ABSTRACT
The idea that towns and cities should be rebuilt along scientific lines, although widely held by British architects and planners during the mid twentieth century, was by no means universally supported. The following account explores the nature of a disagreement between Sheffield City Council's technical officers in the 1940s. At its heart was a dispute about whether the positive sciences should underpin reconstruction efforts, or whether other ideas based on the subjective experience of space had validity. Better to understand the nature of the dispute between Sheffield's planners, people might consider Edmund Husserl's critique of the positive sciences. Consequently, the world as described by modern science is unlike the world as experienced, in that it consists of idealised forms of reality, devoid of all morphological essences. By contrast, the Diagonal Road Scheme was based on principles that had their origin in the classical world, not in modern science. For Husserl, Galileo was 'at once a discovering and a concealing genius'.
