The Washington Post Book World, October 27, 1996, p. 7.
HOME FROM NOWHERE
Remaking Our Everyday World for the Twenty-First Century
By James Howard Kunstler Simon & Schuster. 318 pp. $24
By Robert Wilson
The New Urbanists are no longer so very new, and their way of looking at the man-made environment never quite fit most people's definition of urban, but their ideas remain sounder and more exciting than their name. They probably should have called themselves the Village People, since the village or small town is their model for the development of new neighborhoods and -- although their record so far is spotty here -- for the renewal of neighborhoods that no longer function, or never did.
The first and still the best-known New Urbanist project is Seaside, a beach community on the Florida panhandle that features small lots, wooden houses with metal roofs, front porches and picket fences on narrow streets in an interesting grid pattern and a village square with a post office, restaurants and a small grocery store. In the Washington area the New Urbanists are best known for Kentlands in Montgomery County, a year-round residential community that has some of the same features as Seaside in its separate neighborhoods, plus an alley system offering garages with apartments, one way in which the housing is varied to attract economic diversity.
Although most of the New Urbanists are architects and planners at least three journalists are members of the fold: Tony Hiss, who wrote The Experience of Place; Philip Langdon, who wrote A Better Place to Live; and James Howard Kunstler, the author of The Geography of Nowhere, a B-52-like attack on suburbia. His new book, Home From Nowhere, renews the attack and then presents the New Urbanists as the hearts-and-minds squad that can save the survivors. Just to give you a flavor of Kunstler's prose -- he was once an editor at Rolling Stone and seems never to have recovered from that experience -- here is his description of our very own Montgomery County:
"Kentlands lies embedded in one of the worst suburban crudscapes in America like a Faberge egg in a county landfill. This is the so-called technology corridor between Rockville and Gaithersburg along I-270, one Radiant City office park after another, pod-upon-pod of income-targeted houseburgers, strip after numbing strip of chain stores, fry pits, and multiplexes. It's like Southern California, only arguably worse, because from the 1960s to the 1990s the traffic engineers have managed to ratchet up the scale of everything -- the commercial boulevards are wider, the intersections vaster, the setbacks ever deeper, the juniper-covered berms ever larger. Except for a few tatters of remnant farmland, this is a tragic landscape of postwar zoning with all predictable horrors."
The irritating thing about Kunstler is not so much that his rhetoric is overblown but that, at some level, he's right. What we have made of our cities, towns and rural areas since World War II is tragic, and unchecked suburban sprawl has clearly been our fatal flaw. It sucks the life out of our cities and off our Main Streets while despoiling pastoral landscapes that made the idea of America the beautiful more than the patriotic lyrics to a song but something palpable throughout the world. O, paradise lost! (O.K, so this is a subject that makes the rhetoric flow.)
How we managed to go so wrong so fast is a complicated story featuring such villains as Modernist architects, the purveyors of cheap gasoline and expensive automobiles, the creators of zoning and properly-tax laws and their often myopic enforcers, and the ever-greedy developer. Kunstler elaborates the role of each of these players in his semi- hysterical way. But the subtler and more unexpected part of his argument goes back to beauty, which he calls charm or civic art.
Isn't it astonishing that although each of us knows what makes a small town charming -- tree-lined streets with sidewalks, a commercial center with handsome buildings clustered together, a town square with a statue or a gazebo or a fountain at the center, public buildings that are imposing and decorous -- we stopped insisting upon these features in our new neighborhoods? And isn't it sad that our civic leaders, who once knew the place of beauty in our architecture and its role in creating a civil society, no longer have a clue?
From where I write this I can see a spired 1891 courthouse building of real beauty -- but empty now, of course. Down the street is a hideous, blocky courthouse complex, utterly charmless, utterly lacking the capacity to inspire. Between these two buildings, in our most precious civic space, the powers that be wish to build -- a prison! Can the small- town fathers of a century ago really have been that much more sophisticated than we are today?
