Speaking on behalf a proposal for the West Side Stadium plan, Alex Krieger, the head of Harvard's GSD, invoked Jane Jacobs, claimed her as a mentor and asserted that his proposal most closely matched her ideals.
People love to invoke Jane Jacobs to support some idea that has "mixed-use" and "public space." An intrepid reporter, Will Doig (who also wrote another story I posted a few months ago, and for which I got my first nasty comment) from New York Magazine got to the bottom of this, and managed to talk to Jacobs herself.
“The Harvard School of Design has never been much of a mentor of mine.” Why? “They’ve never respected the city street or the vitality of cities. They got terribly fond of Le Corbusier,” whose tower-in-a-park planning theories are anathema to Jacobs. “And it’s never really worn off.”Her final quote said it all:
"That’s an awful way to use valuable land in Manhattan."
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