Compost Nation

April 30, 2000
    At the urging of an editor, I took an anecdote out of my 1993 book, The Geography of Nowhere. It concerned my visit to interview the husband-and-wife "star" architects (starchitects, we now say) Robert Venturi and Denise Scott-Brown. I was in the early information-gathering stage of the book and was unsure which authorities in this-our-nation-under-God might help me understand why America had become such a nightmarish panorama of highway strips and cartoon housing subdivisions. I really wanted to know.

     I knew a tiny bit about Venturi and Scott Brown. They had put out a trendy monograph in 1972 titled Learning From Las Vegas that had earned them much esteem on the campuses as architectural metaphysicians. It purported to inform America that the highway strip was here to stay, that it was the new Main Street USA, they said, and that it was pretty much okay. Venturi, solo, was the author of previous book (Complexity and Contradiction) that pretended to thumb its nose at Modernist orthodoxy. So, I figured that a talk with these birds might, at least, begin to shed some light on my subject.

     It was a very bad day in the Venturi / Scott Brown office in Philadelphia when I showed up, representing The New York Times Sunday Magazine (for whom I was also cooking up an article along these lines). Not bad because of me, necessarily, but because a bunch of "suits" from the Walt Disney Corporation had dropped in earlier that morning unannounced ( ! ) -- one of the little tricks that Disney liked to pull on its subcontractors. Some months earlier, Venturi and Scott Brown's office had been hired to design the grand monumental entrance boulevard to Euro-Disney, and now the Seven Dwarfs in neckties were in the office all of a sudden to see how the work was coming. Oy vey.

     So it was hardly me that they were disturbed about, really, but I had complicated matters by showing up, and I suppose they felt they had to take a writer from the NY Times Magazine seriously because they liked getting into its pages -- being very shrewd self-publicists. The upshot was that Venturi and Scott Brown were running split shifts between me in a conference room downstairs, and the Seven Dwarfs up on the production floor of the 80-person architectural office. And I was kind of maundering through a laundry list of questions that I'd cobbled together to get their opinion on how come America was so, well, so fucking ugly, to put it as unceremoniously as possible. Venturi, a teddy-bear of a man, would kind of blink at me and try to explain that architecture was no longer about heroic, self-aggrandizing monuments but about the tastes and values of the masses. . . and then he'd roll his eyes and scoot out of the room and go try to mollify the Seven Dwarfs. Scott Brown would then come in and attempt to entertain my pain-in-the-ass questions, but her irritation mounted visibly as the minutes ticked by, and finally she exploded at me, hollering, "If this country isn't tidy enough for you, move to Switzerland!"

     Incidentally, that's not the part of the anecdote that the editor considered "unkind." I will save that part for some other blog or memoir. But it brings me to my theme for today, which is how I traveled yesterday to Saratoga's neighboring town to south, Ballston Spa (the county seat), one of a hundred decrepitating little Main Street burgs in upstate New York, and how it seemed to be visibly rotting into the ground to an extent that even I, after decades of laborious landscape pathology studies, found rather shocking.

     Spring comes late up here. I was down in Georgia back in February and the daffodils there were already gone by, for goodness sake. But up here, they had barely sprouted as of the last week in April. The landscape (and townscape) had a horrible sort of laid bare look -- like an old person in the intensive care unit getting a sponge bath in bed. The ground itself looked scrofulous, with vast quantities of plastic flotsam littering the roadside swales, and tatters of windblown plastic supermarket bags hanging off the sumac bushes, and no foliage yet to hide any of it.

     But it was the buildings that really got me. You have to wonder: have Americans forgotten how to build dignified houses, or are we simply not dignified people anymore? Virtually every building put up after 1950 looked terrible and many of them were rotting into the ground. Most of them are little more than elaborate packing crates with a few doo-dads screwed on -- exactly the kind of buildings, by the way, that Venturi and Scott Brown celebrated in their writings. They called them "decorated sheds," the vernacular expression of the mainstream American soul.

      The design failures of these things might be attributed to a loss of knowledge and a lack of attention to details, but I think a deeper explanation has to do with the diminishing returns of technology. We've never had more awesome power tools for workers in the building trades. We have compound miter saws, electric spline joiners, laser-guided tape measures, and many other nifty innovations, and we've never seen, in the aggregate, worse work done by so many carpenters. For most of them, apparently, getting a plain one-by-four door-surround to meet at a 45-degree miter without a quarter-inch gap is asking too much. In other words, we now have amazing tools and no skill. What you wonder is whether the latter is a function of the former. Is the work so bad because we expect the tools to have all the skill?