Although Kunstler's manner makes it harder than it needs to be to read Home From Nowhere, it's hard to read it without coming to the conclusion that the answer to that question is yes.
-----
Robert Wilson, the editor of Preservation magazine, lives in Manassas.
See Alex Marshall's articles for a critique of Kentlands and New Urbanism.
See Michael Kaplan's critique of architectural neo-fascism.
To lists Design-L and Wam-L:
Home From Nowhere
Remaking Our Everyday World for the Twenty-First Century
James Howard Kunstler Simon & Schuster, New York, 1996
ISBN 0-684-81196-0
One dangerously sunny morning in April 1994, six guys were sitting around the attic porch of a house in the Florida panhandle swapping theories as to why the everyday world in America had become such an abysmal mess. All of them were architects except me. It was the day after the annual Seaside Prize had been awarded and some of us were still a little woozy from the festivities. The prize recipient, Christopher Alexander, author of "A Pattern Language" and other influential books, was there. So was Andres Duany, one of the designers of Seaside, the town we were in; Witold Rybczynski, the writer of graceful books about cities and buildings; Peter Calthorpe, the California architect and planner; and Paul Murrain, a young British landscape architect. The house was one designed by Leon Krier, the architectural theorist and, it is probably accurate to say, godfather of the movement to repair the damage done to our world by Modernism. Krier was present only in the spirit of the house, but his was a palpable presence.
Calthorpe had the floor. Lean and urbane, Calthorpe, forty-five, was in a humorously expansive mood. He proposed two theories. The first was The Stroke Theory. World War Two, he said, was so traumatic that it had caused the same kind of damage to western civilization that a cerebral hemorrhage can wreak on a human mind. It had made the advanced nations of the world lose some of their most important abilities, to forget their own history and culture, as a stroke victim loses his powers of speech, his memories, the particulars of his education. All the ghastly office buildings, banal dwellings, crappy commercial structures, and other common architectural garbage of our everyday world, Calthorpe proposed, were like the inchoate squawkings and bleatings of a stroke victim who had lost the ability to express himself. This theory met with such general approbation that Calthrope went on to propose a second.
This was The Stupor Theory. World War Two, he said, was the high tide of our fathers' generation. All these American men in the full bloom of youth had marched off to a terrible war against manifest evil and won a decisive victory for democracy and decency. In the process, many of them had the adventures of a lifetime -- moments of heroism, romances with grateful foreign girls, days and nights enjoying the spoils of liberated castles, profound friendships with army buddies, and, finally, the worshipful reception of the folks back home, with a sweet package of emoluments upon return to civilian life, including free college tuition and low-interest home mortgage loans.
These young men, Calthorpe went on, were immediately absorbed into postwar corporate life, fitting well into large hierarchical organizations. Corporate life was familiarly regimented like the army, where so many of them had lately enjoyed their heroic exploits. They knew how to give and follow orders, and patiently await promotion.
The downside was that their greatest adventures were over, that life on the commuter platform with hundreds of other guys in gray flannel suits was in some elemental way an awful comedown. What was there to look forward to? Selling ten million units a month of Oaties breakfast cereal for decades to come? How did this compare to drinking seventy-year-old cognac in an Alsatian castle with a pistol strapped to your leg and a seventeen- year-old French cutie in your lap, having spent the day slaughtering Nazis? Of course, there would be the compensations of family life, a nice house in those new suburbs, a shiny new car, the fabulous panoply of washers, driers, Mixmasters, TVs, hi-fi's, and power mowers, autumn days teaching Skippy to throw a football, winter nights at the school auditorium watching Princess dance in her toe shoes, summer evenings presiding over the backyard barbecue, and ... wait ... was that all? Is that where it ended? Flipping hamburgers and wieners in a joke-bedizened apron and a clownish chef's hat?
