If you’re interested, the man himself is interested in giving some kind of meeting to interested parties. It would be great to have a strong dissenter in the room if only to add to the discussion. You have my email if you’re in DC and down.

Be sure to let us know when you finish it. As for the lack of interest in Asian cities, I suppose there’s a charitable explanation (roughly what цarьchitect has suggested) and an uncharitable explanation (that blindness to what’s going on in the rest of the world is a traditional Western problem and so it’s not surprising that traditionalists would suffer from it). My vote would be for some mixture of the two…

цarьchitect:

Now, if you read Buras’s lecture notes, he does emphasize a division between the natural and the human. I’d argue that this is a modern (as in Laugier and Descartes) idea more than an older one, but so is the general conception of classicism that we see.

That’s really important, if, like me, you think that the philosophical underpinnings of our work nearly always come out in the end product. I don’t think I’ve really talked about it much on mammoth so far, but the way in which the relationship between nature and the human is conceived is of tremendous importance to the practice of landscape architecture, specifically, and urbanism, generally — and a sharp division between the two is the major mistake shared by both classical modernists and modern environmentalists.

For the moment, I’ll remain agnostic about how this impacts aesthetics, which the original post wasn’t really concerned with, anyways. But I am pretty certain that, regardless of whether a traditional(ist) aesthetic can or cannot be reconciled with a better interface between the city and nature, the traditional (in this case, not -ist, because this includes modernists just as much) design process needs to be re-thought and augmented. I don’t see many traditionalists doing that, but there’s no reason to think they can’t — F.L. Olmsted, for instance, worked very much with a classical vocabulary while pioneering new ways of design processes (also, I don’t circulate in traditionalist circles, so I may just be ignorant of what they’re up to…).

I’d challenge them to make wetlands and parks work in a traditional aesthetic – the better part of tradition is a flexibility to absorb new ideas into established structures, even if that’s done conservatively. Tradition can be a very effective form of knowledge collection as long as it is examined, so if they shed some of the distinctly retrograde aspects of the plan, it could be excellent. I like the L’Enfant design, but I think it could be enhanced like I wrote in this article. Something more respectful to natural dynamics might come out of it. This is a really concise analysis of the project, and I’ll send it to Nir.

J.D.

As for refusal to design buildings based on Asian prototypes, that’s a more problematic side of tradition. Putting it simply, Classicism would suggest that you can build anything of that class anywhere because it is universally good. But tradition would prefer you stick to the local methods and styles or the practices of your culture, if you’re a conquistador.

Incidentally, I always wonder why classicists and new urbanists (and neotrads generally for whatever Venn diagram that entails) want to emulate European cities but not Asian ones. Those would be the ones that are growing, yes?

No doubt. I still think both (a) and (b) are accurate (that it’s expressing a deep-seated distaste for wetlands and that it’s channelization for the sake of channelization), but it’s not so much the hidden agenda I suggested it was as an explicit agenda. Which doesn’t make it any less wrong, just less deceptive.

And I’d still argue that New Urbanists often are also guilty of both retrograde classicism and an unwillingness to look at ways to accommodate both dense urbanism and ecological process, but if Buras isn’t a New Urbanist, then this can’t really be an example of that.

Well, that is kind of an important point. Takes some of the sting out of my criticism, though I still think the comparison between McMillan 2 and the Port Lands is instructive.