In Praise of Congestion

Viewed with alarm by conservative architects and city planners is skyscraping Radio City, the $250.000,000 Rockefeller development on Fifth Avenue in midtown Manhattan (TIME, March 16 et ante.). The design of this cultural-commercial group of buildings, as yet nothing but three excavated city blocks, has been flayed as a "monstrosity." Its construction without adequate transportation planning has been called a "crime" because its inhabitants will congest an already over-congested area. Last week bristle-haired Raymond Mathewson Hood, one of the three designers of Radio City, went to its defense in an interview in which he praised congestion as a great civilizing force.* Declared Architect Hood:

"Congestion is good. It's the best thing we have in New York. The glory of the skyscraper is that it has provided for the congestion so well. The larger the city, the broader is the opportunity for kindred spirits to find one another and to play and work together. The wonder of New York is that it is the first place in the world where a man can work within a ten-minute walk of a quarter of a million people. Think how this expands the field from which we can choose our friends, our co-workers and contacts, how easy it is to develop a constant interchange of thought. I don't see why anybody anxious to see civilization and culture develop to its highest standard should complain about the size and congestion of New York. My only regret is that it isn't large enough to include kindred spirits all over the world whom I can now meet only at very rare intervals."

* Architect Hood designed the Chicago Tribune Tower (with John Mead Howells), the New York Daily News building, is on the Chicago World's Fair planning commission.

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