Is the American Dream Killing You?: How the Market Rules Our Lives by Stiles Paul

Author:Stiles, Paul [Stiles, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History
ISBN: 9780060593780
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 1185268
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2005-10-01T00:00:00+00:00

1 5 4

I S T H E A M E R I C A N D R E A M K I L L I N G Y O U ?

in general: it is what you get when you strip away any higher principles from the enterprise. The entire built environment loses its meaning as a public space serving the community, the city, the country. Performance triumphs over art, creating the architectural equivalent of pornography.

Marketecture

In designing an environment for living, the critical issue is the balance between the natural and the artificial. As Frank Lloyd Wright famously noted, a good building, one that is organically integrated into its site, actually improves on Nature, a principle we can extend to development at all scales. If one travels the Irish countryside, for instance, one typically leaves a village and enters miles of beautiful countryside before entering another village. The result is that one always has the feeling of living within Nature. Or take a city like San Francisco, with its dramatic rolling perch overlooking its namesake bay. Certainly the footprint of San Francisco has obliterated much of the nat-B o r r o w e d T i m e

1 5 5

ural environment it occupies. And yet the result is one of the most strikingly beautiful cities on Earth. So development, in and of itself, need not necessarily mar the landscape, as long as it serves a higher set of principles: aesthetic, moral, spiritual, cultural. If not, it upsets the natural balance, with tragic effect on the individuals who live within it. As Wright also noted, the environment we live in reinforces certain values in us. It shapes our character, our well-being, our outlook on life, an influence that exists at all scales, from the individual home to the largest public spaces.

Sprawl arises when the Market erodes the higher principles of design and seizes control of the suburban development process, such that the key players involved simply do whatever maximizes their profit, regardless of the consequences. In other words, it is another case of inversion, the collapse of the human in the face of the productive. The result is a chamber of architectural horrors, in which all the common pathologies of the unbalanced Market are made highly visible. In fact, we live in them.

Take tract homes, for instance. In suburban home construction, the tract home is the equivalent of the fast-food hamburger: cheap, mass-produced, and lacking nutritional value. In order to save money on design costs and streamline production, every example looks like the next one. Since pennies add up on the assembly line, great effort is applied to reduce costs everywhere, creating minimal framing, paper-thin walls, and other materials chosen to survive a week longer than the new home warranty. Cheap labor rounds out the picture, yielding substandard construction—although you may not notice right away. Nothing is built to last. This same market philosophy extends out to encompass the entire building site. Instead of saving trees, which are difficult to work around, the entire future neighborhood is bulldozed on day one.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.