Sleeping Cars

Posted by on December 29, 2006

While doing some holiday reading, I found an oral history transcript from 1986 with Serge Chermayeff, founder of the Institute of Design at IIT, who had some interesting observations on the city.

"Urbanity really is the new form of intensity, quantity and frequency of whatever," he said. "This kind of intensity leads to its own problems. When people make cars now, they don't realize that that car sleeps motionless for something like two-thirds of its life, dead, parked. And where is it parked? On the most precious land that you have, the urban land because you could walk from A to B if you didn't have a parking lot which is half a mile long.

"Things that carry people must move all the time. We cannot afford a dead vehicle."

Chermayeff continued, challenging whether our designs were focused on things that could deliever a better way of life.

"We are looking at the wrong things first, i.e. the jolly little dream house instead of a better sewage system and of garbage disposal. In the middle of the richest country in the world, plastic bags filled with garbage stand on the sidewalk and in the corner and in parts of the world, they are torn to pieces by rats. This is not progress."