Hartford Advocate: City Guide - A Victim of... -
[Cached Version]
Published on: 2/14/2002
Last Visited: 2/14/2002
"The expectations of the modernists were utopian," says one of the world's authorities on the early modernists, Dr. Rosemarie Bletter of the City University of New York's Graduate Center, "but the critique of Corbusier's planning is overdrawn.After all, it was American planners who put it into practice."
Certain things about Americans made them a terrible mix with the ideas of the modernists.The first is that like Corbusier, Americans don't like cities much.From the 19th century onward, Americans were leaving the cities, drifting toward the ideal of the wide open space, the frontier, one's own piece of private property."There was always anti-urbanization in American," Bletter says."The cities were the dens of sin."