¶ New York City (2)
← New York City (1) | New York City (3) →
Index Entry
residences, banks, and commercial structures were thought of by architects, owners, and the public as ‘permanent’ monuments of their conceivers’ era. And the building arts being the most laggard of all men’s activities, this conception of buildings as ‘permanent’ still persists in most men’s minds. Most people look upon the building operations blocking New York’s streets–the piles of sand and brick, the huge cranes fishing steel girders from curb-parked trucks–as temporary annoyances, soon to disappear in a static peace. They still think of permanence as normal, a hangover from the Newtonian view of the Universe. But those who have lived in and with New York since the beginning of this century have literally experienced living with Einsteinian relativity.
“Said Newton, in the first phase of his first law of motion, ‘A body persists in a state of rest’ (and then as an afterthought, ‘or in a line of motion’) except as it is affected by another body. This Newtonian norm of ‘at rest’ which means without change, has long been the base line of all our economic charts. From this point of view all events and”