     Another issue is the choice of materials. As you march down the decades from the 1950s, the materials-of-choice for finishing the exterior are more and more materials not found in nature. Aluminum siding was a big favorite for a while -- and you can always spot it because of the dents below the three-foot high level, where the lawnmower has shot stones at the panels for decades. After the 1980s, there is a distinct acceleration in the use of vinyl for practically everything. The vinyl clapboards, soffits, window-surrounds, et cetera, are often little more than stapled onto the house. And naturally they begin to sag and pull apart instantly. After twenty-odd years of that you end up with a house that looks like a birthday present wrapped by a five-year-old.

     Another thing you get is a fantastic accumulation of automobile exhaust in the zone starting about four feet under the eves. The pathetic slobs who live in these buildings never wash this patina of grime off their houses -- because the vinyl cladding was sold to them as being "maintenance-free."

     At this time of year, before the shrubs leaf out, you can see that each house is surrounded by an asteroid belt of discarded effluvia -- plastic children's toys, broken appliances, odds-and-ends of sporting equipment, all oxidizing, polymerizing, and delaminating under the remorseless ultraviolet light. Likewise, the things that have come to be attached to the houses -- the entrance porticoes and decks built out of chemicalized lumber (which has not been painted in twenty-seven years) -- these things are also, finally, coming apart, torquing out of plumb, disintegrating, in short yielding to all the disordering forces of entropy.

     Paradoxically, the buildings which tend to be in better condition are the historic ones, the ones built before modular-snap-together materials existed, the ones made of materials found in nature, the ones built with non-electric hand tools. They manage to resist the natural ravages of time. Their roofs were designed to bear snow loads and to shed water in a way that protected the rest of the structure. The materials never promised to be maintenance-free, so the owners and caretakers naturally perform the required routine repairs. They stand there as reminders that our notion of progress-through-technology is a slippery thing.

     Poor little Ballston Spa. The whole town is rotting into the ground and the folks who live there are either too poor, too addled on methadrine, too busy buying plasma TVs, too greedy strip-mining their buildings for Section-8 rentals, or too conditioned by failure and disappointment to take care of their property. It's a self-reinforcing feedback loop, of course, and it's happening all over the nation. We've succeeded in building too many things that aren't worth caring about, and the end result is that we now live in a land where nothing is taken care of.

Comments

[asoka]

So, in Switzerland, they have overcome entropy, things don't disintegrate there? The buildings are forever the same? Boring.

Change is inevitable... it is exciting to watch the disintegration of the landscape. Roll with it.

[greenbeans]

Ah yes, Home Sweet Home! I love it when you describe my stomping ground and you nailed it... with a little artistic license.

[Kickaha]

I live in a century-old house that I bought ten years ago. I originally had thought that I would fix it up a bit, sell it after five years, and move on to something bigger.

But I'm finding lots of advantages to the place that I hadn't anticipated, and now I don't want to leave. I'm especially happy that the high ceilings and plaster walls (along with another foot of insulation) keep the place warm in the winter and cool in the summer.

I live in Kansas and even with an average spring, the utility bill for our family of four last month was $120--gas, electricity, water. Really.

[Stephen Beltramini]

Jimmy,

Today's builders and the society they work for relish quantity over quality. Cheap materials and slipshod techniques get the building square footage up fast and that's all that counts to them.

Excellent post this week.

[Stephen Beltramini]

Sorry about the salutation in that last post. Maybe Jim is more appropriate. After all, being called Stevie makes me cringe.

Best regards

[Dave]

Ditto for NE Pa.. The place is falling apart as the McMansions occupy ( and opitically scar) some of finest opens spaces in the region. You complain about it and you are fist ignored and then ridiculed and then attaked as somehow subversive or worse. Its not just physical rot and disrepair its moral rot as well. My regions been stripped of jobs for at least twenty years and now the poverty is visible in our downtowns throughout the region.
This country is in a deep state of entrancement. It seems to have forgotten that the world is real beyond the personal and that life is ultimately tragic.
God help us as we enter into coming inferno of climate change, PO, economic collapse etc, etc,.

