The following is a transcript of KunstlerCast #5: Starchitects. You can listen to and subscribe to this weekly audio podcast at KunstlerCast.com.

[intro music]

Duncan Crary (as host): You’re listening to the KunstlerCast, a weekly conversation about the tragic comedy of suburban sprawl featuring James Howard Kunstler, author of The Geography of Nowhere, The Long Emergency, and World Made by Hand.

I’m Duncan Crary. Today’s topic: Starchitects.

Duncan Crary (as interviewer): Hello, Jim, we’re back for another KunstlerCast. Nice to see you.

James Howard Kunstler: Nice to see you, Duncan.

Duncan Crary: They actually put us on the real airwaves out in Olympia, Washington.

James Howard Kunstler: How dare they.

Duncan Crary: [laughs] If you can believe it. The KunstlerCast is now playing on Northwest Indy Radio.

James Howard Kunstler: Did you get your check because I didn’t get mine? It’s probably in the mail.

Duncan Crary: This is a public service that we’re doing. OK, so you can listen to us on the air in Aberdeen on 94.3 FM and in Olympia on 92.9 FM. They’re going to be playing us at 10:35 a.m. Fridays and 4:35 Sundays. Pretty cool, huh?

James Howard Kunstler: Yeah, cool. I’ve never been on a radio before… I mean, as a show.

Duncan Crary: Well, in honor of our new listeners in Washington state, we’re actually — we got a call from Seattle, Washington.

James Howard Kunstler: Dude.

Duncan Crary: Let’s hear what this young woman has to say.

Listener Caller: Hi, Jim and Duncan. This is Sylvia calling from Seattle and I want to say that I’m really enjoying the show so far. I wanted to ask you a couple of questions about some buildings that we have in Seattle and what’s going on with new architecture around the country.

So we have a couple of projects. There’s the new public library which is kind of this futuristic cubist disaster. It kind of looks like a cardboard box that’s been half torn apart, only instead of cardboard, it’s made out of reflective paneling and it doesn’t match any of the other buildings around it.

Then another disaster that we have in Seattle is what’s called the EMP, which is the Experience Music Project, right by the Space Needle in the Seattle Center. This looks like a bright colored amoeba. It’s just completely different shapes, it doesn’t match anything, of course, how could it?

I’m wondering — my question, I guess, is: when cities have the opportunity to create something new, it seems like they either make it a cartoon or some futuristic box that is kind of screaming for attention. I’m wondering, why is it that people are not interested in building classic buildings that blend in? So, if you could help me understand this a little better, I would really appreciate it. Thanks so much, guys.

Duncan Crary: Jim, have you seen these things? I’ve actually seen these buildings in person.

James Howard Kunstler: I’ve seen and been in the Seattle Public Library designed by Rem Koolhass.

It’s not that hard to understand what’s going on. The city officials are not that sophisticated. They’re probably not stupid, but, basically, what they’re hoodwinked into is a kind of fashion contest with other cities, a status fashion contest.

The big status symbol for the last 20 years has been to get a museum or a library designed by one of a certain roster of star architects or Starchitects as they’re called. It’s a revolving door of Frank Gehry, Rem Koolhass, Peter Eisenman and a bunch of other people.

The results have been disastrous for practically every place that’s done this. The case of the Seattle library is interesting. Yes, it is a building that is intimidating and the inside of it is an interesting thing because it completely disorients you. You go up these stairways that are designed to make you feel disoriented and to not really particularly lead to a place that you understand.

The ideology of academic architecture these days is based on the wish to confound our expectations about how buildings will work and about how cities will work and how the buildings will relate to the cities.

So, the program with Rem Koolhass — and he states this explicitly in his own writings — is to confuse the person using the building and create as much anxiety as possible in the users and to mystify them. The whole object of this whole exercise is to make the architect seem more supernaturally brilliant for having created all these mystifications. The more mystification they create, the more it supposedly means that they know things that you don’t.

Duncan Crary: All right, Jim, but what I don’t understand is: not only have these guys like Koolhass conned all the mayors of these cities around the world, but the American Institute of Architects is giving this guy awards. He got an award for this public library which looks like a Droid transport carrier out of a George Lucas film.

James Howard Kunstler: All the big architecture prizes are going to these horrendous despotic high tech buildings that look like they’re constructed out of Gillette Blue Blades or some other really frightening material.

