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

[Mewsician]

FWIW, here's today's Krugman:

The New York Times

April 30, 2007
Another Economic Disconnect
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Last fall Edward Lazear, the Bush administration’s top economist, explained that what’s good for corporations is good for America. “Profits,” he declared, “provide the incentive for physical capital investment, and physical capital growth contributes to productivity growth. Thus profits are important not only for investors but also for the workers who benefit from the growth in productivity.”

In other words, ask not for whom the closing bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

Unfortunately, these days none of what Mr. Lazear said seems to be true. In the Bush years high profits haven’t led to high investment, and rising productivity hasn’t led to rising wages.

The second of those two disconnects has gotten a lot of attention because of its political consequences. The administration and its allies whine that they aren’t getting credit for a great economy, but because wages have been stagnant — the median worker’s earnings, adjusted for inflation, haven’t gone up at all since the current economic expansion began in 2001 — the economy feels anything but great to most Americans.

Less attention, however, has been given to the first disconnect: the failure of high profits to produce an investment boom.

Since President Bush took office, the combination of rising productivity and stagnant wages — workers are producing more, but they aren’t getting paid more — has led to a veritable profit gusher, with corporate profits more than doubling since 2000. Last year, profits as a share of national income were at the highest level ever recorded.

You might have expected this gusher of profits, which surely owes something to the Bush administration’s pro-corporate, anti-labor tilt, to produce a corresponding gusher of business investment. But the reality has been more of a trickle. Nonresidential investment — that is, investment other than housing construction — has grown very slowly by historical standards. As a share of G.D.P., nonresidential investment remains far below its levels of the late 1990s, and it has been declining for the last two quarters.

Why aren’t corporations investing, and what does the lack of business investment mean for the economy?

It’s possible that sluggish business investment reflects lack of confidence in the economic outlook — a lack of confidence that’s understandable given the bursting of the housing bubble, which has already caused G.D.P. growth to slow to a crawl.

But as Floyd Norris recently reported in The Times, there is a more disturbing possibility. Instead of investing in physical capital, many companies are using profits to buy back their own stock. And cynics suggest that the purpose of these buybacks is to produce a temporary rise in stock prices that increases the value of executives’ stock options, even if it’s against the long-term interests of investors.

It’s not a far-fetched idea. Researchers at the Federal Reserve have found evidence that company decisions about stock buybacks are strongly influenced by “agency conflicts,” a genteel term for self-dealing by corporate insiders. In the 1990s that kind of self-dealing often led to excessive investment, which at least left a tangible legacy behind. But today the self-interest of management may be standing in the way of productive investment.

Whatever the reasons, we now have an economy with incredibly high profits and surprisingly low investment. This raises some immediate, short-run concerns: with housing still in free fall and consumers ever more stretched, optimistic projections for the economy depend on vigorous growth in business investment. And that doesn’t seem to be happening.

The bigger issue, however, may be longer term. Mr. Lazear was right about one thing: business investment plays an important role in raising productivity. High investment in equipment and software was one major reason for the productivity takeoff that began in the Clinton era, and continued in the early years of this decade.

And low investment may be one reason productivity growth has slowed dramatically over the last three years — another development that hasn’t received as much attention as it should.

In any case, next time someone tells you that any action that might reduce corporate profits a bit — like actually enforcing health and safety regulations or making it easier for workers to organize — will reduce business investment, bear in mind that today’s record profits aren’t being invested. Instead, they’re being used to enrich executives and a few lucky stock owners.

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

[GMAFB]

Bob, you ARE a bigot. Just come out of the closet and wear your pointy hood with pride.

Back to the subject, though- I noticed this a couple years ago. A half-assed building style that *references* architecture more than it *is* architecture. (IMHO the decline is no recent development: I think Mies van der Rohe killed architecture and now Frank Gehry is dancing on its grave.)

Anyway, my grim take on the cause of McMansionism and disposable stripmalls? Old buildings in Europe have been standing for hundreds of years longer than North America has been populated by gringos. And maybe these particleboard-and-vinyl houses going up that obviously aren't made to last 50 years just mean that- on some level- we Know. We know they don't really -need- to last 50 years, much less 500, because TSGHTF way before that. So hurry hurry hurry get them built get them sold get your money while the getting's good and enjoy the final years of IKEA and iMac in antidepressant medicated oblivion.

I see it as part of the same fuck-it mentality behind our newly negative savings rate- Americans running up credit card debt they're never likely to pay off, and the Bush administration digging the whole country into a massive debt hole. Just spending like there's no tomorrow.

