Who can identify this city? It appears at minute 4:40 in the video linked below. (CPI)
It is past time for my annual roundup of best buildings from 2023. I confess, the time blew right past me. Maybe it is not too late now, but I am too busy (and lazy) to wrap it all up again for last year. Instead, I offer a video that should help to promote a best-building culture around the world. Once you’ve viewed it you will thank me for not inflicting on you another year of “best trad.” The video is from the the online platform The Aesthetic City, and is entitled “Build Like This Again?,” produced and narrated by Ruben Hanssen, founder of the platform. Click on that link. The link does not take you directly to the video, but to “Home.” Maybe that is my fault. You might have to scroll down a bit until you reach “Our Videos,” and click on the first of these, “Build Like This Again?” If you can find the online magazine again (I could not), you can read an interview Hanssen gives at the bottom. The one before it is excellent as well. All of this springs, in some way, from Michael Diamant and his New Traditional Buildings blog, and Nir Buras and his Classic Planning Institute, which is listed under “Other Initiatives.” There is much of value to read in this online magazine. If you can find it.
Enjoy. And enjoy your year, even without “Best Buildings of 2023.”
Architecture Here and There 
On the home page of The Aesthetic City, the second photograph from above displays a building with the word AZARIA (meaning: helped by God) on the façade. On the stairs of the building there are the masses, photographing, perhaps eating and doing what the masses do, there is even a silly big fluffy bear… (sign of the cheap sentimentalism of the masses).
Anyone who loves such buildings who does not see clearly that the kind of mentality and devotional spirit which lead to the construction of this building, and the ‘spirit’ of the modern masses, are totally alien and hostile, merely enjoys such architecture for superficial aesthetic or technicist reasons.
But, then again, it is called ‘Aesthetic City’ for a reason?
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“Ruben has the know-how to make your city thrive. Having honed his skills at a top engineering firm, Ruben is now leading the way in urban design consulting with his unique urban design approach.”
The lame leading the blind? even the sloganesque language breeds uninspiring marketed superficiality (technical skill is far from sufficient). No culture of egalitarianism and spiritual bankruptcy has the required devotional spirit to produce grandness of architecture. The only thing left is that the modernist totempoles of mammoth are exchanged for a superficial emulating Disneyland-aesthetics architecture.
Sort of like the US founding fathers did, an architectural copy of Rome, which was a copy of the arts of former cultures, already far from its inspiring root.
“driven by a passion for creating better cities”
Neither engineering skills nor ‘passion’ suffices.
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It appears to me that there is an obvious connection with grand architecture, highly hierarchical well ordered societies and religious worship. Surely even in the democracy of Athens there was still religious worship, and a promotion of grand architecture by certain strong leaders. And this democracy wasn’t that equal yet..
It always appears to me ridiculous that those who love grand and beautiful architecture are prostrating themselves before the masses, alleging that the public prefers classical/historical architecture. Equality and masses (and their envy and hostility towards hierarchy and the superior), and the ‘grand and uplifting’ do not go together. A sentimental preference of the public for historical architecture is a silly basis for a flourishing architectural culture.
The real reason for the demise of grand and beautiful architecture is exactly the twentieth-century dictatorship of the masses and their mass managers (democracy). Where there are masses who demand equality, grand architecture and the beautiful and uplifting cannot flourish, because the masses desecrate everything, and their leaders, save the exception to the rule, are inferior.
In fact, it even appears to me that those who make a plea for classical/grand architecture using the preference of the egalitarian masses as an argument against modernism, have themselves not understood the spirit of grand architecture, or at least the spirit of what makes it flourish, and they appear to be motivated by lesser reasons, which appears to be a sort of aesthetic sentimentalism, perhaps combined with a love of solid engineering.
Or perhaps the capacity of the better type of democratic man to appreciate grand architecture could be likened to how atheists are able to appreciate religious music, but they do not have the proper inspiration and spirit of devotion to create it.
Grand architecture is the product of quality, quality of a devotional life, quality of a spiritual life, hierarchy based on quality, quality based on good breeding, qualitative communal life, qualitative order, qualitative restriction, modernism is all quantity of the egalitarian masses, quantitative disorder, mobility of the inferior, bad breeding, etc.
Even in societies which degenerated into decadence, where the devotional and spiritual life degenerated, maintenance of proper hierarchy still prevented total aesthetic decline.
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18 Av. Bosquet, 75007 Paris, France
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Thank you, Thomas. Please read my reply below to John the First on what was behind my abdication on the Parisan street plaque. I forgot to mention there that I initially focused on the sign on the building to the right, which is one reason I could make no determination. – db
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There is a street sign on the building to the left that says Avenue Bosquet.
L’avenue Bosquet est une avenue du 7 arrondissement de Paris.
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Can’t imagine, Charles, how you managed to read that sign, even on a pumped up version of the photo. I was only able to get the name of the restaurant on the left side of the street. So it is Paris, of course, but it could be so many other streets in Europe, oui? – db
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It is fairly easy readable when not enlarged, but might take a guess for a letter or two, when enlarged to about 140 percent, you can about not miss it.
Screen and or eyesight might be the issue?
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John, after I wrote that I could not read the street name plaque (and reluctant to attempt changes that WordPress has been making it more and more difficult to perrform), I saw the street sign on the restaurant toward the left of the image, which had somehow eluded me before. You are right, it takes only slight magnification to read it. I figured no one would notice my abandoning ship on this detail. I should have known it was Paris.
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