Mad About Architecture
I posted earlier about an article from the NY Times stating that under no uncertain terms, New York was the best city in which to live. Vermeers, you see, make it unquestionably better.
The article cited a book called The Geography of Nowhere and, piqued by the title, I ordered a used copy from Amazon. I was reading the beginning in Bernie’s, back in California when a waitress asked me what the book was about. I had no idea at that point but I do now: James Howard Kunstler is mad about architecture. Furious.
On hamburger joints:
Thus, a Jacksonian student of landscape can observe a Red Barn hamburger joint, he can remark on its architectural resemblance to certain structures from the past, measure its dimensions, figure out the materials that went into building it, record the square footage of its parking lot, count the number of cars that come and go, the length of time that each customer lingers inside, the average sum spent on a meal, the temperature of the iceberg lettuce in its bin in the salad bar – all down to the last infinitesimal detail – and never arrive at the conclusion that the Red Barn is an ignoble piece of shit that degrades the community.
Office buildings disguised as churches:
Why should this matter? Why not just accept the little fake church as a playful, harmless, adorable architectural oddity, as the lovers of kitsch do? Because it’s a bad building, cheaply cute, out-of-scale, symbolically false, and stuck in the middle of a parking lot, a little noplace that contributes to the greater noplace. Because if the town had not been degraded by other bad buildings and bad design relationships, there would be no need for its mendacious symbolism, which cheapens the town just a little more.
Decorative fountains:
There’s a cute touch to the left of the grand entrance: a little fountain up against an enormous blank brick wall. It spurts water perhaps four feet up in the air, no higher, so that a man of average size, if sufficiently enthralled, could walk over from the parking lot and gaze down upon it in awe. It is about as tall as a foundation shrub, one of those clumpy junipers or yews beloved of suburban landscapers. Most sublimely, a blue floodlight plays through it, even at high noon, in case anyone fails to register that he is looking at real live water.
Kunstler is upset about more than just strip architecture. He is angry about Bauhaus1. He bemoans his home town, Saratoga Springs, departure from the rustic, country town into a forgettable suburb. What gets Kunstler’s goat though, more than anything, is the automobile. He constantly picks at its existence the way a Republican churchgoer might about Bill Clinton, with the same effects: first charming, then curious and finally descending into a meandering cacophony of meaninglessness.
Even though the constant picking is myopic, Kunstler has some interesting ideas about (lack of) urban and rustic design. He traces the majority of our problems in the America to an ideology that was born the moment land was parceled out to survivors of the Mayflower: the concept of public space. In short, Americans are rugged individualists who care a great deal about private space but take little if no interest in the collective space that makes a community. This flippancy causes the decisions of public space to be made without design merit – born of efficiency and economics, not a “greater good.”
Of all places, this is Los Angeles. The most recent edition of Architectural Digest features the case in point: a multi-million dollar home belonging to former soap opera actress Susan Sullivan (reach back in the archives for the vacuous Falcon Crest) in a place where other than the beach we send people to corporate theme parks when they visit.
He also goes after the idea of a home:
These housing “products” represent a triumph of mass merchandising over regional building traditions, of salesmanship over civilization. You can be sure the same houses have been built along a highway strip outside Fresno, California, at the edge of a swamp in Pahokee, Florida, and on the blizzard-blown fringes of St. Cloud, Minnesota. They might be anywhere. The places they stand are just different versions of nowhere, because these houses exist in no specific relation to anything except the road and the power cable. Electric lighting has reduced the windows to lame gestures. Tradition comes prepackages as screw-on aluminum shutters, vinyl clapboards, perhaps a phony cupola on the roof ridge, or a plastic pediment over the door – tribute, in sad vestiges, to a lost past from which nearly all connections have been severed. There they sit on their one- or half-acre parcels of land – the scruffy lawns littered with the jetsam of a consumerist religion (broken tricycles, junk cars, torn plastic wading pools ) – these dwelling of a proud and sovereign people. If the ordinary house of our time seems like a joke, remember that it expresses the spirit of our age. The question, then, is: what kind of joke represents the spirit of our age? And the answer is: a joke on ourselves.
Hence the title – The Geography of Nowhere – a place we build that is standardized, cold and utterly commercial. It has no relationship with its surroundings, whether that is the buildings near it or the physical environment upon which it stands.
But here is my rub: architecture a community does not make. That is why, when looking for culture, one looks for poor people. One looks for simple people. One of the miracles of humanity is culture ex-nihilo: we make it out of nothing, despite ourselves. Consider this: there were poor kids in the 1970s and 1980s growing up in the inner city surrounded by ghetto shanty towns with no money. They listened to music and created a dance for themselves – a dance of infinite variation and creativity. In order to breakdance, all you needed to do was hear music and the music you heard didn’t even need to be a product of your own technology. It could be the noise of cars or yelling or even something you made up in your head. You can, today, purchase a Justin Timberlake video to try and copy the effect, or you can wear clothes that emulate their culture – their community but it isn’t the same. Ask the affluent Europeans whose techno began in Chicago and Detroit in warehouses.
Kunstler is right. When I was in Simi about a month ago I was asking my Starbucks friend M about all the tracts around. She told me about the Greek tract, the Texas tract, and the Italian tract… all these imitations, thousands of cheap stucco houses in gated complexes that faked everything. I felt sad. Depressed. I walked up to the “civic center” by the library. Its façade was an immense parking lot with ominous gates surrounding the neighboring police station. The sidewalks were empty – a token of mobility since the closest big thing was a strip mall by the 118 freeway and beyond that a gas station. It felt bleak and Kunstler’s words bore right into me.
But I think that the moment we redefine ‘community’ our own humanity surprises us. Maybe that’s why white kids in vast suburban tract homes get bored enough or restrained enough to express themselves – grinding token hand rails into nothing with the underparts of skateboards. Conjuring electronic music out of the Macs their parents buy for their homework… If you had asked me if Brookings, South Dakota had any culture or community when I first came my rueful laughter wouldn’t have stopped easily. But hang around any place long enough and people start to surprise you: the dance studio across the hallway, the art museum down the street, the Bauhaus middle school building, the Greek styled post office, the Falung Chinese sect marching in a football parade, the converted barn homes, old farmers who fought in 'Nam, Korea and World War II, who have seen more of the world than anomalies like myself – hang around long enough and things jump out at you. They yell.
1 For more Bauhaus hating, see Tom Wolfe.
2 Kunstler maintains a page on his website called "Eyesore of the Month."
7:46:02 AM 
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