Tom Beard (kindler, gentler local Kunstler) arguing well about sprawl
… and holding forth on the pods
Just before I head up to Te Awamutu to attend Jackson & Freida’s wedding, here are some paragraphs which struck me, from Kunstler’s The Geography of Nowhere:
On the other side of Monroe Muffler, heading deeper into town on South Broadway, is a small realtor’s office ensconced in what appears to be a minature New England church, complete with steeple. The whole structure is about the size of a detached garage. It is a holdover from the period between the two World Wars when it was the fashion to put roadside businesses in cartoon-like buildings: gas stations that looked like mosques and log cabins, motels like windmills, lunchrooms shaped like hot dogs, hats, bulldogs, igloos.
The little white church functions as a sign as well as a minature office building. In symbolic shorthand it says, “We sell traditional real estate here! We sell the coherence and stability, the enduring community, of traditional New England town life!” Saratoga is not a tradiotional New England town and never was. At the present time, Saratoga is the remnant of a Victorian gambling resort overlayed by an urban sprawlscape, with all the disconnectedness and loss of traditional values that implies.
Why should this matter? Why not just accept the little fake church as a playful, harmless, adorable architectural oddity, as the lovers of kitsch do? Because it’s a bad building, cheaply cute, out-of-scale, symbolically false, and stuck in the middle of a parking lot, a little noplace that contributes to the greater noplace. Because if the town had not been degraded by other bad buildings and bad design relationships, there would be no need for its mendacious symbolism, which cheapens the town just a little more.
I don’t even know what mendacious means, but it sounds wicked!