Well, yes, for a lot of them. This was what life had to offer after the stupendous adventure of World War Two. A whole generation of heroes slipped into a permanent semicoma, soothing their boredom and anomie with heavy doses of hard liquor -- their beloved martinis -- and living out the rest of their days in an alcoholic fog. This, Calthrope said, explained why the world they built for us -- the suburban sprawl universe -- was so incoherent, brutal, ugly, and depressing: they didn't care about what they were building. They were drunk most of the time, in a stupor. (This also, he added with wicked parenthetical glee, explained feminism: a whole generation of daughters raised by emotionally remote, perpetually plastered fathers.) pp. 15-17. ...
Isn't it un-American to concoct codes that "discipline" buildings in terms of siting, windows, doors, materials, roofpitches?
The public consensus about how to build a human settlement that is practical, affordable, socially equitable, and spiritually gratifying has collapsed. Standards of excellence in architecture and town planning have collapsed. Civic art has collapsed into the pseudo-science (or pseudo-art) of zoning. To say that a consensus never existed in highly individualistic America would be erroneous. Dozens of historic towns and urban neighborhoods testify to its previous existence. Not long after its founding in 1633, Cambridge, Massachusetts, enacted laws specifying build-to lines (six feet from the street), and roofing materials (slate or board, not thatch). Colonial Williamsburg had similar laws governing the placement of houses next to the street. Until the advent of cars, there was widespread general agreement about the ways that buildings should behave in the civic setting. We threw these agreements away in order to become a drive-in civilization.
What was thrown away must now be reconstructed, spelled out, and reinstated. The New Urbanism proposes to accomplish this through formal codes. These codes will restore the basic unities of design within which a wide variety of individual expressions can function happily. The codes will invoke in words and graphic images standards of excellence that previously existed in the minds of ordinary citizens but which have been forgotten and forsaken. The codes, therefore, aim to restore the collective cultural consciousness.
This sounds authoritarian!
Authorities can exist without being despotic. Indeed authorities must exist if a culture is to remain healthy. We are in the unfortunate and dangerous condition of a culture that has de-legitimized all authorities, that doesn't believe in anything. The New Urbanism is an unapologetic effort to reestablish one particular authority: that of civic art. Its principles may be subject to discussion -- a healthy skepticism about ideas is normal and desirable -- but they are stated with the confidence of an underlying legitimacy rooted in history and practice. The codes and principles are stated explicitly so that years, perhaps decades, need not be wasted reinventing practices of civic design that are already understood and proven.
The codes are lists of what is desirable and what is undesirable in our surroundings. They are given the force of law. This may sound scary, but, in fact, we already have such codes. Zoning is a set of codes given the force of law. The trouble is that zoning codes are crudely numerical and schematic in their application and they produce a poor model of an everydav environment. They say nothing about the quality or character of the things we build in the places we live. The New Urbanism seeks to replace them with rules that redefine standards of quality and character.
In the New Urbanism, a distinction is made between the urban code and the architectural code. The urban code is the skeleton and large muscles of a town, the architectural code is its small muscles and skin. The urban code defines the hierarchy of streets, type and size of blocks, corridors, location of the neighborhood centers, transit stops, parks and squares, and above all how the buildings must behave in respect to the public space of the streets.
The architectural code is subordinate to the urban code. It attempts to spell out desirable standards of design in elements such as roof pitches, window proportion, facade treatments, porch dimensions, and cladding materials. The architectural code introduces an extra layer of rigor that may be thought of as optional. It is recommended as a remedy for the unprecedented incompetence of architects in practice today.*
*This extraordinary incompetence can be attributed to the education of architects -- rooted in Modemist dogma -- which encourages them to be heroic geniuses before they become adept practitioners. The buildings of heroic geniuses must be like nothing ever seen before in history. They are also designed to exist in splendid isolation. They therefore occupy space rather than define space. They are anti-social by nature. They necessarily cannot fit into an established fabric of buildings by non-heroic non-geniuses.
[pp. 134-136]
Comments:
David Sucher, have you not written already this book more concisely and temperately in your City Comforts: How to Build An Urban Village?
