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Masterplan Development for Field Farm, Shepton Mallet, England " Unlike the currently marketed conception of tradition as the "peddling of antiques", the classical project
does not aim at upholstering a spurious restoration. Instead, its aim has been to ferret out in existing society those traditional
elements that could foster the new. The story of cities has been the story of endless innovation. But the new has never been
a mere novelty. The new has always been the result of a process of knowledge and merit. the various phases of history are
additive and the storing of new experience has been the law of mankind. The exclusive characteristic of civilised man has
been his ability to record and to retrieve from memory. In that sense, Classicism and the Traditional City are less absorbed
in the dialectic between an imagined future and a nostalgic past ( as many critics have claimed ), than in the search for
realistic projects. The ultimate criterion in the design of cities ought to be the public well-being of their inhabitants.
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Reconstruction of Friedrichstrasse in Berlin (1981) " Urban centers are not called " historic " because of their age, but because of the maturity and genetic power
of their organizing principles. These principles are transcendent, and timeless. " |
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