American Architecture and Urbanism quote - to be reblogged with comment

http://whiskypapawhisky.tumblr.com/post/72658470813/there-is-a-more-menacing-scale-to-these-problems

Text:

There is a more menacing scale to these problems, of which Venturi, Jackson, and all those who now look about them cannot be unaware. There can be a horrid viciousness in the Strip. Some of the growth is cancerous, perhaps deadly. Frontier hedonism has always teetered on the edge of murder. Yet it is at the vaster scale of the throughway and connector that the most devastating achievements of of modern industrial life now grandly and savagely unfold. The rush of the movement itself, only partly under control and wild with danger, is the right and appropriate way to perceive the new urban scene, with its promise of smashed bodies, its mechanical roar, and its rubbery scream, just as the laggard footpace accompanied by the sound of human voices was the proper way to ascend the Spanish Stairs. That norm was peace; ours is apparently mechanized war. One now dives rattling past the towers of the city, lighted in rising tiers, and flashes through its heart, high above the little houses, released from confinement as through one reckless act of destruction and escape. It is the jail-break of the urban masses, one-handed with a beery tattoo on the roof at seventy miles an hour in two tons of old iron. Baseball-bat-basher, beer-belly, breaker of cities, comes into his own in ours – “a savage servility / slides by on grease,” wrote Lowell.

This urban scene is truly of America’s making. It is the really new thing. European observers can afford to romanticize it, but Americans are forced to take note of the violent and ungenerous social attitudes which see to accompany it in those areas, like Los Angeles, where its automobilized aspect is most fully developed. In consequence, we can hardly help but question its value, but in perceiving works of art there comes a moment when we must pass beyond preconceptions to an empirical recognition of what exists. Otherwise we can never learn anything. And all this is here; some of our greatest painters have seen it. It is our most complete work of art, multiple and tremendous. Its uniqueness, its inconceivable brutality, even only its visual magnificence, can never be denied.
“

Vincent Scully, American Architecture and Urbanism, 1969. Writing with the top down and the foot on the gas, hinting at magnificent potential in the 20th-century megacity.