thoughts on jane jacobs one: the fountainhead
jane Jacobs may be a genius, but I mistrust genius, especially where it relates to architecture and city planning ... probably because my sister sent me, without irony, a copy of The Fountainhead when I was a freshman in college (she a sophomore) and, although I threw it across the room every fifty pages or so, I felt that I had to finish it, and therefore read all the way through the part where Roark 'sploded up a housing project because they changed the pipes or something and then justified it on account of his genius, even though he was a rapist. Jane Jacobs gives me a whole new set of ammo against Howard Roark that I never thought I'd get--or need--namely the simple fact that housing projects are bad, and for that, I forgive her her genius.
Jane Jacobs is, in fact, the anti-Howard Roark: because she was real whereas Roark was fictional; because she stood for the collective using principles to guide minimal interference in community long-term, "natural" building and development processes that brought aesthetic diversity and diversity of use, while Roark was all about the monolithic, single-use project designed by an individual and forced upon a disempowered mass; because she was a woman and Roark, a man--a very important difference; because she was married, a parent, and lived in urban neighborhoods and Roark was perennially single, fatally paternalistic, and residentially nomadic, through urban, exurban, and privileged rural spaces.
I'm shocked that I remember this much about a book I threw across the room twenty years ago. Let this be the last time I ever write about Rand.
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