High buildings make people crazy.
Now this sounds compelling.
Hans de Zwart, Innovation Manager for Global Learning Technologies at Shell, has posted a review of Christopher Alexander’s “A Pattern Language” on his blog.
Hans notes:
The scope of the book is incredible. It sets out, in plain terms, to empower people to design, build and shape their own surroundings.
Most interesting to me is this excerpt, which slantback chose to reblog:
There is abundant evidence to show that high building make people crazy.
High buildings have no genuine advantages, except in speculative gains for banks and land owners. They are not cheaper, they do not help create open space, they destroy the townscape, they destroy social life, they promote crime, they make life difficult for children, they are expensive to maintain, they wreck the open spaces near them, and they damage light and air and view. But quite apart from all this, which shows that they aren’t very sensible, empirical evidence shows that they can actually damage people’s minds and feelings.
There are some additional great anecdotes in Hans’s original post. Funny enough, this book’s been on my wish list for about 4 years. Wish I remembered who originally turned me on to it.
