Architecture professor Stephen Rustow on the tragic poetry of New York's building codes: "If zoning is sketched in watercolor or charcoal and financing counts in red and black ink, building codes are written in blood. The code is a reactive text and each of its clauses is a response to some past disaster. Its awkward poetics is tragic in the original sense of the word, combining pity and fear in a dirge that eulogizes the deaths of those lost to fire, collapse, and malignant neglect. It is a muted language that stifles a cry of despair, hoping to forestall what can never be entirely foreseen." [Urban Omnibus]
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