The Elusiveness of Urban Design

摘要

Joseph Hudnut, Dean of the Harvard University Graduate School of Design from 1936 to 1953, hailed a new faith in the introduction to Jose Luis Sert's Can Our Cities Survive? Hudnut's words are worth reviewing because they describe an aspect of the book and of the very foundation of urban design that warrants attention. His words certainly reward speculation when one is reading the proceedings of the First Urban Design Conference at Harvard in 1956. Hudnut proclaims that he discovered in Sert's book a "new faith, which, no less than science, will shape and illumine the cities of tomorrow." That is quite a claim. This was a new evangelism, and while Can Our Cities Survive? introduced the teachings of the Congres International d'Architecture Moderne (CIAM) to an American audience, it also introduced Jose Luis Sert as its high priest.