<blockquote>'..the desirability of replacing spontaneous processes by "conscious human control." '
- Hayek
The Pretence of Knowledge, (
Economics and Moral Courage)</blockquote>
*** Context: '...the limits of knowledge...'<blockquote>
'Hayek, a man for all generations, who believes mightily in
the freedom of the individual, convinced that the open,
competitive survival of diffused, decentralized ideas and
spontaneous organizations, customs, and procedures in a
capitalist, private-property system is preferable to
consciously rational-directed systems of organizing the
human cosmos...'
--Armen A. Alchian, May 1983
-
http://mises.org/books/hayek_oral_history.pdf, page xiii</blockquote>
'..the newly constructed zones across virtually all of West Germany looked the same wherever you went..'<blockquote>'Indeed, with the exception of a few lucky areas in southern Germany, the newly constructed zones across virtually all of West Germany looked the same wherever you went. Advertised as open and green, oversized apartment blocks and nightmarish developments multiplied from the 1950s onward.
During this same period, the communist rulers of East Germany created their own serial housing complexes, although the prefab residential blocks erected across the country were of a poorer quality than those in the West.
As early as 1965, the Frankfurt-based social psychologist Alexander Mitscherlich complained of Germany's "inhospitable cities."
Still, the clear spatial division of the classic urban functions -- sleep, work and recreation -- was not a German invention. Such zoning lay at the heart of the famous Athens Charter drawn up at the international architecture conference of 1933 and first publicized a decade later -- albeit in revised form -- by the Swiss architect Le Corbusier.'
- Spiegel,
Part 3: The Spiritual Failure of Suburban Developments, A New Look at Germany's Postwar Reconstruction, 08/10/2010</blockquote>
'..his father's generation forgot that a viable city "is about beauty, and beauty is linked to the history of the place you are building in." '<blockquote>'Often, as was the case with the latter, the experts were full of praise. But the rest of the population was skeptical. "If I had 16 million marks, I would buy something else," one visitor wrote in the guestbook. Another simply wrote in French: "My opinion: all merde." Now dilapidated, the building is now set to be demolished.
"Of course, with hindsight, it's easier to say that not everything was successful," says Albert Speer, the son of the Nazi architect and minister of the same name. "But you must remember what it was really like in 1945." The younger Speer, who was born in Frankfurt in 1934 and is now an urban planner himself, says that, after the war, the idea of modern architecture was associated with the utopian vision of "creating better people through better construction."
Architect Christoph Mäckler, for his part, believes that modernism was popular because enlightened souls didn't want to be reminded of the past. "Simply putting two columns next to each other was considered fascist," he says. And he should know: In 1947, his father, the former master builder Hermann Mäckler, even proposed giving Frankfurt's cathedral a flat roof.
In its desperate attempt to create modern, car-friendly, "honest" cities, Mäckler says, his father's generation forgot that a viable city "is about beauty, and beauty is linked to the history of the place you are building in." '
- Spiegel,
Part 4: 'Better People through Better Construction', A New Look at Germany's Postwar Reconstruction, 08/10/2010</blockquote>