More on Kunstler's book later. It's a revealing look at the Nurbanism promo campaign -- New Crudism vaunted as anti-crud -- and its restore-our-quaint-version-of-civilization authoritarians. Keep those six Seaside sun-and-power- woozers in mind, and, to be sure, their hovering marionetteers, exemplars-of-why-me-whine Krier, Duany and HRH.
In contrast to the Neo-Cruds gated and rickety, exclusionary, Middlemarch couthless wheeze about the real estate code- word "homes" (not you David), FT reports today on the Good Prince of architecture, the Aga Khan, and notes the cultural generosity of his awards program in honoring a diverse range of architecture and urbanism. And that genuine modernism embraces history, indeed, that they are united in diverse, thriving cultures -- as the Modernists affirmed in rejecting the ancestor-adulating Beauxs Arts. Too bad that the story was about his being given a kiss- of-death by the World Monuments Fund publicity ghouls.
John Young
jya@pipeline.com
To lists Design-L and Wam-L:
December 2, 1996
Remaking Our Everyday World for the 21st Century
James Howard Kunstler
Simon and Schuster, New York, 1996. $24.00
ISBN 0-684-81196-0
Jim Kunstler spoke at the Architectural League about his new book, "Home From Nowhere," and what's terribly wrong with the Vulgar New World, and what should be done about to get American civilization back on track.
Jim Kunstler's got a hair up about his intellectual prowess, in declaring cultural war on those with less than he's got under his mortarboard. It's a formulaic carny's spiel, yarping about the tasteless yokels of America who don't know civilization from shinola.
Kunstler's advocacy of New Urbanism and gingerbread hometownism is an admission of his own intellectual vacuity about how to counter the depredations of the environment other than to retreat Jackie-O-like to satiny boudoirs, sip sherry, and pancake the wrinkles. Offering nothing but rhetoric, he wink-winks with Windsor, Krier, Duany, and the Congress of New Urbanist co-consiprators to pretend that dense plats of stick-style squats are high quality Beacon Hills and to hype the shit out of them as civilized shinola (Bob Stern vaudevilles similarly at Columbia with his bowdlerized, endless-volumed NYC of Yale-boxed Scullyan dreams).
These Jekyl-and-formaldehydean Ralph Laurens -- supremely stage-confident, hammy, cultural purveyors of scenographic culture to the masses -- whip out this vapid cultural pretense, a burnish-the-best charade, to resist changing values and privileges of a tumultous, contentious culture.
Yes, Kunstler proudly calls home, and exemplar of his civilized propectus, Saratoga Springs, New York -- one of the world's greatest sites of funeral homes housing braying, ever-drunken horses' asses -- and a lickspittle's choice shoeshine spot.
Such opportunistic traditionalists say too-bad about what is to be done with the rest of the savaged landscape outside well-regulated property boundaries in moribund enclaves.
Kunstler's a Writer's Studio view, a mindscape painting of ideal tourist-terrains. A mind-coward's whistle into the dark.
Still, it's a sour pleasure to sip Kunstler's vinegar, for he reminds, like old architectural journals, like the cultural historians -- Vitruvius, Tom Wolfe -- that the heavy vaunting of civilization and monuments, heritage and tradition, distinctions of class and mind -- is the surest path for sharp wits to pop the rag, grin and wipe shoes for wee prizes at world-crime hangouts, maybe get tenurely dole.
John Young
jya@pipeline.com
<DESIGN-L@PSUVM.PSU.EDU>
From: John Young <jya@PIPELINE.COM>
Date: 5 February 1997
Subject: Prince of Harrod's Inner Cities
Washington Post snippet today:
"Robert Higdon is switching Brits. The former executive director of the Washington-based Margaret Thatcher Foundation has left to run the new U.S. branch of the Prince of Wales Foundation here. The organization, created in Britain three years ago by Prince Charles, who's quite the architecture buff, is dedicated to reviving run-down inner cities."
