Study Architecture 
ProPEL 
Author(s): Jos Bosman & Brian Carter
Joseph Rykwert held a lecture in Zurich five or six years ago in which he posed the question “is the city an object or a field.” This question seems to be answered very easily: when the buildings are high and standing next to one another like in Manhattan, it looks like an object; when you look to many post war extensions that were prepared in response to a lot of propaganda by the modem movement in Europe, it looks more like a field. For my generation, which was educated in the 1970’s, this kind of doubleness of object and fields has doubled again. You must know that Joseph Rykwert, when he poses this question, thinks of the Unite &Habitation of Le Corbusier and the way Colin Rowe criticized it as an object, and he is on the side of the Smithsons and other younger people, who tried as architects to link these slab-like forms in networks that looked more like a field.
https://doi.org/10.35483/ACSA.Intl.1995.2
Volume Editors
John K. Edwards
