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Article: Fresno seeks touch of paradise to cure III downtown. (Places).
- Article from:
- California Planning & Development Report
- Article date:
- December 1, 2002
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2002 California Planning & Development Report. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Is it appropriate for designers to create objects that have no use beyond giving pleasure? In 1972, a French interviewer asked a similar question to the designer Charles Eames in the film "Design Q&A." His answer: "Who is to say pleasure is not useful?"
Eames's rhetorical question can be rephrased in a positive way: Pleasure is a legitimate concern in design, and nowhere more so than in urban design. Just as we have outgrown the idea of strict functionalism, in which design is little more than finding the most efficient shape for a given purpose, we have abandoned the idea of the city as nothing more than a pure economic machine that contains housing, places of ...