Well, as far as US Dollars and suburban housing developments and real estate futures are concerned... there aint.

[uncle remus]

There is no future - the Rapture will soon be here. The world can go to hell cause I am going to Heaven.

Imagine the stink if THAT idea ever caught traction.

Sounds like a cumulative commie pinko subliminal plot wrapped up in a catchy advert jingle. An insidious blipvert perhaps?

"You deserve a break today..."

[hermit]

Glad to have you back kd, I had begun to wonder if maybe you had gone off the deep end. NOT !

Great post Jim K. I to took a ride through the old home town last month for a 50 yr H.S. reunion, I didn't recognize the place, the old high school was still there in all it's splender, but it is now surrounded by enough trash to make me cry. This weeks comments should be interesting.

[Weaseldog]

Privatising our infrastructure:

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_19/b4033001.htm?chan=top+news_top+news+index_top+story

[Jerry Johnson]

Hermit's experience must be all too common. My own little ditch digger home town filled with houses lovingly built by cooperative trading of skills has barely changed at all. I doubt there is a tract house style structure on any street. There were a modicum of fifties bugalows built but every one of them were hand made of load bearing brick. Most of the houses are craftsman period including our house and my granparents. Virtually no change on my street from as far back as I can rem ember. All the houses and the commercial district are very well maintained with an expensive butcher job like the new library here and there.

The secret is that the people cling to their immigrant ways even three generations out. Those that sell sell to other last boaters.

The place is a time capsule yet it is a very viable town. For much of its existence it had a vice district strictly enforced. The patrons crossed over the tracks and they were on their best behaviour or they surely got run in. Today, the town bills itself as the " City of Restaurants" with one or two always on the top ten list in the US. In reality they have a lot of four star restaurants.

The government is local and everyone is very interested in local politics. They used to pay cash for everything because da boys took care of everything vis cash or direct gift. The accomodation has been around for a century. Needless to say da boys are almost all local too.

Just to show the difference. Basements were hand dug on a Saturday and Sunday and did the food and wine flow. Come Monday night the footings were laid out. A number of people were mason contractors, including my godfather and uncle. Their Rex mixers were used to mix up the concrete each night but were clean and ready for business the next day. And so on until the house was done. Even the millwork was local in a town filled with cabinet makers. I still have my grandfather's exquisite hand tools.

[Teabow]

Obviously, what we are witnessing is the "Decline and Fall of the American Empire." N'est pas?

[one Eye Open]

So let me get this straight. We are a bunch of wasteful fools who have mortaged our futures by our non-saving ways. We live in shoddily built homes that are not constructed of the hearty hardwoods of yester-year that are assembled by drug addled zombies.

Sure. And to rectify this we should cut down the remaining hardwood forests and pay craftsmen small fortunes to lay stone foundations. And of course this new "quality" dwelling will almost accomodate one queen sized bed. Sounds like a great plan...especially if you don't mind getting yøur feet wet when it rains.

[uncle remus]

JJ,

I love reading your posts, especially when you remind us of a greatness that was. Especially dear to my heart is your last post. The tools of a craftsman are a beautiful thing indeed.

I left the construction industry a long time ago, due in no small part to the lack of craftsmanship. Secondly were the idiots claiming to be journeyman whatever.

I am a journeyman electrician by trade and proud of it to this day. These days I earn my living in IT. I miss the hands-on aspect of the trades. As a commercial/industrial electrician, my crews made artwork of parallel pipe runs, gentle long sweeps of conduit avoiding structural impediments, saddling equipment and ending in almost military precision at a panel tub or switch gear.

We dressed panels cleanly, well marked and thoroughly tested. Craftsmanship.

We used levels on everything - panel covers, light and receptacle plates. Clear, legible as-builts - from apprentices no less - it's how we taught them.

There isn't time for that anymore. It's all hammered shit.

On the housing side, the wife and I have looked for a small house (<1000 squares) built reasonably well. Right. I think I may have to build as I can. That I know I can do. Where I live now (plains state), I might actually find some old school craftsmen.

They are dying off fast.

[JL]

So what do you expect? Over 60% of Americans think that the world is about 6000 years old and that evolution is just another theory, less than 15% read even one book a year, 10% still don't know the name of the president, 25% can't distinguish between the Washington DC and the state of Washington, and only 2% can locate Ghana on a map. And 85% want a new or a bigger plasma TV, and there are some 5.5 million(!) people overweight by more than 100 lb. Duh! It's just our way of life (for now)!