It would be wondrous if Charles divorced the neo-trad enclavists and took on wider and far more difficult public responsibilities. But hiring a professional iron-fisted Thatcherite to run his colonial op is just adding another head-bustng cop to suppress inner city anger and anguish -- like the cowardly Kunstler/New Untervolkers mallishly retail.
Recalling earlier NU PR, has PoW upscale-bribed HUD to promo Neo Nubianism? Does the Foundation really intend to revive inner cities or just stuff them, like Fayed's Harrod's, in Ralph Lauren junk-tweeds?
Is there paper or a Web site that ads this Celebration de Les Miserable?
<DESIGN-L@PSUVM.PSU.EDU>
From: Randolph Fritz <randolph@TELEPORT.COM>
Date: 5 February 1997
Subject: Re: Prince of Harrod's Inner Cities
On Wed, 5 Feb 1997, John Young wrote:
> Washington Post snippet today:
>It would be wondrous if Charles divorced the neo-trad enclavists and
>took on wider and far more difficult public responsibilities. But hiring
>a professional iron-fisted Thatcherite to run his colonial op is just
adding
>another head-bustng cop to suppress inner city anger and anguish -- like
>the cowardly Kunstler/New Untervolkers mallishly retail.
Well, you never know--Chas. appointee just might have a heart.
Having just read Kunstler's Home from Nowhere I'm puzzled by your reaction to him -- is he really buying into the Disney-fic(a)tion of NYC? I don't much like Kunstler's attitude towards poverty -- he endorses some policies that seem to me very wrong-headed. Balancing those, however, he also opposes the development and slum-creation practices you object to, and supports city plans which he believes will offer genuinely decent low-income housing. He's primarily a novelist and he gives generally a supportive account of new urbanism; the account of the decisions made in a local city counsel meeting is hysterically funny. I was puzzled by him until that account and then I realized: Kunstler writes like a genuine conservative -- someone who sincerely believes that older designs and the social patterns associated with them are superior to current ones. I've gotten so accustomed to the opportunistic sort of faux conservative that finding Kunstler to be a real conservative was something of a shock.
But, say, what? Has he bought into the malling of Manhattan? What makes him so objectionable to you, beyond political disagreement?
--
Randolph Fritz
randolph@teleport.com
<DESIGN-L@PSUVM.PSU.EDU>
From: John Young <jya@PIPELINE.COM>
Date: 5 February 1997
Subject: Re: Prince of Harrod's Inner Cities
Randolph,
It's because Kunstler doesn't go very deep, that he settles for pre-fabricated "winners," and cannot bear the anxiety of being outside the privileged circle, or at least cannot conceal his anxiousness to please the people he believes are superior.
So it's not his conservativism that rankles, it's his imitation of genuine conservatives, his neo-conservative presumption that if he writes, acts and advocates what the ensconced want, he will be accepted into their comfy circle. See Home From Nowhere's opening chapters where he gloats at being part of the gang (I posted that obsequiousness to D-L -- see above).
He also offends, like Witold, like a number of today's popularizers, with his promotion of architectural superficialities. This is what links him to the real estate mavens -- and too many architectural critics and scholars -- who emphasis the scenographic, the stylistic, the literary, the VRML, to conceal ignorance (maybe willful) of underlying deficiencies that remain deliberately unaddressed by successful Trump-emulative marketing.
There are a batch of slick writers in the design field who lazily gloss products for the market -- low and high -- with literary and scholarly and debating tricks of the trade. They do not delve very deeply into matters, indeed, they may be prohibited from doing so by their publishers who are obliged to eye advertisers and consumers as closely as Kunstler must doggily eye the gang he wishes to sell himself to.
For this reason you are correct to note Kunstler's novelistic tricks to sustain interest in his shallow potboilers. He also speaks in that carnival-con fashion, as I noted in my earlier critique of his lecture. He's not serious about architecture and planning, he's done very little reading or research.
