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For book club, after extensive suggesting from a regular, we decided to read James Howard Kunstler’s The Geography of Nowhere, a book about suburban sprawl, and specifically about how cars have ruined the geography of American life, leaving us a nation full of un-walkable, car-centric residential tracts full of ugly buildings that isolate us from our neighbors. It’s got a very old man rant vibe, but frankly, I agree with enough of the old man ranting that I’m pretty happy to go along with it (except for side-eyeing a couple of invocations about “traditional values”), plus I got to learn things about architecture and urban planning that allow me to be more informed-ly judgmental when I’m going around towns looking at people’s houses, which is an activity I like very much (see also: McMansion Hell).
This book was written in 1993 and thus some parts of it are pretty dated, but it makes a great perspective on 1993. The Big Dig had barely started; the North End was still choked off from the rest of Boston. White flight had left our major cities as the most undesirable real estate in the country, before rich people decided to “fix” them in the most unaffordable ways. The train meme group on Facebook (you know the one I’m talking about) didn’t exist yet (neither did Facebook). It’s easy to look back on in from 30 years later and be like “The ‘90s were a bleak time, man,” but frankly most of the postwar infrastructure and bad architectural trends are still with us, at least in a lot of the country, and some of them have even metastasized into worse things (see again: the properties profiled on McMansion Hell), while in other areas of public life, some corrections have been made. This book also gave me many thoughts on evaluating five-over-ones (or, as I call them, cappy blocks), and the ways they are following some of Kunstler’s recommendations but not others.
The absolute high point of the judgmental rantiness of this book was the savaging of Le Corbusier, which doesn’t go quite into the same depth as the takedown in Seeing Like a State, mainly for reasons of length (The Geography of Nowhere is a much shorter book, clocking in at a compact 250 pages), but is nonetheless extremely satisfying. In a book that’s largely about wide social trends–like how our entire postwar society was built on cheap oil and being the only country left that wasn’t economically wrecked–it’s nice to have some individual villains we can point to. Robert Moses is also named and eviscerated as a bad guy, which is fun because for all the cranky-old-man-thirty-years-ago vibes of this book, hating on Robert Moses has become quite fashionable amongst the young’uns struggling to make rent in the city (I believe Mr. Moses is also the big bad in one of Dimension 20’s campaigns, but I haven’t watched that one yet). It seems a little weird that Jane Jacobs is never mentioned, given that she is apparently Robert Moses’ most high-profile ideological enemy, even though Kunstler is unapologetically a Town Guy and not a City Guy (personally, I’m a city bitch, even though I moved to the kind of small city that to me feels like a town).
My actual biggest criticism of this book is that I think it could have used some photos. Preferably lots of photos. I spent a good chunk of time looking up buildings and stuff on my phone, which then meant I was on my phone, and when I read I would rather minimize the amount of time I spend on my phone (and I have enough trouble with that already). It’s one thing to look up words I don’t know or whatever, but I generally think books about art, architecture, aesthetics, and other such visuals ought to provide at least some of the visuals so that the reader can follow along more easily. That said, I looked up the Fagus Werk and I do in fact hate it; I went to a school that actually was built to be easily converted into a shoe factory if the whole school thing flopped, but because it was built in 1889 it doesn’t look nearly as factorylike. Anyway, I *did* like that Kunstler specifically called out the bullshit moralizing of the Modernists and post-Modernists, and their over-reliance on political narrative to silence the aesthetic observation that some of these buildings are fugly. (I have fairly trad aesthetic tastes and I’m a little oversensitive to any implication that objecting to our corporate overlords’ Apple-store-ification of everything is somehow politically regressive. Sometimes, new things are also bad!)
Anyway, I think we’re going to have a real rich conversation about places we’ve lived, and what we did and didn’t like about them, and how to fix cities and towns, and how little of the U.S. I have actually seen, and Things My Next House Will Have (a front porch, mainly). I’m looking forward to it!
This book was written in 1993 and thus some parts of it are pretty dated, but it makes a great perspective on 1993. The Big Dig had barely started; the North End was still choked off from the rest of Boston. White flight had left our major cities as the most undesirable real estate in the country, before rich people decided to “fix” them in the most unaffordable ways. The train meme group on Facebook (you know the one I’m talking about) didn’t exist yet (neither did Facebook). It’s easy to look back on in from 30 years later and be like “The ‘90s were a bleak time, man,” but frankly most of the postwar infrastructure and bad architectural trends are still with us, at least in a lot of the country, and some of them have even metastasized into worse things (see again: the properties profiled on McMansion Hell), while in other areas of public life, some corrections have been made. This book also gave me many thoughts on evaluating five-over-ones (or, as I call them, cappy blocks), and the ways they are following some of Kunstler’s recommendations but not others.
The absolute high point of the judgmental rantiness of this book was the savaging of Le Corbusier, which doesn’t go quite into the same depth as the takedown in Seeing Like a State, mainly for reasons of length (The Geography of Nowhere is a much shorter book, clocking in at a compact 250 pages), but is nonetheless extremely satisfying. In a book that’s largely about wide social trends–like how our entire postwar society was built on cheap oil and being the only country left that wasn’t economically wrecked–it’s nice to have some individual villains we can point to. Robert Moses is also named and eviscerated as a bad guy, which is fun because for all the cranky-old-man-thirty-years-ago vibes of this book, hating on Robert Moses has become quite fashionable amongst the young’uns struggling to make rent in the city (I believe Mr. Moses is also the big bad in one of Dimension 20’s campaigns, but I haven’t watched that one yet). It seems a little weird that Jane Jacobs is never mentioned, given that she is apparently Robert Moses’ most high-profile ideological enemy, even though Kunstler is unapologetically a Town Guy and not a City Guy (personally, I’m a city bitch, even though I moved to the kind of small city that to me feels like a town).
My actual biggest criticism of this book is that I think it could have used some photos. Preferably lots of photos. I spent a good chunk of time looking up buildings and stuff on my phone, which then meant I was on my phone, and when I read I would rather minimize the amount of time I spend on my phone (and I have enough trouble with that already). It’s one thing to look up words I don’t know or whatever, but I generally think books about art, architecture, aesthetics, and other such visuals ought to provide at least some of the visuals so that the reader can follow along more easily. That said, I looked up the Fagus Werk and I do in fact hate it; I went to a school that actually was built to be easily converted into a shoe factory if the whole school thing flopped, but because it was built in 1889 it doesn’t look nearly as factorylike. Anyway, I *did* like that Kunstler specifically called out the bullshit moralizing of the Modernists and post-Modernists, and their over-reliance on political narrative to silence the aesthetic observation that some of these buildings are fugly. (I have fairly trad aesthetic tastes and I’m a little oversensitive to any implication that objecting to our corporate overlords’ Apple-store-ification of everything is somehow politically regressive. Sometimes, new things are also bad!)
Anyway, I think we’re going to have a real rich conversation about places we’ve lived, and what we did and didn’t like about them, and how to fix cities and towns, and how little of the U.S. I have actually seen, and Things My Next House Will Have (a front porch, mainly). I’m looking forward to it!