Our cities are not polluted or congested because they have to be. They are what they are because that's how we made them.
I think if I would have started BIG in America, I would probably never have called it BIG. There was nothing but a little bit of local small country humor in the idea.
All evidence shows that we are actually getting smarter. Roughly we are getting 10 IQ points smarter every decade. The speed of innovation is also faster.
Architecture is restricted to such a limited vocabulary. A building is either a high-rise or a perimeter block or a town house.
We can engineer a building and design a building with least reliance on active machinery to make it inhabitable.
St. Petersburg is a wonderful city. You have wonderful parks, birds singing in the trees, manatees in the water, pelicans. So it's like this little paradise on Earth.