[Wells]

It seems to me that bankers will finance subdivisions on the sure bet that they'll collect more interest from financing the automobiles that suburbanites must purchase to meet their travel needs, than they will collect from home mortgages.

The quality of the home construction is of tertiary importance. The real money is financing the cars. One wonders sometimes if bank employees are hired depending upon how far they have to commute.

[lise]

I live in the same territory as Kunstler. Except for Saratoga Springs and neighboroods directly outside of the city, the area is largely defined by sagging abandoned barns, hyper building of small vinyl houses in small disheveled looking developments stripped of trees, trailers poked into the woods by themselves on a weird lot with odd plywood additions (complete with rooves with shingles falling off, odd & unlevel plexglass little windows which were impulsively put in, a huge satellite dish on the roof and a brand new car in the driveway), gift shops in some of the old country houses or chain marts in the middle of nowhere...

Ballston Spa's older houses are wonderful & grand architecturally, but they are in the middle of town with heavy trucks constantly going by & many have been made into apartments or offices (nothing like florescent lighting & aluminum venetian blinds eminating from the windows of an elegant & highly decorated Victorian lady!).

[one Eye Open]

"and there are some 5.5 million(!) people overweight by more than 100 lb."

This number strikes me as overly optimistic. There must be ten times that number who are 100 lbs overweight. My entire family tips the scales at over 275 lbs.

[one Eye Open]

Robert of the Rohirrim

You nailed it! The solution is to have some serious firepower available when the riff-raff wonder into town.

[one Eye Open]

"and there are some 5.5 million(!) people overweight by more than 100 lb."

Actually someone else (gee, I wonder who) posted the preceeding. But I DO have an issue with another little nugget. And that would be:

"Over 60% of Americans think that the world is about 6000 years old..."

That is utter clap-trap. There is no way on earth that 60% of Americans believe any such thing.

[one Eye Open]

My troll is back.

Get a life, biotch.

[two eyes open]

At the time our country was founded the wealthy made money through land speculation and tobacco farming. For the tobacco farming, slaves girdled the trees, tobacco was raised for a few years, and then after the soil was depleted the process was moved to new land. Short term gain has always been the law of the land.

[george]

If you want to blame anybody or anything for the horrid condition of our man-made environment, blame the culture of "entitlement" that has afflicted us since 1945. We've been led to believe we are "entitled" to a certain way of life that's "non-negotiable" under any circumstances. That way of life is characterized by extreme car-dependency, profligate consumption of fossil fuels and a careless disregard for the limits of economic growth.

[Jerry Johnson]

OEO, I have seen polls for years on creationism/ evolution/ just plain Genesis that are all in the 50-60% range.

Since few actually understand evolution, I wonder if the percentage might be higher. I assume every HS graduate in America has taken biology. Yet, few have a clue about biology. The fetus itself evolves though every stage of prior genetic existence. Very plainly observable from the textbook alone. So, all we have here is solid proof about Loyola's dictum about having them for the first seven years means having them for life.

We are in the midst of one of those periodical revivals of religion these past forty years. Might this one be near the end of it's run?

[Randy W]

One of the first things to go in population crashes is the old religion.

What scares me is that many are letting everything go to rot in anticipation of Jesus comin' on home, and are so entranced by the story they have learned and regurgitated over and over that they want to FORCE him to come back by detonating nukes.

My wife wants kids, but I just see bringing anyone else into this insane world as cruelty.

[Stephen Beltramini]

One Eye Open,

I appreciate the reality check you bring here, and I hesitate to go too far off subject, but having ventured into Creationism and earth history with many folk, I wouldn't doubt that somewhere between 15 to 50 % of people in the US would put the age of the planet they live on as less than a million years old.

Whatever the true figures are, they're pretty far off the mark I fear. It's sad.

[one Eye Open]

Stephen,

My gut feeling is that 6000 year estimate is far closer to the truth then the 4.6 Billion years that some scientists espouse.

[one Eye Open]

First of all, let me just say that I don't really care how old the earth is. 4.6 billion years or 6,000, neither date proves the existence of God, and neither date proves that evolution is true.

That said I do have some questions about one of the major forms (at least one of the major forms that I am aware of - if there are others that are predominant that scientists use regularly, please, fill me in) of dating methods: radiocarbon. First of all, in regards to radiocarbon dating, why should one assume that every single rock on the face of the planet bagan with the exact same about of radioactivity?