It is a con game and it’s also a game of the “Emperor’s new clothes.” These guys are all trying to support an ideology which says, in essence, “The more we can mystify the public, the more brilliant we will appear to be.”

Duncan Crary: Yeah, it’s almost like how Rudy Giuliani once was talking about art, there was some art show in Brooklyn that was controversial and he goes: “Art is something I don’t understand. If I don’t understand it, it’s art.” I feel like, that’s the level of this con. These buildings look like crap!

James Howard Kunstler: Well, that’s the other end of the spectrum which is a kind of Philistinism which is “I don’t know nothing about art, but I know what I like.” There is such a thing as — there’s a different path.

Let me perhaps put it this way: One way of understanding the urban principles involved is to know that there’s a difference between background buildings and monumental buildings.

Monumental buildings have a certain obligation to help us feel oriented, to know what they are, to be typologically consistent with our expectations, and also to present a sort of sense of decorum to the city.

The city can be an intimidating place for the person who lives there. It’s a place where you’re meeting a lot of strangers constantly, you’re around people you don’t know. There are a lot of exciting, stimulating, but also kind of intimidating things that happen to you in the city.

So one of the purposes of architecture for a few thousand years has been to reassure us that when we’re in the city, we’re in a place that is safe, in which transactions occur that we can understand. We’re in surroundings that are coherent, that the outsides of the buildings embellish the public realm and honor the public realm.

It honors our presence in the public realm by speaking to us in languages, and vocabularies, and syntaxes, and grammars, and rhythms, and patterns that we understand from our own culture.

So, when you bring into that setting this effort to mystify and confuse everybody and create, deliberately, more anxiety, you’re doing a real disservice not only to the individual people who inhabit the place, but to the idea of civic life as a general proposition.

Duncan Crary: I want to get back to this “Emperor has no clothes” idea. I think you nailed it.

James Howard Kunstler: That’s not an original thought on my part, by the way, Duncan. I mean, there are a lot of people who are on to the “Emperor’s new clothes” element to this racket.

Duncan Crary: Well, there’s a reporter, I happen to really enjoy his writing –but he was writing about my hometown, Troy, and I think he suffered from the “Emperor had no clothes” situation with this EMPAC building. Now, you were speaking at RPI recently, did you see this thing? It’s a galactic battlestar –

James Howard Kunstler: Yes, it’s the mothership. The tragic thing about it is that the Rensselaer Polytechnic campus is one of the more coherent ensembles of buildings in the United States of urban college campuses. Most of it is a Beaux Arts period, Greco-Roman sort of neoclassical ensemble of buildings.

It’s very handsome, very orderly. It creates a sense of coherence and order which helps young people who are struggling to develop a point of view about the world and to feel that their existence has purpose and order.

So, being in these settings actually is enhanced by being surrounded by things that reflect a certain amount of coherence. Into this, they’ve now introduced this kind of mothership UFO but it’s perfectly consistent with the trend of what’s gone on in every campus in every city in America.

Duncan Crary: But, Jim, this campus happens to be perched on top of a hill, so it’s the skyline of my city. Now they’re blasting these green and red lights on it at night, like, “Oh, look at this thing.”

James Howard Kunstler: Yeah, it’s like if you were to put on a clown suit and jump up and down on the highest part of your city and point at yourself and say, “Look at me, I’m special.”

Duncan Crary: [laughs] But they have a school of architecture at RPI. What are architects actually learning in school?

James Howard Kunstler: By the way, we should now have a Special Olympics for architects so they can jump up and down in their clown suits and be as a special as they want.

Yeah, it’s tragic. RPI, of course, is not really a special case. You can probably count on one hand the architecture schools around the country that are actually teaching something that has a future. Most of them are pretty much stuck in the fashionista/mystification racket.

And RPI, unfortunately, is one of them. Although there, even they have heavier emphasis on just some of the technical considerations, like these claddings that are made out of rare metals like titanium, which is an unbelievable squandering of resources. They’re really into a lot of the high tech stuff.

Many of the buildings that are getting these awards from the architecture societies and the Pritzker Prize and all that, they’re doing it by dabbling in high techism.

There is not necessarily anything really wonderful about cladding a building with titanium, from a technical point of view. It doesn’t improve the insulating or heating properties or air conditioning properties, it’s just a stunt really.

Duncan Crary: Jim, you lecture all around the country and you do speak to –

James Howard Kunstler: I actually call it flapping my gums.

