Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time

by Jeff Speck

Figural space is one of the things that allows traditional cities to so generously support pedestrian life. Look at an aerial photo of Paris and you will be astounded by how contorted some of the buildings become in order to shape the delightful spaces they frame. In contrast, modern urbanism was founded on the cult of the figural object. It became the role of the hero architect to create buildings as three-dimensional sculptures akin to a Brancusi or a Calder, floating freely in space. The shape of this space became residual and meaningless—and inhospitable to pedestrians. Most urban designers now consider this evolution to have been a horrible mistake. Most architects also agree with this assessment publicly, even as they hope against hope for their chance to design the figural object building that will land them on the cover of a hero architect magazine. And then there are the starchitects, most of whom don’t care about figural space at all.