Interview: James Howard Kunstler
Thursday, May 22, 2003
by Mark Hurst
Get Good Experience by e-mail: e-mail update@goodexperience.com
Experience is constantly shaped by our environment - the city or
suburb where we live and work. James Howard Kunstler is the best
person I know to talk about that aspect of experience.
Jim is the author of "The Geography of Nowhere," "The City in Mind,"
and other critiques of urban and suburban design. He also spoke at
the Gel conference earlier this month.
Q - In your recent book "The City in Mind," you write about the
architectural monstrosity that is Boston City Hall. You said that it
"looks like the back office of Darth Vader's Death Star, a brutalist
trapezoidal heap of stained beige concrete on a despotic brick
podium... windswept, cold, vacant, cruel, petty, bland... a
nightmare." How could a design that's so obviously *bad* actually
get approved and built?
It was a combination of strange circumstances. We'd need a
Bronowski-type connect-the-dots version of history to fully
understand it.
In the 40s and 50s, some refugees from Bauhaus came to the US from
Europe and were embraced by the left intelligentsia. Some made their
way to Harvard and brought with them their modernist ideology. The
fact is, a lot of it was just Marxist bohemian blather. A lot
derived from the basic idea in Marxian thought, which permeated the
arts and the bohemian scene, that to ring in a new golden age of
equality and justice, you had to destroy everything in the old
world, including all the existing cultural semiology that had been
accumulated through five thousand years of culture - like art and
architecture.
One of the consequences of destroying the past, or making it
inadmissible, is that you end up not being able to know where you
came from. And then you don't know here you're going, and you can't
live in a hopeful present. The modernists destroyed that, and made
it the heart and soul of their practice and their message. Americans
regarded it as being sexy.
Q - Why would Americans regard a loss of history as sexy?
Because we Americans have a weakness for the idea of the cutting
edge, and we're easily led into mystification. It comes from our
hysterical Protestant Puritan national experience, which breaks out
every 60 or 70 years, like the Great Awakening in the 1740s, Mormons
in 1830s, hippies on 1960s. Americans like to by mystified, and
they're easily impressed by obscurantists, wizards of Oz, people
coming from Europe with their funny accents.
In Europe, architecture had social and political content, but when
it came to the US it became just a matter of fashion. So you have
all the practitioners in the post-war era doing this brutal
architecture in which history has been eliminated, and the forms are
brutal, and you have an additional problem: our cities are being
tyrannized by automobiles. You're getting a wholesale degradation of
public space. In one sense, Americans' public space is being
systematically degraded, and on the other hand, the architecture
being used to occupy it is becoming more and more degraded.
This was a main component of the Marxist hoodoo that attached itself
to architecture after 1945: in order to be good, it had to shock and
appall the bourgeoisie. That's us, normal educated people. When you
say that normal people know that this is bad, they're reacting
appropriately to buildings designed to shock them and injure their
sensibilities. You're seeing buildings designed to shock, and it's
still going on. Every seven or eight years it gets a new name, from
"modernism" to "post-modernism" to "deconstructionism."
Q - What about strip malls? Those don't shock and appall people.
One of the other strange unforeseen consequences of the modernist
movement was that it gave corporate America an excuse to build cheap
and ugly buildings. When ornament has been outlawed and is deemed
incorrect, you can just put up boxes. The more utilitarian the box,
the less money you'll put into it. If you go back to a different
culture, the Beaux Arts period in America a hundred years ago, even
a businessman would be persecuted for putting up a building that
wasn't attractive. Look at any business building put up in 1905: a
beautiful building, beautifully decorated and proportioned. Even the
fire houses. But it was all thrown in the garbage in the post-war
years.
Q - You recently visited Savannah, Georgia. What did you think of
it?
It's an incredibly beautiful place. Savannah is like being on
another planet that vaguely has US characteristics, but you're not
on the same earth. It's freaky.
The historic district comprises most of the city, not just three
blocks [as in other cities], and people still live there. That's
very important. Contrary to what the "diversity rainbow" people say,
you need gentrification. You need wealthy people downtown, and
Savannah has that.
One of the beneficial products of the South being depressed for a
hundred years is that they were so depressed until the 60s and 70s
that they couldn't afford to throw away their old civic buildings,
like we did in the Midwest, where the economy was more robust in the
50s and 60s. A lot of older Southern architecture was preserved,
like in the Garden District and the French Quarter in New Orleans.
By the 50s, people got the notion that maybe we should buy it and
fix it up. That was the first wave of preservationists, which was
then institutionalized as "historic preservation" starting in the
60s and 70s.
