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Constantinos Apostolou Doxiadis Quotes

1913–1975 Greece

Constantinos Apostolou Doxiadis (14 May 1913 – 28 June 1975), often quoted as "C.A. Doxiadis", was a Greek architect and town planner.

Greece
Architects

Also known as: Konstantinos Apostolos Doxiadis

Random Constantinos Apostolou Doxiadis quote

23 quotes

The realistic view of the City of the Future accepts that it will be a global city.

The real city is the whole territory within which people move every day.

At present the machines are in control and no human values are respected.

We should never forget that values of the past are first overlooked when a change is necessary, but later they are understood and re-established.

When we build a city we must answer the most basic question as for any type of project: who is the master whom we have to serve?

Dimensions are not connected with the efficiency of the system; they simply make it more difficult.

When we speak of quality and desirability it is not the question of one unit, but of the whole system.

We should not forget that the value of seeing lies in the information capacity of vision.

From the balance of the past, we have been lea to the great injustice of the present.

The social aspect in city building is now completely overlooked.

We now have several hundred metropolises and they all suffer in many ways from many problems because they have not been foreseen and properly conceived.

If we have the most perfect neighborhoods without proper connections between them we do not have a city, but nomadic life in a jungle.

My conclusion is that today we are in chaos as far as the metropolis is concerned and do not do anything in the right direction.

The fact that the super-markets and super shops have developed and serve wider areas of tens of thousands of people does not mean that we do not need smaller ones.

Ecumenopolis is under way, but we lack the overall concept and the courage to guide Ecumenopolis rather than just letting it happen by chance and necessity.

Our Networks are not unified.

I begin with the clarification that I consider Society as a total system of relationships between people which are either visible or invisible and which form networks.

When we place all these extraordinary achievements together, however we can see where we have failed: by bringing together all the elements of progress into a meaningless and inhuman system of life.

When people like Genghis Khan tried to speed up the rhythm and conquer and organize a continent in a few generations, they did not create a synthesis, they only courted disasters.

We need to understand what we can do and how. Otherwise we will never do it.

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Constantinos Apostolou Doxiadis (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.