Witold Rybczynski is the Martin and Margy Meyerson Emeritus Professor of Urbanism at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of more than twenty books including the Olmsted biography, A Clearing in the Distance, which won the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize and was short-listed for the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction.
Olmsted’s landscape creations, especially his urban parks, are anything but relics of the past—they remain a vital part of the present.
A corollary of giving priority to invention is that imitation, once the foundation of creativity in architecture, is banished.
Historically the most conservative of the arts, architecture was an unlikely candidate to carry the red banner of insurrection. And yet.
“The layouts of new houses have changed significantly in the last twenty years.”