Building For Modern Man Book

Text extracted from opening pages of book: BUILDING FOR MODERN MAN A SYMPOSIUM EDITED BY THOMAS H. CJR. EI( HTON PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY 1949 PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS COPYRIGHT, 1949, BY PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS LONDON: GEOFFREY CUMBERLEGE, OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA BY PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS AT PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY PREFACE - IL. N THE spring of 1947 some sixty persons whose lives are devoted to the study of man's physical environment were invited to Princeton University to engage in a two-day Conference. The official occasion was Conference Five of Series Two of the academic conferences that marked Princeton's Bicentennial Celebration. The result was a gathering of architects and planners, those who teach archi tecture and planning, those who write about such subjects, and a sprinkling of those who are engaged in related design fields. Twenty-four prepared papers were read, and in the eight sessions of the Conference a number of extempo raneous rebuttals, refutations, concurrences, and variations were added to the discussion. As might be imagined, the topics under consideration spilled over the time limits of the formal session meetings and were further pursued in small group discussions at breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and far into the several nights that the participants spent together at the Princeton Inn. To some those postscript gatherings were more inspiring than the formal sessions. Apprised that this book was under preparation, one participant wrote the editor, The gain at the Conference was the same that a political convention has. It is the electricity in the air ... How in the hell can you get that mto a book? The answer, of course, is that you can't. And yet the at tempt to capture in print some of the areas of agreement and disagreement that were indicated at the Conference some of the hope and resolve, and some of the frustration and discouragement seemed to a number of the people who were there to be worth while. The attempt seemed to have purpose, in fact, to all but four of the participants. One, for the reasons stated above, felt that the effort would be useless. Two others stated quite flatly that they felt noth ing worth saying had been said at the Conference, modestly including their own remarks with the others. A fourth be PREFACE lieves that only he added anything of import to man's knowledge during the discussions, and since his words ap parently fell on deaf ears he has lost interest in the matter. All of the other people who took part in or listened to the sessions have endorsed this permanent record, although not all of them have added papers. Some are frankly inarticu late ( not all designers and planners express themselves well in words) and some feel that better men than they have said very nearly what they would say. This book is not intended to be a factual report of the Princeton Conference. That meeting is the basis from which the discussion springs, but a serious and, I hope, fairly successful attempt has been made to draw into it some of the things that were said, or perhaps merely thought, by participants who were prevented by time, bashfulness, or the limitations of a fairly rigid agenda from getting themselves on the official record. Practically all of the original statements have been rewritten some length ened, some shortened, some radically revised. Very nearly half of the papers that follow were written after the Con ference. Before the gathering at Princeton the committee in particular its indefatigable chairman, Arthur Holden carried on a fairly extensive correspondence with those who had been invited. The Conference topics were dis cussed by letter, and points of view were established by a number of the participants. Pre-Conference discussions were held in New York and Boston and they resulted in further correspondence. All of these letters were made available while the book was being edited, and the intro ductions to each of the sectionRead More