Corals avoid the International Style.

Stumbled on a good aesthetic/ethical urbanism blog this week. Updates aren't frequent, but there's some good stuff. E.g., this:

“The main thing is that both humans and corals have evolved the capacity to build their own permanent residences, and in so doing to change the nature of the land or sea around them.

“The humans, who are an argumentative lot (one of the many ways they might appear to be inferior to the corals), might point out that corals build by blind instinct, whereas humans have an innate sense of beauty and order. Yet the corals consistently produce works that are breathtakingly beautiful to humans, whereas humans—by our own admission—more often produce breathtakingly ugly architectural excrescences that you’d never catch a self-respecting coral living in.

“One of the ironies of human nature is that we tend to turn out ugly cities when we put the most thought into them. Left to grow by itself, a city may have ugly sections, but the city as a whole is almost invariably beautiful. Subjected to the whims of urban planners, the city suddenly finds itself shot full of holes, empty spots where the urban planner has decreed a pedestrian mall or ample free parking.”

The spirit of Charlotte's architecture.

W.J. Cash, 1941: “Probably it would mean nothing if I said that the skyscrapers which were going up were going up in towns which, characteristically, had no call for them … for it would merely be said that the Middle West was doing something of the same silly sort. But if I told you that they were often going up in towns (like Tar Heel Charlotte and Winston and Greensboro, or South Carolina's Columbia and Greenville and Spartanburg) which had little more use for them than a hog has for a morning coat…”

Robert A.M. Stern, 1986: “[Uptown Charlotte has] the ugliest collection of third-rate buildings in America. Charlotte has defined a type unto itself — a town that has grown very fast in a very mediocre way. There’s no place like Charlotte.”

(I should confess that I'm immensely fond of the exterior of the Hearst Tower in Charlotte, though I've never been inside. Actually, now that I think of it, none of the interesting buildings were around in 1986. Hopefully our city center is a little better now.)