![]() This idea of “artificiality” has its root in the Latin word artificium, which means “art, craft or skill” and eventually also acquired the meaning of “inauthenticity,” thereby coming to encompass the common associations of “truth” with nature and “deceit” with culture. Man, the conscious cultural being, sets himself against the world of natural things: civilized artificiality versus original wilderness. Nature is a mystified anthropocentric ideal, one evoked well by Caspar David Friedrich’s 1818 painting of a man poised on the edge of the abyss, contemplating its vastness and projecting onto it an extension of his own inner grandiosity. ![]() Landscape has become junkspace, foliage as spoilage: trees are tortured, lawns cover human manipulations like thick pelts or even toupees, sprinklers water according to mathematical timetables…”⁶ ![]() “Air, water, wood: all are enhanced to produce hyperecologyae, a parallel Walden, a new rainforest. Social polis merged with bucolic arcadia in infinite, site-specific combinations and bred a succession of “transgenic landscapes”⁵ that we now generally refer to as “the urban.” The territory lost friction and changed in more or less awkward ways to the point at which “the urban” itself became a kind of all-pervading (mostly chaotic) cultural background – one might say, a kind of nature. The industrial (modern) city blurred and irreparably damaged this once-stable opposition. The city wall drew the limit between the two worlds, with the cultural object in the foreground, contained and framed against the backdrop of wide-open land. The classical city, one could argue, did the same thing on a communal scale: it contained the agglomeration of civilized inner public spaces segregated from the outer (extramural) countryside. Ultimately, all architecture colonizes space for human appropriation, defining a boundary of domination set against a background of wilderness and chaos – in other words, nature (the excluded leftover of the architectural inside). What is left now is an ambiguous and hybrid condition that has no genetic code and is impossible to describe in typological terms. Engulfed by “junkspace,”⁴ city-as-object and rural-as-background no longer exist. While each has its own particular standpoint, they all address (directly or by implication) the demise of the humanist city³ and that of its analogous dichotomy, city/countryside. This paradigm was the condition of limitlessness and the complete integration of movement and communication brought about by capitalism, which Cerdà saw as the unprecedented ‘vast wirling ocean of persons, of things, of interests of every sort, of a thousand diverse elements’ that work in permanent reciprocity and thus form a totality that cannot be contained by any previous finite territorial formations such as the city.”¹Ĭittá diffusa, metapolis, postmetropolis, global city, space of flows, generic city² – these are some of the recently invented concepts that try to name and define the new kind of urban phenomena that have come to asymmetrically blanket the globe. Conscious of the extreme importance of the phenomena he wanted to describe, Cerdà legitimized his invention of urbanization as elucidating the emerging ‘conceptual’ features of a paradigm. ![]() The project was called too big for the property - “ten pounds of sugar in a 5 pound bag,” said Todd Pressman, zoning consultant representing the club.“The word urbanization was introduced by the Spanish engineer and planner Ildefons Cerdà, who theorized the concept in his 1867 book Teoría general de la urbanización. “Projects like this in Tampa belong in downtown,” Elizabeth Johnson, whose daughter is soon to be married there, told the council. Nestled on more than 3 acres of water-view green space, the club serves as a busy wedding venue that’s booked 18 months out - a business that could be jeopardized by a looming tower next door, supporters said. Members of the Garden Club next door also turned out in full force. “I think it would be a shame for us to potentially lose a synagogue from Bayshore Boulevard,” said congregation member Marcy Baker. Representatives and members of Rodeph Sholom - some in T-shirts that read “Honoring The Past, Preserving The Future” - said the sale would provide funds for future maintenance and repair and could prevent the congregation from one day having to sell off the entire property and move. The existing synagogue is at the bottom right.
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