The Buell Hypothesis

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Change the Dream and You Change the City

CUT TO LATER STILL THAT AFTERNOON INT. CAR — INTERSTATE 95 Socrates and Glaucon are still stuck in traffic. The talk on the radio turns to Wall Street. Glaucon This idea of the house—or as you call it, housing—as the basic unit of urbanization leads me to think that architects and urbanists ought to devote their considerable energies and talents to perfecting this building type. Can we not design a “smarter” house today, when we have so many more resources and technologies at our disposal than we did in ancient Athens, or in old New England, or even in Santa Fe for that matter? Humans have changed little since these earlier times, and so it remains our task to deduce the essence of human habitation as it might be contained in a house, and thence to build a new type of city out of this new type of house. Socrates Not exactly, my friend, for this returns us to where we


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