Randolph,
Kunstler's skill at dramatizing environmental disputes is
admirable, and you're right in finding more ethical and
aesthetic substance -- abrasive critique -- in Georgraphy
than in Home.
Kunstler wrote like an outsider in Geography, got attention and
an invitation to come inside, and succumbed to the temptation in
Home. He has retreated from being a challenger to being a
hustler, as he simpers at the end of Home.
Now, granted, the same thing usually happens with getting tenure,
with making partner, with becoming "award-winning," with losing
an edge, with believing purchased publicity's slick brochures and
judgments of history -- hah, the smell of shit termed perfume.
It is this adoption of a too narrow definition of architecture,
as Kunstler does in Home and as do other successful popularizers
of architecture in the academy and in journalism, that annoys me,
for it shows once again that architectural canon -- cant like
"world class" and "serious" and heirarchicism -- of any sort is a
constricting lens that diminishes perception of the wider
richness and diversity of the unmediated, erractically constructed
world.
This cant suffuses "property development" architecture, the
language of historical periods, styles, movements, schools,
fame. Read any regularly published architectural critic and
you'll read property development promotion of the Times
in disguise. That's why the Real Estate secton of newspapers
is carefully separated from Arts and Style -- don't be so
obvious.
Architectural historians, critics, intellectuals, journalists,
and professors are complicit in this desktop version of
architecture which lives primarily in books, photographs, slides,
magazines, television, computers, brochures, posters, It is
promoted, protected and projected in libraries, museums, design
studios, lecture halls, parties and, most importantly, in real
estate advertisements and salesrooms.
There is a long history of close ties between the Vasaris and
the Property Developers. Most architectural history is a
sophisticated brochure for the parallel property market, as
revealed by the sponsors of the tomes, now as before the
institutions which nuture the research and promotion -- and,
as Michael Kaplan and others note, cloak the source of funds.
So when Kunstler moves from stringent critique to well-paid
promotion, his work stinks of unstirred mental rancidity, the
mind odor that suffuses the cravenly ensconced who do not have
to sweat the future -- or so they pray to and supplicate before
their superiors.
Not that he's any different from architects and designers and
property developers and the rest of us when we gaze at the black
hole of failure in our dreams and squat-holes.
So, for architectural critique I say it's far better to take a
walk and clamber about what's outside, full scale Geographies of
Nowhere and scarily incomprehensible, than gobble the desktop
simulations of critics and scholars safe at Home with Martha
Stewart.
Kunstler's skill at dramatizing environmental disputes is
admirable, and you're right in finding more ethical and
aesthetic substance -- abrasive critique -- in Georgraphy
than in Home.
Kunstler wrote like an outsider in Geography, got attention and
an invitation to come inside, and succumbed to the temptation in
Home. He has retreated from being a challenger to being a
hustler, as he simpers at the end of Home.
Now, granted, the same thing usually happens with getting tenure,
with making partner, with becoming "award-winning," with losing
an edge, with believing purchased publicity's slick brochures and
judgments of history -- hah, the smell of shit termed perfume.
It is this adoption of a too narrow definition of architecture,
as Kunstler does in Home and as do other successful popularizers
of architecture in the academy and in journalism, that annoys me,
for it shows once again that architectural canon -- cant like
"world class" and "serious" and heirarchicism -- of any sort is a
constricting lens that diminishes perception of the wider
richness and diversity of the unmediated, erractically constructed
world.
This cant suffuses "property development" architecture, the
language of historical periods, styles, movements, schools,
fame. Read any regularly published architectural critic and
you'll read property development promotion of the Times
in disguise. That's why the Real Estate secton of newspapers
is carefully separated from Arts and Style -- don't be so
obvious.
Architectural historians, critics, intellectuals, journalists,
and professors are complicit in this desktop version of
architecture which lives primarily in books, photographs, slides,
magazines, television, computers, brochures, posters, It is
promoted, protected and projected in libraries, museums, design
studios, lecture halls, parties and, most importantly, in real
estate advertisements and salesrooms.
There is a long history of close ties between the Vasaris and
the Property Developers. Most architectural history is a
sophisticated brochure for the parallel property market, as
revealed by the sponsors of the tomes, now as before the
institutions which nuture the research and promotion -- and,
as Michael Kaplan and others note, cloak the source of funds.
So when Kunstler moves from stringent critique to well-paid
promotion, his work stinks of unstirred mental rancidity, the
mind odor that suffuses the cravenly ensconced who do not have
to sweat the future -- or so they pray to and supplicate before
their superiors.
Not that he's any different from architects and designers and
property developers and the rest of us when we gaze at the black
hole of failure in our dreams and squat-holes.
So, for architectural critique I say it's far better to take a
walk and clamber about what's outside, full scale Geographies of
Nowhere and scarily incomprehensible, than gobble the desktop
simulations of critics and scholars safe at Home with Martha
Stewart.