THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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Town plans, ideal towns and real clarity again: permeation of crystal with profusion
Combined with others, houses no longer look as if they are ready to leave. The good builder needs groups, squares, a town, and it should no longer need to disappear,
it should be planned for the long term. This is a hope of tomorrow, and where the morning is already breaking, of today, but it is as old as architecture itself, remains
inscribed in it and self­evident. Town planning is therefore by no means confined to modern times, in fact although it frequently occurs in the latter, even before the last
century, it is also oddly thwarted in them. For bourgeois society is of course a calculating one for the sake of profit, but on account of its anarchic economy also a
disordered one, one of economic chance. That is why precisely the industrial towns and the residential areas of the last century, which we owe to the magnaminity of
building speculation, are thoughtlessness and planlessness per se. The only uniform thing about them is their dreariness, the stone gorge, the bleak line of streets into the
void, the kitsch of their own miserable style or stolen flashy style; the remaining lay­out, however! is anarchic like the profiteering which underlies it. Whereas precisely
the so­called evolved towns of the pre­capitalist period, owing to their more regulated mode of production, by no means arose at random. Clear town plans have come
down to us from antiquity, even from the time before Alexander, the rapid founder of towns from the Nile to the Himalayas. Deliberate provision here characterized
architects from the start, even amazingly close to social construction. Aristotle thus mentions an architect Hippodamos, in memorable duplication of architectural and
political planning: ‘Hippodamos, the son of Euryphon, from Miletus, who invented the division (diairesis) of towns and cut through the Piraeus … was at the same time
the first man who, without being a practical statesman, undertook to say something about the best political constitution’ (Politics II, chapter 8). So old therefore is
contact between architectural and political planning in general: the said Hippodamos had likewise planned a diairesis on political foundations into purposes of worship,
public benefit, and private property, and had almost socially underpinned his building plan. Furthermore, the extravagance of planning was not lacking which had always
been a part of megalomania and which reckoned with its frenzy of building, but in fact it was a mania with a plan and method. Alexander and his master builder
Dinokrates dreamed of carving out the entire foothills of