Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
letters from Palestine.Town names in the other letters are usually preceded
by the determinative URU,” as in Urusalim, as Jerusalem was then writ-
ten.
10
(This indicator remains nested in the name Jerusalem.) In the South
of India, where the Hindu personify every aspect of the world (mountains
can be divinities and rivers alive), Tamil villagers distinguish between the
map-delimited town in which they live and its spirit, “ur.”
11
The ur is the
town's personified space, the soil from which its particular consciousness
arises and its spirit, its locally distinct traits which interpenetrates the vil-
lagers' bodies. (In the abstract this sounds foreign, and as coldly clinical as do
many anthropological descriptions, but the same can, and is, said by and of,
New Yorkers and Parisians, and many others, as in “You can take a New
Yorker out of NewYork but you can't take NewYork out of a NewYorker.”)
In whatever its form—bur, pur, pol, per, er, uru, or ur—the city's impos-
ing vigor was expressed by a single word root. This urban idea must have
been so impressive that—like radio or powered flight today—each nation
vied to claim primacy of having invented and built the first city; hence the
hometown of Gilgamesh is Erech, which might mean “er” (city) “ech”
(first).
12
There must be a reason for this near universality of word and con-
cept, which might arise from the diffusion of an original invention—just as
there are relatively few words for modern inventions, like the telephone or
the airplane. Inventions that originate at a single source tend to be known
by one word.
Just how deeply seated the idea and attraction of the city was (and
remains) must be confronted in any discussion of resistance to, or funda-
mental modification of, the city. From the oldest civilizations came the
urban ideas that inform the present. The geographic reach of this primal
idea of urbanism was vast, resistance to demoting its intrinsic appeal
intractable, and the urban idea remains universal in, and fundamental to,
industrialized cultures and the societies that aspire to become industrial-
ized.Yet clearly the modern city is sick, perhaps because it is so old, perhaps
rickety as a notion to confront the behemoth of industrialism. There are
those who would profoundly alter its constitution. One of these is Paolo
Soleri, who believes, essentially and with good reason, that the city is a
neolithic invention that has run its course and been choked by outracing
its logistical possibilities.
Born in Turin on June 21, 1919, Soleri received a doctorate in architec-
ture from the Turin Polytechnic in 1946. He then made his way to Taliesin
West, in Arizona, to work as an apprentice of Frank Lloyd Wright from