Duncan Crary: [laughs] But you do speak at some — you’ve spoken at architectural institutes and things like that?

James Howard Kunstler: Yeah, I’ve been to many of the biggies.

Duncan Crary: So have you talked to these architects? What the hell are they learning in school? Do they apologize to you when they hear you? Or do they argue with you?

James Howard Kunstler: Oh, no. They argue with me strenuously, especially at the more elite universities. I’ve been to Harvard, I don’t know, three or four times and they think that this is a joke that I’m complaining about it. They think that mystification is wonderful. It makes them feel more superior.

They’re totally along with that program and they’re certainly prompted and supported in it by their professors who also get a huge lift out of feeling like superior supernatural beings from another planet. They’ve succeeded in mystifying people and making them feel uncomfortable in the buildings that they have to go to everyday.

Another interesting case, by the way, is MIT, which is down the street from Harvard. They were gifted with the famous Frank Gehry building known as the Stata Center, which is kind of a classroom complex. It was supposed to be the centerpiece of their “new” main street which is called “Vassar Street” off of Mass Avenue.

The building’s only been open for about two years and they’ve already incurred something like $100 million lawsuit. Because the roof doesn’t work and the way that the entrances were designed, they were perfectly designed to direct large pieces of ice to fall on the heads of people on the sidewalk. [Duncan laughs] As if they couldn’t have predicted that from these steel shed channelized roofs that they have over the entrances. So they’re in a lot of trouble with that. They’re going to probably have to do a lot of costly retrofitting.

The inside of the building, by the way, doesn’t work very well for the people who work there. There are all these glass walls where people wanted to have private offices, so they could sit in there and drink their coffee and be alone and not be bothered. Instead, they got glass walls for all their offices, and they would be taking corrugated cardboard cartons that their computers came in and taping them to the glass walls of their office so that they could have some privacy.

So the whole thing is sort of a fiasco in spite of the fact that it’s a playful building and looks cute on the outside on one side.

The whole issue with Vassar Street, too, has gotten very funny because most of the buildings along Vassar Street, now, at ground level, actually present the heat air conditioning exhaust vents at , like, eyebrow levels so that when you’re going by, you get blasted with either hot air or cold air, depending on the season.

Duncan Crary: All right, Jim, I think that pretty much wraps it up for this week. We’ve settled the score with these architects but if there are any architects out there and you want to call up and defend yourself, our listener comment line is 1 866 924 9499. Thanks a lot, Jim.

James Howard Kunstler: Nice speaking to you, Duncan.

Duncan Crary (as host): You’ve been listening to the KunstlerCast featuring James Howard Kunstler. To leave a listener comment, call toll free at 866 924 9499.

Send email to . You can download episodes of this program and read transcripts at KunstlerCast.com.

I’m your host, Duncan Crary. Thanks for listening.

[music fades away]

Direct Download: KunstlerCast_05.mp3

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The following is a transcript of KunstlerCast #4: Parking Garages. You can listen to and subscribe to this weekly audio podcast at KunstlerCast.com.

[intro music]

Duncan Crary (as host): You’re listening to the KunstlerCast, a weekly conversation about the tragic comedy of suburban sprawl. Featuring James Howard Kunstler, author of The Geography of Nowhere, The Long Emergency, and World Made by Hand. I’m Duncan Crary.

Today’s topic: parking garages.

Duncan Crary (interviewer): Well, Jim, we’ve made it to our fourth KunstlerCast. Congratulations.

James Howard Kunstler: Thank you very much.

Duncan Crary: We’re getting a lot of comments from listeners around the country. I have one from Columbus, Ohio. Would you mind if we just play that right now and get into it?

James Howard Kunstler: Columbus, Ohio, that wilderness of free parking.

Listener Caller: Hi this is Carl. I’m calling from Columbus, Ohio. I love the KunstlerCast.

I heard Mr. Kunstler mention something in show number two about the ridiculous amount of surface parking in downtown Columbus. And I just wanted to let you know that the city is talking about dropping $30 million to build two new parking garages downtown.

The mayor put out some press release saying, “Parking has long been the top concern of businesses looking to move downtown.”

And don’t get me wrong. I’m all for moving people downtown. But bringing them in cars is a little misguided. I mean why not spend that money on improving the bus system?

Building more parking garages will only encourage more traffic and congestion. And plus there’s no street-level retail in the designs for these garages.

So I just wanted to know, from your perspective, what can people do other than throw back a few beers and call your show?

