Lecture by Jan Gehl: To be a good architect you must love people
According to Jan Gehl, throughout history cities were made with spaces for life and at eye level. The modernists threw this concept away (1933). Cities became a matter of placing objects. If it looked good from an aeroplane it was a good city. For years and years, when most of the modern cities were built, there was no scale between airplane scale and detail-scale (“The Dog View", as he calls it). There was a serious link missing: The city at eye level.
Jan Gehl recalls a long and hard struggle to bring the city at eye level – urban design – back to the architect’s toolbook. By now the struggle has been won, he says. The city at eye level is back and with this, concern for people in the city is back. At eye level the people can never be overlooked any more.
This is a lecture with two layers: The big story and Jan Gehl’s very personal story of his own work on closing the missing link and refinding the people dimension in architecture.
Jan Gehl. Foto: Gehl Architects 
