WITOLD RYBCZYNSKI » Urbanism

Last summer I ran into Alain Bertaud in Charleston (above). We had first met in India, when he was at the World Bank and I was at McGill Uiversity, working on a research project with B.V. Doshi�...

https://www.witoldrybczynski.com/urbanism/order-without-design/

Traditional urbanism is an easy sell; most people favor treed squares, fountains, and benches. People in Philadelphia crowd Rittenhouse Square, which was laid out in the 17th century, and whose P...

https://www.witoldrybczynski.com/urbanism/the-old-urbanism/

A recent conversation on GoodFellows, a podcast from the Hoover Institution, concerned Niall Ferguson’s recent book Doom, and included a comparison between military and civilian planning. This ...

https://www.witoldrybczynski.com/urbanism/the-fog-of-life/

Transect Urbanism is a collection of essays that describe a seminal idea of the New Urbanism movement. The concept is roughly based on observations made by Alexander von Humboldt, a nineteenth-ce...

https://www.witoldrybczynski.com/urbanism/urban-discontinuities/

A lot has been written about the effect of Covid-19 and the associated year-long shutdown, on cities. The present situation is dispiriting: so many of the amenities that attracted people to citie...

https://www.witoldrybczynski.com/modern-life/the-after-time/

The veneer of civilization is perilously thin. I was living in Montreal during the 1969 policemen and firemen’s strike. It lasted only sixteen hours but that was long enough for things to unrav...

https://www.witoldrybczynski.com/modern-life/the-thin-veneer/

I recently received my new passport. The pages for stamps and visas are decorated with images, as they have been in the past, but this is the first time I looked at them closely: a windjammer and...

https://www.witoldrybczynski.com/modern-life/america-the-beautiful/

“I love Paris in the spring time”–Cole Porter   The post Paris 1967 first appeared on Witold Rybczynski .

https://www.witoldrybczynski.com/modern-life/paris-1967/

Here is a recent photograph of Catfiddle Street an infill development in Charleston, which is slowly coming together. The house in the foreground is being built by Vince Graham and was designed b...

https://www.witoldrybczynski.com/architecture/catfiddle-street/

My friend Vince Graham holds a copy of my new book in front of his Charleston home. The house features in Charleston Fancy: Little Houses and Big Dreams in the Holy City, published by Yale Univ...

https://www.witoldrybczynski.com/architecture/charleston-charleston/