I mean I guess parking garages are better than parking lots, but let’s face it, they still suck. Thanks.

Duncan Crary: OK, Jim, well I don’t know if there’s anything left to say. I think Carl covered it all, but what are your thoughts on these parking garages?

James Howard Kunstler: Well, there actually is quite a bit more to say, although he did present a pretty coherent picture of things.

What we’re not seeing here is any recognition on the part of municipal leaders, or even the people they’re serving, that these are bad investments because the future’s not going to be about parking.

In very, very few years ahead, we’re going to have enormous problems with motoring and everything connected with it: the fuel, the oil, the gasoline, people getting the cars, being able to buy them when they’re tapped out on their credit cards and their credit generally, I mean.

The whole happy motoring dynamic is really going to be fading fast. And the fact that the city leaders all over the United States are totally clueless about it and are willing to invest $30 million –which by the way will probably be bonded, meaning they’ll be assuming a lot of debt, and paying a lot of debt service at fairly high rates now because we’re in the middle of a municipal debt, credit crisis.

Duncan Crary: This is just another example of a municipality subsidizing sprawl to yank suburbanites into their town in the hopes they’ll spend some money.

This happens in Albany, where I work, too. You have all these suburbanites who drive into the city to work, they don’t spend any money when they’re actually there and then they’re gone. And the mayors of these cities are so obsessed with luring more people.

It’s kinda sad.

James Howard Kunstler: Well, they only know what they’ve known in the past. They don’t really get the fact that we’re facing a discontinuity, a break from the past.

They only know that in the past, people have lived out there, somewhere outside the city, and we’re desperate to get them inside the city.

Now, I’ve been to Columbus five or six times in the last 10 years.

Duncan Crary: Yeah, me too.

James Howard Kunstler: And interestingly, already about 75 percent of the former downtown core of Columbus, Ohio is surface parking. So they’ve already done a magnificent job of destroying most of the fabric of the town. You could make the argument that, “Oh, well, it’s better to stack the cars up in a five-story building, ” but…

Duncan Crary: I mean, it is better, but you could still design a better parking garage than the one…

James Howard Kunstler: Even on its own terms, it’s a bad design.

Duncan Crary: Yeah.

James Howard Kunstler: OK? And the guy who called in is correct. ‘Cause let’s say hypothetically during the period where it seemed like maybe a good thing to do, like maybe the early 1990s, the idea was: OK, you’ve got to build the parking structure. At least line the ground floor with some retail so it has a relationship with the street that is more or less like a normal building, so it provides some destinations for people who are walking around town, gives people something to look at as they’re traversing the block, etc, etc.

These things are fairly self-evident, but I would maintain that continuation of building parking decks is just an enormous waste of whatever dwindling resources we have.

Duncan Crary: You can’t even retrofit these buildings. I remember I heard you talking about this here in Saratoga Springs when they were going to build the new parking garage. And you were talking about if you made each floor taller –- ’cause what are the heights of a regular parking garage?

James Howard Kunstler: Well, when you’re building something other than a parking deck, you need some room overhead to run the ductwork and the plumbing and the service lines and all that stuff. So you have to have more than a seven-foot ceiling, and the trouble with these parking decks is that they have fairly low ceilings that don’t lend themselves to be retrofitted.

And also, there’s the problem of needing a central lightwell. In a structure that large, if you were going to turn it into offices or apartments, you’d have to have a core in the center that would be a lightwell that would allow you to get light in from the outside to the apartments or offices that are more toward the center of the structure.

Duncan Crary: Well forget apartments. You can’t even build a warehouse in these things, right? The ceilings aren’t even tall enough to have…

James Howard Kunstler: Well, it would be a warehouse with very short floors.

Duncan Crary: Jim, have you ever actually seen a parking garage that had liner buildings and taller ceilings and…?

James Howard Kunstler: Oh, you bet. Well, not taller ceilings, but the city of Charleston had a very successful program in the 80s and 90s under their wonderful mayor Joe Riley, who’s been mayor for like 35 years there, and is among the few elected officials in America who actually has a very firm grounding in the particulars of design.

So they built a bunch of parking decks in downtown Charleston, but they took pains to make provision for retail on the first floor. I believe I saw something like that in Savannah, too, but I don’t quite remember. But they’re around the country.

