Philip Jodidio who was born in New Jersey in 1954, studied art history and economics at Harvard. He has been editor-in-chief of the French art magazine Connaissance des Arts in Paris since 1980 a nd is a member of many scientific committees and juries. Among the numerous studies and books he has published on contemporary architecture are the Taschen series on contemporary American, European and Japanese architects as well as monographs on Norman Foster, Tadao Ando, Richard Meier and Santiago Calatrava, among others. A Knight in the French Order of Arts and Letters, Jodidio has also won the Prix de Briey for his publications. The debate about contemporary architecture and urbanism often fails to take into account one simple, overriding fact. Buildings of some quality, whose esthetic and practical aspects are worthy of note, are few and far between. One could say the same thing about contemporary art. Thousands of people strive to make a living from art, but very few manage to do so, and fewer still make any kind of lasting contribution. This may not be a serious matter where bits of canvas and paint are concerned, but when the built environment, the world we live in, is at stake, there is nothing more important. Bad buildings, and worse still, bad urbanism, fueled both West and East by the predominant concerns of the profit motive, are not the exception but the rule. Where the goal of many architects in the past was to create a coherent urban environment, the rules of the modern world gave free rein both to commercial interests, and to the ego of the individual. The tabula rasa proclaimed by Walter Gropius and others early in the century of course participated in the idea that what was modern had to be apart, had to stand on its own, but from there to the free-for-all visible in many Western and Asian cities, there is a great distance. Gropius and his colleagues may have dreamed of making men better through architecture and design, but the facts of post-World War II construction and urban growth took hold of the form of their thoughts without retaining the intellectual substance. An ideal of renewal, seems through a perverse process, to have sown the seeds of chaos. Clearly, something, somewhere has gone wrong, and it is the quality of life which has suffered. No amount of discussion and intellectual analysis will change the fact that cities, from Beijing to Bangkok, from Sao Paulo to Los Angeles are dominated by bad architecture, which is built without even the most perfunctory analysis of the health and well-being of the city-dweller. Naturally this problem reaches catastrophic proportions in cities such as Cairo or Bombay. The remarkable progress in building materials and techniques brought about in the past decades hardly has any impact where the very poor are concerned. ! Uwagi: Oprawa lekko wytarta. Brzegi stron delikatnie zakurzone.