Name: 【TED】Justin Davidson: Why glass towers are bad for city life -- and what we need instead (Why glass towers are bad for city life -- and what we need instead | Justin Davidson)
Uploaded: 2017-09-23T22:55:19.000Z
Duration: 12 min 40 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Imagine that when you walked in here this evening,

you discovered that everybody in the room looked almost exactly the same:

might have the most idiosyncratic inner life,

because we're all wearing the same blank expression all the time.

That is the kind of creepy transformation that is taking over cities,

only it applies to buildings, not people.

You can still find architectural surfaces of great individuality and character

expressing the ordinary splendor of cities.

And the reason they're like that is that the need for shelter

is so bound up with the human desire for beauty.

Their rough surfaces give us a touchable city.

by running your fingers over brick and stone.

that are almost always made of concrete and steel

You can look at skylines all over the world --

and you see the same army of high-gloss robots

when architects stop using the full range of available materials.

When we reject granite and limestone and sandstone

and wood and copper and terra-cotta and brick

It's as if you reduced all of the world's cuisines

assemblies of glass towers like this one in Moscow

suggest a disdain for the civic and communal aspects of urban living.

Right? Buildings like these are intended to enrich their owners and tenants,

but not necessarily the lives of the rest of us,

those of us who navigate the spaces between the buildings.

and they are choking our cities and killing off public space.

We tend to think of a facade as being like makeup,

a decorative layer applied at the end to a building that's effectively complete.

of how a city's surfaces affect the way we live in it.

Early in the morning, sunlight rakes the facades,

and at night, lamplight segments the buildings

each one a separate pocket of visual activity.

It becomes a stage where the generations can meet.

You have teenagers sprawling on the pavers,

and real life starts to look like an opera set.

So just because I'm talking about the exteriors of buildings,

even so those surfaces give texture to our lives,

because buildings create the spaces around them,

And the difference often has to do with the quality of those exteriors.

So one contemporary equivalent of the Plaza Mayor in Salamanca

on the way from the metro to their cubicles

but otherwise spend as little time in as possible.

In the early 1980s, the architect Philip Johnson

tried to recreate a gracious European plaza in Pittsburgh.

a half acre of open space encircled by commercial buildings

And he ornamented those buildings with metal trim and bays

【TED】Justin Davidson: Why glass towers are bad for city life -- and what we need instead (Why glass towers are bad for city life -- and what we need instead | Justin Davidson)

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【TED】Justin Davidson: Why glass towers are bad for city life -- and what we need instead (Why glass towers are bad for city life -- and what we need instead | Justin Davidson)

material

eventually

versatile

texture