We did it in Saratoga Springs, as a matter of fact. We have a bunch of new apartment buildings about six stories high on a stretch of our downtown that used to be kind of Desolation Row. They felt they had to provide parking for the condominiums and understandably so in the age that they built them.

In any case, they did build parking into the project but they built it in such a way that they could put retail on the ground floor and load the parking in the back and they sacrificed a few spaces to get the retail on the ground floor and it was a good idea. So sure, they do it all over the country and it works fine.

Duncan Crary: So Jim, Carl, asked what he could do other than call our show. And other than cloning the Mayor of Charleston, what can people do?

James Howard Kunstler: I think it’s a very, very tough problem. And the public consensus is simply that we’re still continuing with all of the motoring and all of the accessories that got with it and we’re not willing to think about making a different kind of adjustment. The psychology of previous investment is just too big an obstacle at this point.

There will be some moment in the years ahead, probably not very far, when the shock of recognition will thunder through the population and we’ll get it. But right now, the public doesn’t get it, they’re being well represented by officials who don’t get it and the prospects of getting over something like this are not very good.

By the way, I don’t really like the idea of promoting people to be just depressed about stuff and not do anything. I think Carl should probably go through whatever motions that he feels are necessary to pursue this. And he should write a letter to the editor and go to the planning board and shout. I don’t even think it’s necessarily an act of futility. Sooner or later, the consensus will change and maybe it’ll help if one person begins by making one small move.

I, myself, go to meetings around here and you know I shout a little bit about the dumb things that we do, even though I’m under no illusion that — Here, in this town, which is a classic American Main Street Town, which has been very fortunate, there’s a consensus that we have to keep going with the car thing. In fact, tragically and, really, deeply ironically, in the previous mayoral election, we elected a so-called progressive Democratic mayor, who then took the position that it was not a good idea to continue downtown infill, which was an absurd position to take.

But she was very adamant about it and she attracted a lot of supporters. And the whole reason was that these people thought that they couldn’t park close enough to the things they want to get to. So even though the political progressives are clueless about this, and it really shows where we’re at in this country.

Duncan Crary: In an earlier show, I mentioned that I have a car, I drive a car, I like to have it sometimes. Honestly, I hate having my car, too. It’s a convenience, but most of the time it’s a nuisance. I went six months without driving it and I got squirrels in the car. They died when I turned it on, it was a horrible stink.

James Howard Kunstler: Did you eat them by the way, did they heat up there on the engine block? ‘Cause some guys have ways of cooking stuff on the engine block. You know, you put a squirrel in tinfoil…

Duncan Crary: Yeah (sarcastically)…

James Howard Kunstler: By the way I once did a story for a magazine about roadkill, and I went around interviewing a lot of aficionados of roadkill cuisine, and I asked this one guy, “What’s your criteria for freshness?” And he said, “My bumper.”

Duncan Crary: Yeah, so getting back to the topic at hand. You gotta actually maintain your car. You gotta drive it regularly or it doesn’t work.

And I’ve been thinking, my cousin lives down in New York City and he uses this thing called “zip car”, where you can just sort of like rent a car for a couple of hours, you leave it in the neighborhood. I would rather see a system like that in my town where I can just pick a car for three or four hours.

James Howard Kunstler: Well it’s very sane and rational and all. And they’re popular in Europe, they’re called “car clubs”. The zip car is one of its American manifestations.

And the idea is you don’t have to go through all the grief of car ownership and maintenance and payment. You join this club for like $800 a year and anytime you need a car to go on an excursion or go on a picnic in the country or go to a store and bring something bulky home or move to a new apartment or to a new house, you go out and you get one of these vehicles from the car club that has many kinds of different vehicles.

They have sporty vehicles for excursions and they have pick-up trucks if you need to move your stuff and blah, blah, blah.

And it would seem to be a sensible thing. But, remember, you have to have the whole social urbanistic and architectural infrastructure in place for that to work. It works fine in Amsterdam, because Amsterdam is a wonderful, walkable city. I’m talking about Amsterdam, Holland not Amsterdam, Arizona, New York, Michigan or wherever there’s another Amsterdam.

But Amsterdam, Holland is, you know — they never destroyed their traditional urban pattern. People are living in row houses and apartments in row houses fairly close together. And certainly, well integrated with all the shopping and entertainment and civic and cultural and educational stuff, all mixed in very richly — with parks, by the way, wonderfully designed green spaces, wonderful squares and full of cafes.

