Good morning from rainy New Hampshire.
It’s been raining all morning, but apparently there is an ocean hidden in the above picture. We also got in after dark and so all I really saw was what I could see on the drive from the airport.
Whenever I am reminded that the vast majority of built form in North America is car-oriented in nature, I can’t help but think of how sticky all of this is going to be.
Witold Rybczynski put it accurately when he said, “urbanism and architecture observe different time lines.” Buildings may take forever to build, but relative to urban form, they actually change pretty quickly.
New materials and styles emerge, and so do new buildings. But the streets that surround them change so slowly, that for all intents and purposes, they mostly don’t change.
What that means is that, for better or for worse, most of what we see is likely to persist. No wonder there is an arms race going on with autonomous vehicles.