He writes in HFN that he got into it as a way to make a living while he works on his, ahem, serious work. He confesses to surprise at his commercial success: see the end of HFN. This lie is claimed as truth by quite a number of architectural -- trade -- promoters, that you can be paid well for hustling shoddy products.
Suzanne Stephens, among others, has sardonically remarked on the inferior quality of architectural writing for the trade, but, as she says, it's a pretty good living if you can live with yourself. I think Kunstler is no more ashamed of his commercial trickery than are the shoddy-products Nurbists and Princes.
Ha! Are not we all? Keep in mind that keeping the faith is hard when your muse -- your faith in your purpose -- deserts, and you still got to go out and peddle shit to the whatta-you-got-for-me clients-consumers.
Read the end of HFN, I almost believed it was true. Then I recognized it as one of my own well used cons, indeed, it may be the best part of Jim's screed, at least the most useful for make-believe Princes and make-believe artists, ahem, suffering for their art, confessing their potboiling failure.
<DESIGN-L@PSUVM.PSU.EDU>
From: Randolph Fritz <randolph@TELEPORT.COM>
Date: 19 Feb 1997 20:23:15 -0800
Subject: Re: Kunstler and the prince
John,
I finally went and read Geography of Nowhere. It's a very different, and I think far superior, sort of book than Home From Nowhere.
What struck me about Geography... is how much of a historical work it is. While, as a professional, you may be familiar with all the ground he covers, I am not, and I am impressed with Kunstler as that rare thing, a journalist with a heart and historical sensitivity. He is also the better sort of polemicist; it is very obvious he has a strong position, and he sets out his reasons for believing it. And I think he shows occasional flashes of extraordinary insight: into the translation of modernism into a style, into people's awareness of automobiles in their environment, into Disneyworld. Saying that he supports Disnification is a hard criticism indeed -- he plainly hates it.
Home from Nowhere, on the other hand, is much more journalistic, and I think displays the failings that you lambaste him for; my impression is that he probably was, in part, capitalizing on the success of Geography... -- if his editor didn't ask him for a second book, it was only because the editor was asleep at the switch.
> He also offends, like Witold, like a number of today's popularizers,
> with his promotion of architectural superficialities. This is what
> links him to the real estate mavens -- and too many architectural
> critics and scholars -- who emphasis the scenographic, the stylistic,
> the literary, the VRML, to conceal ignorance (maybe willful) of
> underlying deficiencies that remain deliberately unaddressed by
> successful Trump-emulative marketing.
I'm honestly not sure what you mean, here. In his books Kunstler concerns himself with history, economics, and quality of work -- hardly superficial matters. He plainly regards what you call "scenographic," "stylistic," and so on as more important than you do, but he's hardly blind to underlying deficiencies -- in fact, he seems to agree with your point.
> For this reason you are correct to note Kunstler's novelistic
> tricks to sustain interest in his shallow potboilers. He also speaks
> in that carnival-con fashion, as I noted in my earlier critique of
> his lecture. He's not serious about architecture and planning, he's
> done very little reading or research.
Hmmm...he's done what I would reasonably expect of someone whose prime interests are political, historical, and social -- though it is possible that the holes in his knowledge are also the holes in mine. I do wince every time he slams Modernism, but then, I tend to think of the ideals of Modernist designers; it's certainly fair to call them on the carpet for falling short. The way you write about him, you sound like you'd like him to have done as much reading as someone with a non-professional degree in the field...or, hmmm, what would you recommend to fill in his knowledge?
My knowledge?
> He writes in HFN that he got into it as a way to make a living
while
> he works on his, ahem, serious work. He confesses to surprise at
his
> commercial success: see the end of HFN. This lie is claimed as
truth
> by quite a number of architectural -- trade -- promoters, that you
can
> be paid well for hustling shoddy products.