[denizen]

Yep, people just don't give a shit about their environment anymore. Acquiring plasma screen TVs and other technogizmos is way more important than building a solid home out of quality materials.

[LizM]

True, true, true.

Would this be the same Robert Venturi who proclaimed that old people like plastic flowers because they don't want to be reminded of mortality? The same Robert Venturi who designed the appalling Guild House, which looked seedy the day it was finished? Because if so, time is catching up with him as well. A few years ago, Venturi Scott Brown's design for our new orchestra hall was scrapped in favor of something more Swiss and less cheesy. And I heard that a patron of one of our local museums is withholding funding for a proposed annex designed by Venturi Scott Brown because he can't stand their work.

The notion of a decorated shed is not, as far as I can tell, a design principal so much as an architect's rationalization for taking a bunch of money from a sleezy developer to build the biggest thing possible for the smallest price per unit. A better term for this sort of design, which is less utilitarian than opportunistic, might "instaslum."

[ryan costa]

I watched half of George Tenet's interview on 60 Minutes. It seemed a rehash of things already thought over. I turned it off.

Al Queda isn't interested in destroying our "Way of Life". If they were they would use far better tactics than ramming jetliners into a few iconic buildings.

On Sunday some overpasses connecting Oakland to San Francisco were destroyed by a simple truck accident. Terrorists could easily destroy hundreds of overpasses a year here. That would be far more demoralizing to us that losing a set of towers representative of the outsourcing of American Manufacturing. At least when many people are killed we get Angry about it, and then Proud and assured of our power to wreak Vengeance.

Few or no people die in overpass destruction: That would just make us feel weak and helpless. We wouldn't feel strong and independent driving our SUVs and Luxury Sedands to the white collar job in a traffic bottleneck over for nearly a year.

Yesterday in Downtown Cleveland was a rally to "support the troops". Many people rode in on their Harley Davidson Motorcycles. They didn't ride in on light high mileage motorcycles. They rode in on big loud muscle bikes to support the troops. What a stupid gesture.

They rode to a monument in the townsquare. The Monument was a statue of soldiers and sailors from America's distant past. From our protectionist energy independent past. The Rally was an absurd charade.

You'd think our leaders are taking this "war" seriously. In World War II there was propaganda and personal advice everywhere to conserve, to reduce, and to grow liberty gardens. And we were an oil exporting nation then!

Our President doesn't get on the radio telling us to drive smaller cars, or to drive less or carpool. In today's oil wars that would be the rational thing to do. That would be the Proper thing to do. It isn't being done. It must be concluded that this war hasn't been rational or proper, and its leaders not rational or proper.

[bud4wiser@yahoo.com]

JK, what's your point? As an essay, your post lacks a clear thesis. Nor any insight to the obvious.

If you just wanted to let the world know that poor people suck at maintaining cheaply built homes that offer then no sense of pride - then say so.

This week's post dilutes your stock.

[canuck]

You can still build a quality home in North America but it will cost you an arm and a leg. I'm building a good quality home (poured concrete & brick) and the tab is at $250K plus the geothermal heat. I'll be close to 300K when all is said and done. Not a chump change for a 1300 square foot home but quality costs, I guess.

[blueskies]

good rant!

you sir are keenly observant.

[DanaJ]

The tech toys the home builders use arn't there to put up a quality house, they are there to put up a cardboard box as quickly as possible. Have you been to any recent development thats under construction? The only solid piece of the building is the foundation, barely, the rest is chip-board & sheet rock STAPLED together. Homes that used to take months to build 10-20 years ago now go up in just a few weeks. Walk through a model home just for fun, jump on the floor and you'll feel how crappy the construction is. Here in California, in the next big quake, all the crappy construction of the last couple decades will probably collapse in a few seconds. My house, which was built post 1906 and has been through at least 3 good shakes will still be here.
DanaJ

[kd]

Excellent post, Jim.

I'd love to hear the "unkind" part of the Venturi / Scott Brown anecdote someday.

