"New York has such courage and enthusiasm that everything can be begun again" April 10 2014

New York is a vertical city, under the sign of the new times. It is a catastrophe with which a too hasty destiny has overwhelmed courageous and confident people, though a beautiful and worthy catastrophe. Nothing is lost. Faced with difficulties, New York falters.

Still streaming with sweat from its exertions, wiping off its forehead, it sees what it has done and suddenly realizes: “Well, we didn't get it done properly. Let’s start over again!”.

New York has such courage and enthusiasm that everything can be begun again, sent back to the building yard and made into something still greater, something mastered!

These people are not on the point of going to sleep. In reality, the city is hardly more than twenty years old, that is the city which I’m talking about, the city which is vertical and on the scale of the new times.

 

LE CORBUSIER, 1936