What is particularly striking in American cities is the disorder at height. These brick huts are of unequal size: one floor, two floors, one floor, one floor, three floors, these are proportions noted randomly during a walk in Detroit. You will find the same ones on the other side of the country, in Albuquerque or San Antonio. Deep down, above this irregular crenellation, we see buildings of all shapes and sizes, long boxes, thick boxes of thirty floors, with thirty, forty windows per floor; as soon as there is a little fog, the colors fade. All that remains are volumes, all varieties of polyhedra. Between them, enormous voids, wastelands cut out in the sky.
In New York, in Chicago itself, the skyscraper is at home, it imposes a new order on the city. But everywhere else it is out of place: the eye cannot establish any unity between these large asparagus and the little houses which run low to the ground: it seeks in spite of…