A friend of mine came up with the term “award-winning architecture” to describe the worst, most intellectual bits of modernism that blight our national landscape. He called them that because you can be certain that the worse they are, the more honored they had been by an intellectual elite completely out of touch with humanity (how we need more Dostoevskies, smart humanists to chastize the excesses of the money-slave intellectuals). On my trip down through the South I found plenty of these spaces now going to rot, malls that have been shuttered and will clearly never reopen.
Take a listen to James Howard Kunstler dissecting this phenomenon. Is he wrong at all? The whole lecture is worth listening to (about 20 min.), as it is, among other things, very funny. And at the end of it, you’ll have a sense of what you can do about it (like participate, yourself, in the vitality of places like New Orleans worth living in).
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