The GCW Tour, Spain & Morocco: Boxes Are Boring

I'm not sure if it's the fault of the architects, the developers, the city councils, the citizenry, or some combination thereof, but every time I go to a foreign city I'm reminded of how boring American cities are.

And it's not just a function of the fact that foreign cities are older, cause there are some very new cities that are amazing. The problem is the box. Given a plot of land, which is normally going to be a rectangle of some sort, the optimum way to maximize your use of that plot is to fill it with a rectangle, which can be subdivided into more rectangles. Don't have enough rectangles? And another floor full of rectangles, and then another, and another. End result? A very tall box.

But while a box is great at maximizing the use of space, it's pretty terrible at all the other things buildings are supposed to do, like optimize flow, create livable environments, feed the imagination, and all those other things that are important spiritually but hard to reduce to dollars and cents. 

And while American cities will occasionally throw to universe a bone like the Experience Music Project or the Walt Disney Concert Hall, that's not their bread and butter. The basic building in America is the box. 

That seems less true in Europe and Asia. Not everything is the Sagrada Familia, but I see a lot more cantilevers, curves and cutouts in Europe and Asia than I do in America. To my mind anyway, it makes for better environments and for better cities.