And so they’re not suffering from that, and anytime they need to get a car, it’s — you know, they’re not prevented from making an excursion. And any time you want a car, you go down and you get your car from the car club and you drive out to the countryside, blah, blah, blah.

You know, one of the upshots in America is that sure, we all have our own cars at our disposal all the time, but because of that, there’s almost no place in America that’s worth being in or going to. That’s one of the unintended consequences of mass automobile use is that you actually destroy the terrain so voraciously that nowhere is worth driving to.

But the other one, of course, is it’s estimated to cost oh somewhere around $6, 000 a year to keep any car on the road between the payments, the maintenance, the insurance, and the fuel… That’s generally the going rate. So if you’re only paying a thousand bucks a year to belong to a car club, and you can have one anytime you need one, you don’t have to worry about storing it and parking it or insuring it or all that stuff, great!

Duncan Crary: Yeah, I think it’s great. If they can only get a critical mass for the need in my town, I would definitely join one.

James Howard Kunstler: Well I don’t know if it’s gonna — in the United States, it’s going to be a problem because by the time we have a critical mass for that stuff, the whole motoring scene maybe in complete disarray. Between the oil problems and the problems of people affording cars in any form because we’re hemorrhaging affluence, I’m not convinced that that’s going to happen quite the way we imagined.

Duncan Crary: Well, then I’ll join a zip horse and carriage club because, as you’ve pointed out, if you watch the movies, they drive horse and buggies as if they’re Chevrolets. But really, they’re pretty complicated devices to hitch up a team.

James Howard Kunstler: Oh, yeah. You don’t just go out there with a key and put the key in your horse’s behind and take off.

Duncan Crary: You can’t just leave your horse and buggy sitting there at the curb all day.

James Howard Kunstler: No, you can’t leave your horse and buggy in the Wal-Mart parking lot for three hours.

Duncan Crary: All right, so I’ll join a horse-and-buggy zip club at the end of cheap oil.

James Howard Kunstler: It’s called a livery stable… they used to have ‘em.

Duncan Crary: Jim, thanks a lot for joining us. It’s always a pleasure and pretty darn funny, too.

James Howard Kunstler: Well, I’m glad it’s funny for you. I mean, it’s torture for me. I have to sit here and think up all these jokes.

Duncan Crary: Take care.

James Howard Kunstler: Bye.

Duncan Crary: You’ve been listening to the KunstlerCast featuring James Howard Kunstler.

To leave a listener comment, call toll free at 866-924-9499. Send email to .

You can download episodes of this program and read transcripts at KunstlerCast.com.

I’m your host, Duncan Crary, thanks for listening.

[music fades away]

Direct Download (6.9 MB): KunstlerCast_04.mp3

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The following is a transcript of KunstlerCast #3: World Made By Hand. You can listen to and subscribe to this weekly audio program at KunstlerCast.com.

[Musical Intro]

Duncan Crary (as host): You’re listening to the KunslterCast, a program about the tragic comedy of suburban sprawl. I’m Duncan Crary.

Each week I bring you another conversation with James Howard Kunstler, author of The Geography of Nowhere and The Long Emergency.

Today’s topic is World Made By Hand.

Duncan Crary (interview): Jim, thanks for joining us for another installment of the KunslterCast.

James Howard Kunstler: Nice to be here, Duncan.

Duncan Crary: Your latest novel, World Made By Hand, has been published by Atlantic Monthly Press. I understand you want to share a little bit about that book with us today.

James Howard Kunstler: Yes. I will read a little bit. But, let me tell you a little bit about it first.

When I finished The Long Emergency, which was a nonfiction book, I wanted to write a novel depicting vividly what it was like to live in a post-oil future in America. Of course, I know my own part of the world best, so it’s set in Washington County, New York, which is that little piece of land between the Hudson River and the Vermont border. It’s set in a small town.

The story opens and a group of Christian evangelicals has moved to this little town of Union Grove from the Sun Belt, which is very disorderly down there and a lot of bad things are happening. This group called “The New Faith Brotherhood” has moved to Union Grove and bought the high school — which is no longer being used — and they’ve moved in.

In this scene, the head of that group — an interesting character named Brother Jobe — is being introduced to a landholder in Union Grove. His name is Steven Bullock. He has assembled a huge plantation composed of all the small farms that were around him over the last several years, as his neighbors have gone out of business, died off, or met with misfortune.

He has become a local lord of the manor. Brother Jobe is being introduced by the protagonist of the book, Robert Earle, who is a carpenter and has worked for Mr. Bullock over time.