Q - What do you think of New York City?
I grew up in New York. It's an amazing place. As a kid, all I wanted
was to go bass fishing and go on dates with girls named Alice. The
girls I went out with in New York didn't have vowels in their names.
Going back to New York City now, it's thrilling. You can look up at
any block and see some wonderful building from 1907, anywhere
downtown. Not to mention the people. The hardware and the software
are great, and it's a great city. But a lot of the post-war
architecture has no soul. The fact is, buildings built in the 60s
all look like demoralizing packing crates.
Q - In contrast to New York or downtown Savannah, how would you
describe the American suburban experience? You called it "the
geography of nowhere" in your book by the same name.
Most of the nation is sleepwalking about this. There are a few
people who are dimly aware, and there are others who are distressed
their whole lives about the environments they live in. They
dreadfully lack validation for their feelings, because these
environments become the norm. Suburbia is normal for most Americans,
and they think there's nothing wrong with it.
Q - What about the New Urbanists? Do you support their efforts to
reinvent the suburb?
Yes. The New Urbanists came along in early 90s, some from
alternative energy world, having gone through the trauma of 70s oil
crisis. They began to understand that it wasn't a matter of houses
being properly solarized, but rather that the communities s-cked.
Some were architects and scholars, and they began to discover there
was this buried lost culture of urban design that America had thrown
in the garbage, and it was there to be referenced and restored.
They went to the dumpster, got the rules and regs, and started
poring over them. The reason that these skills had developed over
five thousand years of history was that they were based on trial and
error, and the circumstances and conditions were time-tested and
successful. Like why you'd want a courtyard house in hot climate -
there are technical reasons for that. Or why it's important for a
building to meet sidewalk in a certain way, and why it's not a good
idea to put juniper shrubs between a store and the sidewalk.
They re-discovered all this stuff. Information about typology. Why
different types of buildings are appropriate in specific kinds of
places. Why it's not a good idea to put a bank building, which looks
like a southern plantation, in the most important part of your
downtown. It's a rural building, and putting it into an urban
setting doesn't behave right.
The New Urbanists are applying this knowledge in a hybrid way,
understanding that they're working within a market with certain
expectations. Bankers have to be retrained to make loans for real
estate ventures that don't fit into templates that they understand -
strip malls and subdivisions. Home builders have to be retrained to
put out a product different from packing crates with vinyl siding.
Planning officials have to be retrained to recognize that the
suburban development pattern is tremendously destructive, and that
there's a better way of doing things. We don't know how to do it.
Municipalities relinquished their authority in the 60s and gave it
to the developers, and highway engineers, who then made decisions
about things they didn't understand.
Q - What about a sense of history in these New Urbanist suburbs?
They don't seem to have any.
In order to have that feeling of oldness, you have to be old. You
can't have that if you were built four years ago. It's not a valid
criticism that a place doesn't feel old.
Q - What do you think about Starbucks? A lot of people feel that a
chain like Starbucks can dilute the unique feel of their community.
Starbucks does what it does pretty well. But it's not hard to run a
coffee shop and make it attractive. In the small town where I live,
we have a Starbucks, but also a locally owned shop that's probably
more popular. This local guy is competing on a quality basis with a
chain and he's doing just as well.
Starbucks provides something very simple, in short supply: agreeable
public space. They provide a nice place for you to hang out, and you
pay an excessive to ridiculously high price for their coffee
product, for occupying space in their business. You pay $3.50 for
their stupid coffee concoction, but you stay at their table for an
hour and a half. There are so few places that Americans can go,
especially real public space, not a mall, so little real public
space, that if you put in this artificial substitute, it's wildly
successful. Starbucks is selling a public gathering place. Coffee is
the enabling mechanism.
- - -
Links:
Jim Kunstler's home page: kunstler.com
Kunstler's "The City in Mind" at Amazon
One of the better-known New Urbanist suburbs is I'on, near
Charleston, South Carolina. (The site also has a good reading list.)
The New York Times Magazine just covered a bunch of new architecture
in a special feature called Tomorrowland.
Be sure to read Big Sponge on Campus, about MIT's newest and (in
my opinion) ugliest dorm, which predictably is winning architecture
awards.
- - -
Get Good Experience by e-mail: update@goodexperience.com
- - -
Come to the conference! Good Experience Live, Friday, April 30, 2004 in New York City.
Back to Good Experience
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Get e-mail updates of goodexperience.com: e-mail update@goodexperience.com
Copyright 1999-2003, Good Experience, Inc.
