Word: mumford
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...LEWIS MUMFORD considers the view from his study at the top of Leverett towers one of the great advantages of the apartment he has occupied there since 1965. The scene unfolds up Dewolfe St.: first the insistent brick spire of a Catholic church, then the stubby red buildings of the Yard, and finally, William James, towering abrupt and white in the background. The church spire struggles for attention, but can't really match William James, which rises sleek, new and confident above the Cambridge sky-line. Beneath it, the quiet buildings of the Yard huddle together as if frightened...
...Mumford, a visiting scholar in Leverett for the last four years, says he likes the scene because he likes Cambridge generally. The tableau also seems to resonate with something deep in Mumford him-self. The tension between old and new, past and future weaves through almost all of Mumford's 50 years of prodigious writing on man and his social environment. Mumford remarks philosophically that he's a "rare bird." He may be rarer than he thinks: a kind of latter-day Thoreau, trying to make sense of the twentieth century and plan for the twenty-first...
...others have been mentioned. Jane Jacobs, an astute urban gadfly (The Death and Life of Great American Cities), says New York should be divided into units of 100,000. A recent Royal Commission recommended reorganizing London into boroughs of about 200,000 (London already has limited decentralization). Author Lewis Mumford, one of the foremost students of the city, is more flexible. A "humanly lovable city," he says, "must range somewhere between 30,000 and 300,000 people...
...week or next, or the week after that. With luck, it will never break down entirely. Nonetheless, a nation that prides itself on pragmatism and problem-solving can afford only at its peril to ignore the immense-and immensely complex-challenge of making its cities habitable, enjoyable and governable. Mumford told a Senate committee last year, "Unless human needs and human interactions and human responses are the first consideration, the city, in any valid sense, cannot be said to exist. As Sophocles long ago said: The city is people...
...point. The M.L.A. editions are crammed with niggling notes on whether Herman Melville used the spelling "bananas" or "banannas" and whether Howells wrote "wrapt" or "wrapped." In an earlier review of the M.L.A. edition of The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Harvard University), Cultural Critic Lewis Mumford found the text so cut up by the "barbed wire" of notations and arcane diacritical symbols that it was virtually unreadable...