"Downtown is dead because cars are not useful in it. After forcing themselves halfway in, they have given up and set up a new life in rings around it. The new scale is so large and loose that it never makes the massed, sustaining effect of the old city, and makes one wonder if the large Baroque squares produced agoraphobic reactions too. The transition between old cities and the new dispersed strip development was crude, but friendly. Limited access roads cannot be populated continuously, but American suburban arteries of the fifties, with their styless scattering of filling stations, hamburger stands and remnant stores made a diverting, contrapuntal effect. More than the new form it was a changing place, constantly added to and subtracted from, the juxtaposing of decay and success giving it the feel of spluttering life.""Night is not just another part of reality that demands representation, too, but an opacity whose meaning we cannot fix very well. Arriving in a new place at night is inevitably potent perhaps because the visual uncertainty corresponds to our uninitiated ignorance. Waking up and setting off on our first walk in a city seems exactly right too, another way of acting an allegory of knowledge"
from "Eccentric Spaces", Robert Harbison
Fantastic Prayers