About a block down my street a row of charming 30's bungalows were razed to make room for a luxury 3 floor condo unit called The Pleiades. Construction still isn't finished. The work has been surprisngly slow & painstaking. Layers of thick concrete, huge steel support beams throughout, smaller steel beams within each rooms, lots of glass, & red brick. There doesn't appear to be a piece of wood used in the entire project. With all the time it's taking, & all the expensive materials in use, I can't imagine what these units will cost. Who is there to buy them? Their hyper-modern "Dwell Magazine" styling might not appeal to the Baby Boomers, & condos of this type are usually purchased by singles or young married couples. (With no yard, they probably won't appeal to folks with small children.) A neighbor told me she heard these 2 bedroom units were priced at eight hundred thousand. Folks living in the shadow of this architect/developer's wet dream are sick about it. A feeble protest was raised. Three houses went up for sale immediately right behind the condos. They're still for sale.

A new luxury shopping center in an area that's destined to become Austin's "second downtown" (according local news broadcasts) is called The Domain. It's built to resemble an "old fashioned" small town. You park the car and walk the "streets" lined with expensive shops. Many folks think it's beautiful.

As gas prices push 3 dollars a gallon, and the old & modest homes of the past are torn down for new luxury McMansions or condos, people flock to shops like these to pay fifty dollars for a T-shirt. Etc.

Perhaps you'll come to Austin someday, Jim. I'd like to read your take on the city.

[canuck]

kd,
You guys complain when builders slap together stick houses and you complain when they build solid apartments out of concrete. Tell me then, what DO you want to see being built? As for the price of 800k, guess what? Quality costs. I know that is an unthinkable idea in North America but the housing business on this continent must undergo a radical transformation and soon.

I'm building a concrete home with brick on the outside and finding it costs 30 to 50% more than a vinyl clad stick house. But then again I want to practice what I preach so I'll go ahead and build a small home that will last and be efficient to run and beautiful to look at. It will be half the size of the buildings surrounding it and ten times nicer to look at.

[Ben]

A good way to see our American Landscape is to ride a bike. This past weekend I participated in a 300k (187 mile) endurance ride that took me through a fair amount of New Jersey's rural farmland between Princeton and Blairstown. Traveling at an average speed of 15 mph allows you to really observe and take in your surroundings. I was really quite shocked to see some incredibly beautiful stone houses and amazing farmland. One stone house in particular was nestled alongside a babling stream where hundreds of yellow tulips were in bloom. I also rode by a surprising amount of farmland with grazing sheep, cattle, horses and even alpaca. Regretably however, during those 187 miles, it wasn't all pretty. There were quite a few Toll Brothers projects up and runnning, in what had likely been a corn field a few years earlier. I'm really amazed that these houses don't seem as wildly out of place to the buyers as they do to me. If someone is going to live in a 4-car garage house shouldn't it be at the end of a 100 yard long driveway, and not twenty feet from four other 4-car garage houses. A 4 car garage! Really? Why not just cut out the middle and put the house on wheels. Oh, wait a second, that's called a trailer park. At least the trailer parks I rode by on my ride had some trees in and around them. Thats another thing I find so jarring about these Mcmansion sub-divisions, there are absolutely no trees or greenery. Its about as shocking and obscene as shaved private parts. Another incident that I saw that I thought summed up the white-trash condition pretty well was a family getting out of their SUV after a shopping trip. The mother was yelling at two crying kids, while the dad, red in the face and sweating, was struggling to carry a new oversized TV set to his dilapidated house. Another nice architectural development I witnessed in a few places were these P.O.D.S. I guess it is acceptable now to park a tractor trailer in your driveway in order to put all the shit that you cant fit in your 3000 square foot house. I think as Jim was getitng at it, particularly with housing market set to implode, it wont be long before Americans move out of their homes and into their windowless P.O.D.S.

[Chris Rall]

LizM,

Well put on Venturi / Scott Brown. I remember back in the early nineties, sitting in an architectural history class scratching my head as we were introduced to this pair's work and philosophy. I asked myself, Was I stupid, or was everyone else?

kd,
You bring up some interesting issues. How are we to transform towns so that more people live in the walkable area without increasing density? In my town, the more historic downtown residential neighborhoods are zoned residential low density to protect them from projects that would destroy the historic character. Meanwhile, in the effort to prevent sprawl, subdivisions on old industiral land are planned at medium or high density leaving more folks further out from downtown in the future buildout. Does an 80 year old bungalow really represent something that historic? Sure, it's a high quality home, but, meanwhile, the sprawl spreads outward.

[Ron Owen]

An excellent read and very timely post, Jim.