****

Radiocarbon Dating (Carbon 14)
Willard F. Libby, a physical chemist, developed this technique in 1949. Radiocarbon dating was formulated upon the understanding that neutrons are produced by cosmic radiation. These neutrons enter the earth's atmosphere and react with nitrogen. This reaction results in carbon 14. Carbon 14 is a "heavy" carbon isotope because it contains fourteen neutrons in its nucleus instead of the more common load of twelve. The two additional neutrons make carbon 14 unstable and causes it to decay at a gradual rate. As the carbon 14 decays, neutrons leave the nucleus and emit a radioactive particle which theoretically can be measured to determine the rate of decay.

How does one apply this to an artifact he wishes to date? Plants and animals digest carbon (CO2) while they are living. When plants and animals die they no longer take in carbon. The carbon that is present begins to decay supposedly at a steady rate when an animal or plant dies. By measuring the rate of carbon decay through neutron emissions, one can theoretically determine how long ago death occurred.16

How Reliable is Radiocarbon Dating for Determining the Age of Ancient Fossils?
Radiocarbon dating was developed on the basis of two assumptions (not established facts). In the first place, Libby assumed that the carbon 14 content is consistent in the carbon dioxide which is absorbed by the organism while it is living. In the second place, Libby believed that cosmic rays which produce carbon 14 have remained constant in our atmosphere. Dr. David Hurst Thomas of the American Museum of Natural History addressed the problems of these assumptions when he wrote:

Radiocarbon dating relies on a number of key assumptions, perhaps the most important being that the radiocarbon level - that is, the ratio between carbon 12 and carbon 14 - has remained constant in the earth's atmosphere. Libby assumed this when developing the method, but we now know that this assumption is not valid. That is, levels of atmospheric carbon 14 have shifted somewhat over the past millennia.17

Shortly after Libby developed his carbon 14 dating method, Egyptologists, who applied his method to well-established historical material, said that "his dates did not square with the historically derived dynastic chronology."18 Dr. Stuart Piggott, a British archaeologist, excavating near Durington Walls in England, received a radiocarbon date for his site. The radiocarbon test on a piece of charcoal suggested that Piggott's site was 1000 years older than it actually was. Conclusive data from the site proved that the radiocarbon test was grossly in error. Piggott said of radiocarbon dating that it was "archaeologically unacceptable."19

In June of 1985 the Twelfth International Radiocarbon Conference met in Trondheim, Norway to discuss the flaws in radiocarbon dating. From this conference a correction curve was developed for carbon 14 dates based upon the fairly exact dating method of dendrochronology (tree ring dating). Unfortunately, there are a limited number of tree types that are suitable for providing an accurate correction curve for carbon 14 dates. The ideal tree is the Bristle Cone Pine which is only found in the buildings of ancient North American Indian sites. The oldest of the Bristle Cone Pines found are only 4600 years old. Using living samples and ancient trunks, scientists were able to develop a correction curve for radiocarbon dates going back 8200 years.20 In other words, radiocarbon dates can only be corrected as far back as 6200 B.C. Any samples that date further back than 6200 B.C. cannot be corrected, and therefore their age cannot be accurately determined.

(Facts and Fallacies of the Fossil Record by Brett Rutherford)

[one Eye Open]

I'd recommed anyone bothering to reply to OEO's posts not waste their time as OEO has only actually posted three times today (including this post). The other two posts follow:

So let me get this straight. We are a bunch of wasteful fools who have mortaged our futures by our non-saving ways. We live in shoddily built homes that are not constructed of the hearty hardwoods of yester-year that are assembled by drug addled zombies.

Sure. And to rectify this we should cut down the remaining hardwood forests and pay craftsmen small fortunes to lay stone foundations. And of course this new "quality" dwelling will almost accomodate one queen sized bed. Sounds like a great plan...especially if you don't mind getting yøur feet wet when it rains.

"and there are some 5.5 million(!) people overweight by more than 100 lb."

Actually someone else (gee, I wonder who) posted the preceeding. But I DO have an issue with another little nugget. And that would be:

"Over 60% of Americans think that the world is about 6000 years old..."

That is utter clap-trap. There is no way on earth that 60% of Americans believe any such thing.

This will be final posting for today.

[Rudi Cilibrasi, PhD]

I think the Clathrate Gun is more interesting:

http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2007/04/26/magmatrigger_pla.html?category=earth
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis

I think this positive feedback trigger will really, ehm, impact us going forward.