TEN POINTS CONCERNING CORNERS

1. The angle in the basic geometry of urbanity. It is at once intersection and vertex. And it is built corners that give concrete forms to agreements and contrast between buildings and people, activities and movements
   
   
2. Corners are the visible forms that architecture provides to this network of intersections : the outcome of a difficult and meritorious exercise that capture the full complexity and richness of urbanity. Without good architecture there can be no good city.
   
   
3. Coincidence and difference are the ideas that define the corner. These characteristics also define the city, more than more, unity or regularity.
   
   
   
4. The multiplication of corners makes cities. the city is a network of corners: space articulated to facilitate the interaction of people and activities
   
   
   
5. On the global scale, the great metropolises of the urbanized world are corners of transport, migrations and business. These are the corners of the world.
   
   
   
6. Urbanity (cultural diversity) is not a question of concentration or dispersion, but of interdependence - of the density corners.
   
   
   
   
7. Stations, parkings lot, major facilities, terminals, interchanges and transport nodes may well be the corners of the contemporary territory. new corners are a means of creating diversity in the territorial landscape, breaking down social ghettos and highlighting the role of public transport
   
   
   
8. Against projects that forget that the urban terrain is the foundations of sociability: the interacting presence of corners. Against the neo-conservative utopia that propose an urbanism of major icons, abstract systems and the cosed design of images and ignores the direct physical contact of people and stone: corners, please, corners!!!
   
   
   
9. Against the proliferation of theme parks, against exclusive residential development, against the gated dormitory communities and the office district, against the endless suburbs: the virtues of intersections, and even of promiscuity, as the objectives of any project for the city.
   
   
   
10. For an urbanism of ambiguity, surprise and mixture: more and more corners
    

Architectural Positions: Changing definitions of public and private .
position 1: Manuel de Sola-Morales
Feb 22 2007
Faculty of architecture ;TU Delft