Jane Jacobs / 100

 It could be said that the creation of the Fulton Mall was in fact a modernist scheme, but in a 1958 article in Fortune Magazine, Jacobs commented on a proposed Gruen plan for Fort Worth, Texas:

The plan by Victor Gruen Associates for Fort Worth is an outstanding example. It has been publicized chiefly for its arrangements to provide enormous perimeter parking garages and convert the downtown into a pedestrian island, but its main purpose is to enliven the streets with variety and detail. This is a point being overlooked by most of the eighty-odd cities that, at last count, were seriously considering emulation of the Gruen plan's traffic principles.

There is no magic in simply removing cars from downtown, and certainly none in stressing peace, quiet, and dead space. The removal of the cars is important only because of the great opportunities it opens to make the streets work harder and to keep downtown activities compact and concentrated. To these ends, the excellent Gruen plan includes, in its street treatment, sidewalk arcades, poster columns, flags, vending kiosks, display stands, outdoor cafes, bandstands, flower beds, and special lighting effects. Street concerts; dances, and exhibits are to be fostered. The whole point is to make the streets more surprising, more compact, more variegated, and busier than before - not less so.

One of the beauties of the Fort Worth plan is that it works with existing buildings, and this is a positive virtue not jusf a cost-saving expedient. Think of any city street that people enjoy and you will see that characteristically it has old buildings mixed with the new. This mixture is one of downtown's greatest advantages, for downtown streets need high-yield, middling-yield, low-yield, and no-yield enterprises. The intimate restaurant or good steak house, the art store, the university club, the fine tailor, even the bookstores and antique stores - it is these kinds of enterprises for which old buildings are so congenial. Downtown streets should play up their mixture of buildings with all its unspoken -- but well understood -- implications of choice.  

Jane Jacobs was not a fan of post-war modernism. She criticized the father of modern planning, Le Corbusier's “Towers in the Park" concept of separating uses and building high-rise buildings surrounded by green space. Although, he was a great architect, it's safe to say that Le Corbusier's modernist planning dogma failed. Jacobs explained, "To approach a city, or even a city neighborhood, as if it were a larger architectural problem, capable of being given order by converting it into a disciplined work of art, is to make the mistake of attempting to substitute art for life. The results of such profound confusion between art and life are neither life nor art. They are taxidermy." This seems like a good place to point out the obviously modernist owl on Jane's mantel. Learn more on Curbed.