The Best Sentences of the Week

"...it's as if Light has captured an act of topographical blackout—a whole landscape, redacted—as what should be hills and valleys are erased and obstructed by this imposed crystallography of settlements that never arrived."
From "Landscape, Redacted" for BLDG BLOG.

"It’s author, Thom Andersen, points out that Blade Runner’s version of L.A. in 2019 (!?) shows what is supposed to be dystopia but is closer to what many of us think cities should be like: Vibrant street life, with no cars, a multi-ethnic populace, and plenty of good noodle shops. It just happens to be controlled by Big Business and its replicants."
From "Downtown Dystopia" by Aaron Betsky for Architect. 

"This is one way that the conflagration of 'black = urban' comes to an end."
From "How 'Black=Urban' Ends" by Pete Saunders for Corner Side Yard Blog.

"Hardly anyone fears healthy, prosperous, and orderly cities, but when urban areas break down—New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina or, more dramatically, Baghdad after the fall of Saddam Hussein—nothing is more anxiety-producing than other people. And a zombie contagion is the ultimate urban-disaster scenario."
From "The Walking Dead in an Age of Anxiety" by Michael J. Totten for City Journal. 

"Many things in Egypt don’t work very well. Traffic is bad, and trains get cancelled; during the summer, it’s not unusual to have five electricity blackouts in a single day. One year, we couldn’t buy bottled water for months, because the plant that produced the water somehow caught fire. Since we moved into the apartment, the country has cycled through three constitutions, three Presidents, four Prime Ministers, and more than seven hundred members of parliament. But there hasn’t been a single day when the trash wasn’t cleared outside my kitchen door."
From "Tales of the Trash" by Peter Hessler for The New Yorker.

"Downtown is home to what is probably the most awesome nature spectacle LA has to offer. Vaux’s swifts are small sickle-shaped birds that spend their days on the wing feeding on insects. Every spring they migrate from south of the Mexican border up the West Coast to their breeding grounds in the Pacific Northwest. In the fall, they stop off in LA for a breather on their way back. During the day, they hang out by the LA River and other open spaces, eating their fill of insects. But, every evening the group—which can range up to tens of thousands—comes home to roost in abandoned chimney shafts."
From "Looking for Nature in LA" by Lila Higgins and Emily Hartop for Boom: A Journal of California.

"Why is it that this is 'cool' for rich people but 'tough' for poor people?"
David Adjaye, as quoted in "Building Hope and Nurturing Into Housing" by Michael Kimmelman for The New York Times.