College WritingSelf, Society & Sustainability

The Built Environment & Sustainability

American Space – The Geography of Nowhere

Taster Video

James Howard Kunstler

“Eighty percent of everything ever built in America has been built in the last fifty years, and most of it is depressing, brutal, ugly, unhealthy and spiritually degrading” (Kunstler, p 10).

American Space – The Geography of Nowhere

• “The identification of this extreme individualism of property ownership with all that is sacred in American life has been the source of many of the problems I shall describe in the pages that follow. Above all, it tends to degrade the idea of the public realm….” (Kunstler, pp 26-7)

Life on the Gridiron

• “The grid was primarily concerned with the squares of private property that lay within the gradient, not with gradients themselves, or how the two related with one another. This dictated a way of thinking about the community in which private property was everything….” (Kunstler, p 30)

Aerial view of Philadelphia

Aerial view of Queens, NY

Aerial view of suburban Washington, DC

Eden Updated – Llewelyn Park (started, 1858)

Yesterday’s Tomorrow – Modernist Architecture

German, Walter Gropius buildingSwiss, Le Corbusier apartments Marseille

American, Louis Sullivan buildingWalter Gropius Le Corbusier

‘Box-like’ steel and glass-clad monoliths

Suburbia – Late 20th Century

• “There was a reason that suburbs like Riverside didn’t develop proper civic centres: they were not properly speaking civic places. That is, they were not towns. They were real estate ventures lent an aura of permanence by way of historical architecture and picturesque landscaping. They had not developed organically over time….” (Kunstler, p 51)

• “The result of Modernism, especially in America, is a crisis of the human habitat: cities ruined by corporate gigantism and abstract renewal schemes, public buildings and public spaces unworthy of human affection….” (Kunstler, p 59)

The new Boston Municipal Court Building

Joyride – The Cult of the Automobile

“The cities, of course, when completely to hell. The superhighways not only drained them of their few remaining taxpaying residents, but in many ways the new beltways became physical barriers, ‘Chinese walls’ sealing off the disintegrating cities from their dynamic outlands. Those left behind the wall would develop, in their physical isolation from the suburban economy, a pathological ghetto culture.” (p 107)

POINTS FOR DISCUSSION

1. Do you think that Kunstler is overly pessimistic and negative in his view of the lived (especially urban/suburban) environment in the US? Is it really a place so ugly and dispiriting that it is not worth caring about?

POINTS FOR DISCUSSION

2. Kunstler is eager to point out the ‘degradation’ of civic space by architectural and technological development; what, in your opinion, could help to ‘revitalise’ and give new, social and civic meaning to public spaces in a city environment? Consider your experience both in your home city and in Dublin.

POINTS FOR DISCUSSION

3. Do you think that Kunstler is too subjective, too emotional, too nostalgic, in his preference for an idealized ‘town’ environment?

POINTS FOR DISCUSSION

4. Having read / listened to just a few short excerpts from Kunstler’s book, what adjective would you give to describe the tone of his writing? Do you find his tone engaging? Offputting? Balanced? Persuasive? We’ll look in more detail at this issue in part two of the class…..