Steve Jobs' Legacy and the Return of Civic Beauty

"The age of architectural Brutalism is past, but between the travails of planning-by-committee and the red tape of bureaucracy, our civic projects still tend to be uninspired in design and interminable in execution. (The newest additions to the Washington Mall, the World War II and Martin Luther King Jr. memorials, look like rejected rough drafts for monuments rather than inspiring finished products.) For all its successes, the new urbanism sometimes feels more like a reclamation project than a renaissance: it's saved the row houses of yesterday without building the neighborhoods of tomorrow."'