This book was an interesting take on the architecture of the US. He states that 80% of American structures were built in the last 50 years, and those consist of the most depressing and uninteresting buildings. I can relate to that for sure. In the city of Champaign, I am surrounded by bland and poorly constructed apartment complexes that, even though they must have been constructed not 20 years ago, look dilapidated and grimy. In contrast, I live in a house that was transformed into a girls cooperative house around 40-50 years ago. The original wood molding surrounding the walls is a style that has been lost for awhile. In addition, the large wooden window frames and unevenly stuccoed walls add a character that cannot be found in modern buildings. Indeed, the vast majority of buildings today simply do not have the character and design that the house I inhabit does.
Kunstler began with a journey back in time to when Europeans first reached the shores of the US as Puritans. The idea that a god had given them the land allowed them justification for all the negative actions that they inflicted on the animals, plants, landscape and even people of this "new world". For the purposes of the book, he skipped some of that and discussed, instead, the national grid system that divided up land into townships and individual farm plots. In addition, industrialization and the introduction of factories, slaughterhouses, and lack of sanitary systems created a city environment fraught with diseases and crumbling structures of all kinds (family, moral, buildings, etc.) Therefore, people began to live in intermediary places, between the city and rural communities, in areas soon to be labeled "suburbs". When I discuss the class system present, but mostly ignored, in the US, I remind students that most of them are products of rich suburban families. They don't understand what it was like to be raised in the country, where the nearest town was about 30 minutes drive from your house. Nor do they understand what it is like to live in the city, where schools have intensive metal detector systems and children learn to not go to the bathroom for fear of being stabbed, raped or worse by the delinquents that hide out there. The privileges that they take for granted every day, including being able to attend the UIUC, should be better acknowledged.
Parks in the city were designed for a glimpse of country life in the midst of bleak buildings and smog. In fact, recent studies have determined that this type of "green space" really does raise moral among people that are faced with the bleakness of the projects or poor housing in the city environment. Part of the bleakness originally resulted from a lack of zoning, which allowed factories to go up next to a residential district. Other parts of this bleakness include modern American architectural styles, high-rise buildings, and race politics, which included allowing certain people, but not others, to escape this bleak city life and move to the suburbs.
Other damaging effects of the modern life include the shift from agriculture to agribusiness, which leaves little room for the cultural knowledge that used to get passed down through generations. I attended an archaeology meeting last month, which included graduate students that study historical archaeology (or archaeology since the 1800s). They wanted to promote this branch of archaeology by bringing a milk goat to the quad and making butter from her milk. It surprised me that I ended up being the only one who knew anything about taking care of goats, much less how to milk one. This form of cultural knowledge, lost even to those who study these topics, is appalling.
In addition to losing shared cultural knowledge, we are losing shared interactions. Cars have created a supposed "need" to drive everywhere we go. It is considered a right of everyone to own a vehicle and drive it to every destination. The buses are seen as vehicles for the poor members of society who don't like to take regular showers, so why should we have to share a space with them when we can drive our own vehicle that will play our own music and allow us to forget about other members of society other than our own social class? In addition to taking away a broader view of society, today's shopping structure has no shared sacred spaces or shared experiences. There are no community markets in the US, and there are no unifying buildings that people flock to. Especially as we turn to an online world where products can be shipped to your doorway without you ever having to see the seller or even the delivery man, the world is closing itself off to human interactions. I further appreciated the estimate, given in the book, that for people who commute one hour each way to work, they spend 7 weeks of their year sitting in a car.
I appreciated the acknowledgement of the downfalls of modern advertising. I did an undergraduate research project on advertising for a history professor that I worked for. It was amazing to me that all the products we "need" are actually constructions of the advertisers of the western culture.
Kunstler examined different cities around the US, and their handling of architecture and space. Los Angeles probably got his worst critique. Because my boyfriend moved there, I have visited this "damned" city full of freeways and lacking good mass transit system. Indeed, it has boxy, cheap, flimsy, commercial architecture centered around a commuting mindset with a resulting bad air pollution. My boyfriend rents a house near enough to his work that he can bike there, which sometimes has negative consequences. As one of the only bikers on the road, people seldom pay attention to him, and late last year he was hit by a motorist that forgot to look before surging forward. Detroit also got scorn from Kunstler for being a city full of race politics and having an extreme loss of momentum and moral after the car industry took a turn for the worst. Finally, Portland (home of the fabled "Portlandia") was seen as the ideal city in the US, with good shopping districts, bike-friendly roads, water fountains and parks, and an environmental focus.
Kunstler concluded the book discussing Disney World, which he really hated, and potential fixes for the mess we have made of communities and buildings in the US. He concluded that we need to rebuild communities and create buildings centered around people and not cars.
No comments:
Post a Comment