More on Urbanism “We must develop some kind of consistent theory for relating one building to another and to the environment. The Ecole des Beaux Arts did have such a theory. I’m not proposing that we bring it back, but in the nineteenth century when the Ecole des Beaux Arts was in full swing, they did have a comprehensible theory in regard to the relationship of one building to another—as did earlier periods of architecture.
The 1893 Chicago World’s Fair has been damned for a great many years, but it is time we reassessed it. It was a comprehensible whole, not a collection of individual buildings. We may not like the individual buildings, but they read as a group. The spaces between them were well thought-out; some buildings served as anchors and dominated less important ones by their size, placement, proportions and relationship to the ground, the sky and their neighbors.”
Rudolph, Paul Marvin, 1918-1997. "The Form of the City." Canadian Architect 4 (March 1959): 49-67.