I think it pretty likely, actually, based on the differences between the two books. Who'd have thought that Geography... would sell as well as it has? A thoroughly crochety, polemical book on a subject which "everyone knows" the public doesn't care about? Advocating a genuinely unpopular position? (Anyone as critical of car-oriented city plans as Kunstler is advocating an unpopular position!)
Shakespeare wrote for the crowds, and many greats in the arts have done popular work because it paid -- I don't think you can dismiss their work simply because of that. Truthfully, if we are to see an improvement in the current abysmal state of the built environment -- and I think you, me, and Kunstler all agree on that -- some showmanship and hustling is necessary. That is not a conclusion I come to easily or happily -- I hate salemanship -- but unless an effort to persuade is undertaken, people are not going to be persuaded in the face of the sellers of nowhere and nothing. You said it yourself: there are plenty of people who are in the business of promoting shoddy products and practices; if we are, instead, to have quality, we needs must promote that, instead.
I think -- correct me if I am wrong -- you are concerned that he is feeding yet another nostagic design movement. I fear this may be so: certainly Kunstler doesn't seem to have many new ideas. Still...the meeting of nostalgia and reality has produced some excellent buildings and city plans. Who would give up Craftsman bungalows on theoretical grounds? Or most of Julia Morgan and Bernard Maybeck? Or H. H. Richardson, for that matter? It may even be that the nostalgia conceals important timeless concerns...
...but that is a matter for another essay.
--
Randolph Fritz
randolph@teleport.com
<DESIGN-L@PSUVM.PSU.EDU>
From: John Young <jya@PIPELINE.COM>
Date: 1 March 1997
Subject: Re: Kunstler and the prince
Randolph,
Kunstler's skill at dramatizing environmental disputes is admirable, and you're right in finding more ethical and aesthetic substance -- abrasive critique -- in Geography than in Home.
Kunstler wrote like an outsider in Geography, got attention and an invitation to come inside, and succumbed to the temptation in Home. He has retreated from being a challenger to being a hustler, as he simpers at the end of Home.
Now, granted, the same thing usually happens with getting tenure, with making partner, with becoming "award-winning," with losing an edge, with believing purchased publicity's slick brochures and judgments of history -- hah, the smell of shit termed perfume.
It is this adoption of a too narrow definition of architecture, as Kunstler does in Home and as do other successful popularizers of architecture in the academy and in journalism, that annoys me, for it shows once again that architectural canon -- cant like "world class" and "serious" and heirarchicism -- of any sort is a constricting lens that diminishes perception of the wider richness and diversity of the unmediated, erractically constructed world.
This cant suffuses "property development" architecture, the language of historical periods, styles, movements, schools, fame. Read any regularly published architectural critic and you'll read property development promotion of the Times in disguise. That's why the Real Estate section of newspapers is carefully separated from Arts and Style -- don't be so obvious.
Architectural historians, critics, intellectuals, journalists, and professors are complicit in this desktop version of architecture which lives primarily in books, photographs, slides, magazines, television, computers, brochures, posters, It is promoted, protected and projected in libraries, museums, design studios, lecture halls, parties and, most importantly, in real estate advertisements and salesrooms.
There is a long history of close ties between the Vasaris and the Property Developers. Most architectural history is a sophisticated brochure for the parallel property market, as revealed by the sponsors of the tomes, now as before the institutions which nuture the research and promotion -- and, as Michael Kaplan and others note, cloak the source of funds.
So when Kunstler moves from stringent critique to well-paid promotion, his work stinks of unstirred mental rancidity, the mind odor that suffuses the cravenly ensconced who do not have to sweat the future -- or so they pray to and supplicate before their superiors.
Not that he's any different from architects and designers and property developers and the rest of us when we gaze at the black hole of failure in our dreams and squat-holes.
So, for architectural critique I say it's far better to take a walk and clamber about what's outside -- full scale Geographies of Nowhere and scarily incomprehensible -- than gobble the desktop simulations of critics and scholars safe at Home From Nowhere with Martha Stewart Kunstler.