I have been building a custom, 2100 sq.ft. home on and off, over the last five years (no bank loan). While designing and building the house, I have poured over the vast array of homebuilding styles and eras, starting with the 1880's Victorians, through the 1910-1925 era Craftsmans, the 1930's brick tudors, and then what I deem "everything else". The "everything else" is primarily the sum of the suburban building development scheme; much to the effect as Jim has frequently ranted on.

I think that the suburban effect, like virtually everything else in our lives, is conducted under the paradigm of an ever-expanding monetary system. Quality doesn't matter, in fact it hinders, as banks would loathe for people to feel content in a suitable, smaller, well-built house. Instead we've been mesmirized into phoney concepts such as "planned obsolescence", disposability, "supersizing", and generational marketing in which the puppet masters (Madision Ave. and the bankers) constantly prod us with glamor, sex, anxiety, and doom to line their pockets.

When I finally decided that I should take upon building a house from scratch (I had *no* building experience as a former cubicle rat), it was after the tortured realization that there were too few craftsmen anymore. The meth-addled tweakers and other semi-skilled types that gravitate towards these professions nowadays do so on the premise that the money is decent and the scope of work is limited. It seems that a combination of rampant credit, a dimunition of the trades in social standing and yes, power tools, have created a moral hazard of workmanship.

In closing, the funny thing about my entire experience with my house project, is that even when I tell people that I don't have a mortgage, and have learned *every* trade involved with home building, people still give me a bewildered look and ask: "So what do you do for a living?"

[V. Publius]

OT, but worth noting, over at MSN Money:

"...this will probably come to be known as the "Private Equity Bubble." He observes that, perversely, the private-equity deals have caused the "outperformance of inefficient companies that are conducive to improvement by the acquirers." In other words, companies that are doing poorly have seen their stock prices improve, relative to better-managed companies, because they're more likely to be acquired. Lastly, he notes the danger in this process: "If profit margins, which are at record highs everywhere, regress as usual, then many deals leveraged to the hilt on peak margins will be in trouble and diversification will have a very high cost."

[just a thought]

It's likely the people are poor who live in the town you visited, Jim. Things likely would look a lot better if they had some money.

I grew up in a rowhouse neighborhood in a big, Northern East Coast city and, while there was not much green, things looked neat and well cared for. Now, poorer people are living in my old neighborhood and it looks horrible.

Poor people don't have the money to invest in home maintenance.

Now I live in a small town in the South, which looks better every year that passes, as people from up North come in and fix up houses.

[Robert of the Rohirrim]

"We've succeeded in building too many things that aren't worth caring about, and the end result is that we now live in a land where nothing is taken care of."

Jimbo, Why should I build something nice and long-lasting when I know that I am soon going to be pushed out of my nice, quiet, safe community by savage blacks and mexicans taking over the neighborhood? I'd be a fool to put down roots and try to build up a nice neighborhood these days. Once we had a neighborhood that met your standards, the dark flotsam and jetsam would float in. And if I then complained or tried to have the law enforced against this rabble, if I tried to protect my family and my community which I worked so hard to build, the jews and their multi-culti Christian ninnies would call me a bigot and an evilracistwhowantstokillsixmillionjews.

[Weaseldog]

The point of housing is to push lots of money through the mortgage system.

The flow of money is what is important, as it keeps prices up, wages down and drives us to seeking the bottom in quality.

Homes are no longer places to live in. They are investments. So its understandable that the industry wants to put the m miniumum money in, to get the maximum return. And of course, the banks want to maximize cash flow.

So we get into conflicts where maximizing the quantity of homes, leads to rising resource prices. To keep costs down, quality has to decline, even as prices go up.

Paradoxically, quantity has more influence over price than quality.

[uncle remus]

"Poor people don't have the money to invest in home maintenance."

Bullshit. It is a question of priorities.

[uncle remus]

"drives us to seeking the bottom in quality"

Instead of "land of the free" it should be "land of the lowest common denominator".

I wonder if Darwin understood that collective societal and institutional stupidity would actually force de-evolution in Homo sapiens in a span of 2 or 3 generations.

[Mewsician]

What an excellent, insightful commentary. And anyone who's seen "Idiocracy" knows the landscape look we're headed for in the advanced stages of what Mr. Kunstler so skillfully documents the beginnings of here.

What a country. What a sad, pitiful, depressing state of affairs.