jordanb said:
Could somebody post the text? Kunstler's site is blocked by my office's web filter. 
the words of K:
November 12, 2003
The condition of Midwestern cities never fails to astound me. This time, an endowed lecture by the Johnson's Wax company took me to Racine, Wisconsin, about 20 miles south of Milwaukee on Lake Michigan. The town looked like a provincial Soviet backwater as imagined by cartoonist R. Crumb. Outside of a miniscule historic district where a few grand old 19th century mansions stood on a bluff above the lakeshore, there was hardly a single object or building in the town that was not aggressively hidious. The newest buildings were among the worst.
My hotel was a case in point. The six year old Radisson had been built down by the lakeshore on filled land next to a marina. It was tucked behind a gigantic parking structure and the street approach to the main entrance took you right past the hotel dumpster and an electric company switching box the size of an SUV. The hotel itself was a jive-plastic packing crate in the spirit of a hypertrophied McMansion, complete with vinyl siding. To get to the hotel restaurant from the lobby, you literally had to pass through the laundry room annex. And once inside the restaurant, to get from the dining room to the bar you had to go through the waiter's pantry. I'm not kidding. This is how things are done in the Midwest.
The landscape itself, apart from the grandeur of the lake, is rather flat, bleak and featureless. But there was a tiny remnant of the old farming economy and its obsolete accessories visible around the outskirts, and you tell from seeing the old farms that the problem out there was not the landscape. The problem is the things that the locals have built there throughout the 20th century and particularly after World War Two. I think the following explanation works:
After the war, the US economy was the only advanced industrial one in the world that was wholly intact and financially solvent. Europe was a mess. Germany was flattened. Even the victors, Britain and France, were virtually bankrupt. And Russia, of course, was on a socioeconomic planet of its own (not a very nice one). America's industrial base was all there, humming away, ready to be reprogrammed from munitions, bombers, and tanks to consumer goods. This was promptly accomplished and places like Racine, Wisconsin, benefited hugely. We could sell anything we made to the other people of the world and even lend them money to buy it.
In particular, the American working class benefited. The 1950s and 60s saw factory workers rise from their former lumpenprole status to an amazing level of middle class prosperity, and in vast numbers. Their reward for winning the war was the American Dream of a single family house in the suburbs and as many cars as they could ever want. Cheap gasoline sealed the deal. So, what you see in a place like Racine is a landscape filled with little industrial box dwellings for a class of people who had no previous experience with things valued by any criteria besides industrial efficiency, and the things they built for themselves show it. They had a positive genius for ugly houses and they were diabolically inventive in finding endless variations for expressing industrial efficiency.
As the 1970s and 80s came along, they further accessorized their world with all the hyper-car-oriented commercial infrastucture intended to replace their existing downtown -- the strip malls, the fry-pits, the stand-alone mega-stores, and all the other entropic architectural garbage of the time. The old center of town was left to rot. It was never very nice to begin with by world standards but they managed to make it downright pitiful. Then in the 1990s, with globalization and the final surge to the global oil production peak, Racine began to shrivel and sink from the orgy of industrial outsourcing.
The Johnson company still remains. They've dominated the town the way the Bolsheviks dominated Bellarus for generations. They have a company headquarters designed by the great Midwestern hater of cities, Frank Lloyd Wright, and naturally it was done in the form of a suburban "campus," which is to say a development pattern that will not have much of a future. It's no worse than any other suburban office "complex" but it isn't any better either. Otherwise, the Johnson's mark on the city is remarkably paltry. They built a new downtown Main Street building recently -- designed by the "green building" guru Bill McDonough, a green glass and steel monstrosity that is no doubt highly energy efficient (efficiency once again exalted beyond all other values). But it appears to not contain any ground floor retail. The locals insisted there was a store and a restaurant inside, but there was no signage to indicate it -- perhaps signage is too vulgar for the "green" spirit.
I gave my lecture on civic design in an auditorium that had been the Johnson's Wax pavilion at the 1964 World's Fair -- and which was afterward taken apart and shipped back to company headquarters. It looked like one of the flying saucers from the old science fiction flick The Day the Earth Stood Still. The audience was mostly middle-aged and older. I suppose they were the very people who acquiesced in the destruction of their town. I was hard on them. They were suffering, like other people all over the country, from living in punishing and hideous environments. But it was my sad duty to tell them that they were entirely responsible for creating them, that it was their own low standards and incapicity to value anything beyond efficiency that had left Racine in its current miserable condition.
After my talk, a middle-aged guy came up to argue with me that we will never in the conceivable future live without the benefit of automobiles, and generally on the same mass basis as today. He was aflame with hopes for the fuel cell and the promised hydrogen economy. I politely disagreed with him but he was one of these pests who turn up at a lecture who just want to harrass you like a mad dog.
I feel bad about places like Racine and the people who live there. They are completely unprepared for the future. They seem to believe, with the faith of little children, that the world as we know it today will go on forever. A tragic view of the human condition is beyond their powers to imagine -- and that is precisely what will cause things to end tragically for them
