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Ideas 1, 8 March 1994 id 9419
Design in Perpetual Motion
1994 The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation All rights reserved
CBC RadioWorks - P.O. Box 500, Station A - Toronto, Ontario - m5w 1e6
Lister Sinclair From the Canadian Broadcasting Centre in Toronto, this is Ideas. I'm Lister Sinclair. We're at a series of talks called Design in Perpetual Motion. Some of the designers we'll hear design very big things, like buildings and cities; some work on products you have in your home; some work on very small things, like typefaces, the kind you see in newspapers and commercials.
I know what you're thinking: Design on radio? How are we going to see the stuff? Well, this Ideas program, and the one a week from tonight, concentrate on what designers think about and why their products -- from cities to chairs -- turn out the way they do.
The Design in Perpetual Motion series was co-sponsored by Ideas and VIRTU, the Canadian design organization. VIRTU organizes public events like this, sponsors an annual juried competition for Canadian design, and runs a store in Toronto stocking exclusively Canadian-designed products for the home. To introduce tonight's speakers, here's Ideas producer Max Allen.
Max Allen Urban design is, first, the design of cities. Mostly cities are not designed, of course, or certainly not by one person. But zoning regulations and height bylaws and street layouts do determine how cities look, and there are design theories behind those rules.
Witold Rybczynski is an architect who teaches about these matters. He graduated from McGill and taught there for many years and is now at the University of Pennsylvania. He's a bestselling author. His book Home: The Short History of an Idea is famous, and he writes articles for Saturday Night magazine and The Atlantic. He started his lecture in Toronto by saying that there have been hugely successful architects in every era, in every century, who have designed individual buildings in many different styles. But when it comes to cities as a whole, what's happened in our era? Where are the modern cities to rival Amsterdam and Paris and Prague? Of course, modern cities don't burn down regularly like they used to, and we don't have cholera plagues. But what...