Word: humanism
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Dirty air decays buildings, cracks rubber tires, ruins nylon stockings and worsens all sorts of human ailments. According to one Government study, air pollution costs Americans an average $65 a year; the figure may hit $200 in particularly filthy cities like New York and St. Louis. Even so, most citizens have a lot to learn about pollution. When a sampling of St. Louis residents were polled on how much they would pay in higher taxes to clean up the air, they reckoned that the effort might be worth 500 a year, at most $1. Ignoring their own auto-exhaust fumes...
...work of the city planner is highly technical, complex and occasionally grubby. It is also exciting, full of heady schemes and grandiose concepts. Among the most grandiose are those advanced by Constantinos Apostolos Doxiadis, 56, inventor and prophet of "ekistics," meaning the science of human settlements. His planning and design firms employ more than a thousand people in Athens, Washington and 17 other cities. His smallest projects these days are complete university campuses, his largest embrace thousands of square miles, such as the River Plate Basin Development Program, involving new towns and transportation in five South American countries. A better...
...Grids. On Saturday morning the 6,000-ton vessel Orpheus sailed out of Piraeus harbor. By midafternoon, after the first of a series of daily swims and visits to fascinating ruins, the passengers gathered on the ship's deck for a two-hour working meeting. "Society and Human Settlements: Policies for the Future" was the stated theme of the conference, but policies rarely emerged. The language unfortunately was almost unfailingly prolix, sententious and jargon ridden...
Doxiadis introduced the first session, on the subject of man and his environment. "The two components of the environment are physical and social," expounded the host. "We must be concerned with the quality of life. Does the grid system of organizing human settlements, for example, give greater opportunity to individuals than the centralized, circular pattern of contacts?" The responses were, at best, tangential. "We can't be godlike," mused Washington, D.C., Psychiatrist Reginald Lourie, "but we have the opportunity to contribute the appropriate inputs." Lord Llewelyn-Davies, the British architect, professed that the rigidity of bricks and mortar...
...discuss all week. The wind was rising as Margaret Mead stumped forward in a flowered hat, a long black cape and blue sneakers. Reading out the Declaration of Delos VII ("there is a basic distortion of values in society's failure to allocate resources for the improvement of human settlements"), she looked like a benign bullfrog. As she read, the wind blew out the flaring kerosene torches...