The Met's elaborate Neo-classic facade, the medallions of Michelangelo, Rafael, and Velasquez, show that the bourgeoisie needed very much to think that it was fulfilling the old humanist roles. They were unable to see how silly it was to build inhuman beehives at one end of the City at the same time that they were copying French palaces at the other end. Seen together, the Met and the skyscrapers show the perversely contorted development of the American city.

AWORD about solutions. First, of course, it is important to understand that the only reasonable response to modern American cities is to want to escape them. The parks are certainly escapes from intolerable congestion and pollution. In a way, skyscrapers are a kind of escape themselves, an effort to get out from the bottom of the canyon, to escape into the sky away from the sordid misery below.

Second, we must understand that the current means of production are destroying the environment. In his book Arcology, Paolo Soleri explains that the expansion of American suburbs is decreasing drastically the amount of breathing space left to the earth. Since green plants provide a lot of the oxygen we breathe, that is important for both the plants and us. Los Angeles smog has reportedly killed over a million of the Ponderosa pine in the hills outside the city. That destroys both watershed and forest.

Soleri's solution to all of this is to build gigantic complexes that would float on the ocean just offshore, or hang on cliffs, or sail around the earth out in space. Soleri thinks that if the structures are planned well enough, natural recreation areas could be integrated into humanely constructed working and living spaces. People would no longer have to travel interminably to get to their jobs. These complexes, each of which would house about a million people, would be connected by extensive networks of rapid transit facilities. The earth could then cover itself with forest once again, and men could build structures that would relate to the environment.

I have questions about what Soleri proposes. For one, how many people can live together without duplicating New York, no matter how good the planning? Are there optimal or maximum numbers of people who can live together constructively? Is the idea to create smaller, more personal communities within the grander complexes? New York has a few real communities, like the Village and near Columbia, Paris, with three million people, packed four times as closely together as are New Yorkers, still seems a large village. In each quartier the people know one another and seem fairly close together. Most of the sections of Paris, in fact, are quite disinter from the rest of the city. Would communal living and working facilities for a hundred or a thousand people, inside the giant complexes give people the kind of community they need Or will we have to give up cooperation on a large seale altogether and move back to the farm, where we can get close to the land and close to one another?

Architecture has now grown to where its responsibility is to consider any information that relates to people. The planning that a loveable city will require is beyond the capacities of the society we live in even if those who control it were disposed to aid in the changes.

I HAVE a notion where to begin looking for the answer, but it is only a notion. A week or two ago. I took a couple of long walks in Roxbury, where I talked with a lot of black people from the community. Sometimes I talked with three or four kids my ago in park, drinking wine and joking a lot. Sometimes I talked with ten-year old kids about the Panthers. Sometimes with forty or fifty-year-old factory workers. Sometimes with the women who were sitting on the broad sidewalks talking to the kids and each other. The Panthers say that black people are together as a nation because they are oppressed as a nation. They are together because they are forced together by the system, and because they have an entirely different cultural heritage.

What I found was exactly what the Panthers said I'd find. One day I'll have to write a piece about how easily people relate to each other in the ghetto, and how few barriers are between one person and another. But almost all the black people I talked to explained that they have a community that they value highly. They don't have enough to eat, many don't have a job, and the white cops beat them up all the time, but at least the competitive nature of the system has not permeated their personal relationships. They live in a world where people will help each other. That is the kind of consciousness we will have to develop before we can begin to create livable worlds.

The same kind of understanding of community in New York is helping to stop the destruction of many of the Third World communities in the City. On Eighth Avenue, around 90th St., tennants have been evicted from blocks of three and four-story apartment buildings. The city plans to destroy the buildings to put up high-rise urban renewal projects at twice the rent, breaking up the communities and driving people out of the City.

Most of the tenants are black or Puerto Rican. About three weeks ago, the Young Lords, a Puerto Rican radical group, the Panthers, and a lot of people in the community organized Operation Move-In. They took over the empty buildings, and moved homeless or crowded families into them. The project takes care of the buildings with volunteer labor, fixing the pipes, and assigning apartments to the families so that each one has enough room.

The City can't tear down the buildings with families living in them, and it can't evict the families, because every time they try, thousands of people surround the buildings to protect the new residents. The project has established a representative community council to make decisions, and cultural education programs for the kids, including classes in black and Puerto Rican history and a cultural resource center.

One of the leaders of the project, Tony Martinez, explained to me that they wanted to keep the community together, and besides, "Look at the buildings they're building." I looked outside as he pointed to the nearest one. "Can you imagine living in something like that?"

It takes a lot of dedication. Tony explained to me how he had tried to move a refrigerator from an unused apartment building to a family's apartment. He carried the refrigerator down five flights of stairs by himself, when the building's superintendent caught him. He argued with the superintendent about taking it, since the super admitted that no one was using it. Finally Tony turned his back to take the refrigerator anyway, and the super stabbed him twice in the back.

I'm pretty certain that most of the black people I've talked to would build cities far differently from any that white architects could design. Black people have had experience in living together. Our cities will continue to be the worst kind of Hell until we learn to live together as well.