I’m going to read a little of this chapter:

Excerpt from World Made By Hand, by James Howard Kunstler, Atlantic Monthly Press 2008. Read by the author.

Bullock poured us each a generous sample of his whiskey from a cask in the rear, where many barrels were racked [portion not read out loud: into jade-green pony glasses made there on the premises, too. Brother Jobe tossed his dram straight back, said it was "fit for all occasions and all weathers," and Bullock refilled his glass. I had not been there for a while, but it seemed that everything was coming up at Bullock's establishment whereas everything in our town was running down. You could understand the allure of the place].

We proceeded to the horse breeding barn. Bullock was raising big Hanovers for the cart and saddle, and Percherons for freight loads. Brother Jobe said he favored a mule in the field, that it was the coming thing with all the hotter weather. Bullock said he hadn’t seen a jackass in Washington County that was worth breeding a mare to. Brother Jobe said he had just such a one and would lend it over.
“Have you tried oxen?” Bullock said. “They’re peachy in the woodlot and behind the plow.”

“I don’t know the first thing about an ox,” Brother Jobe said. “We’re all about mules where we come from.”

“I’ll tell you something about an ox,” Bullock said. “You can eat him when he’s past his prime for work.”

“That makes sense, I suppose,” Brother Jobe said. “I confess, I never tried to eat a mule either in or out of its prime.”

Bullock refilled our glasses. He said he admired Brother Jobe’s team of blacks, but the latter said that the sire had been left back in Virginia.

“We’re miserably short of new blood,” Bullock said.

“You’re welcome to try our stallion. He’s a liver-chestnut, fifteen-and-a-half hands Morgan. Maybe some time we can swap out.”

They were in excellent spirits by the time we strolled through the orchard to the beginning of Bullock’s extensive fields. The corn seemed to go on forever, but we crossed a hedgerow over a stile and came to what Bullock really wanted to show.

“Why, iddin that sweet sorghum?” Brother Jobe said. It was not a crop plant that I recognized.

“You are correct, sir,” Bullock said. “With the maple borers killing our sugar trees, and mites on our bees, we’re a bit hard up for sweetening lately.”

“Is that a fact?”

“Well, it’s this heat, you know.”

“We always had sorghum syrup on Momma’s table.”

“It’ll be a new thing here, but our people will like it, won’t they Robert?”

“I suppose they will, Stephen,” I said, not really knowing.

“It beats heck out of blackstrap molasses, I’ll tell you,” Brother Jobe said. “Milder.”

“It’s got a flavor all its own,” Bullock said.

“My point exactly,” Brother Jobe said.

The two of them seemed to be getting on like boon companions. It made me a little sick to see it, or maybe it was just the heat and the whiskey.

We made our way around the extensive property, down grassy lanes between fields of one crop and another. The corn was knee-high and lush. The buckwheat was in flower. From his years in Japan, Bullock was fond of soba noodles made from the grain. He was particularly proud of his experiments with spelt, an antique precursor of our common wheats and apparently immune to the rust disease that lurked in our soils. It did not have the gluten content of modern wheat, he said, but it was better than rye.

Copyright © James Howard Kunstler 2008

James Howard Kunstler (speaking): OK, I’m going to jump ahead a little bit. It’s the same scene but a few minutes later.

Excerpt from World Made By Hand, by James Howard Kunstler, Atlantic Monthly Press 2008. Read by the author.

We followed the road along the extensive hay fields and oat fields where they raised animal feeds, and came, at last, to the collection of little cottages that Bullock had erected over the years for his people. It really amounted to a village, but of a kind that had not been seen in America for a very long time. The cottages were deployed along a picturesque little main street with a few narrow lanes off it. There were about thirty buildings in all. This main street lacked shops or places of business because the only business there was Bullock’s business. There was a commissary building, where his people could get their household needs. I didn’t even know if they used money in it, or whether Bullock’s people even got paid. Two new cottages were under construction, meaning I supposed that more people were joining up. This, too, seemed to pique Brother Jobe’s interest.

“What do you call the place?” he said.

“Metropolis,” Bullock said.

“Ain’t that were Superman lived?” Brother Jobe said.

Bullock grinned and winked at me, and Brother Jobe grinned, too, back at Bullock. It was grins all around.

“We just call it the New Village,” Bullock said.

“I like that,” Brother Jobe said. “It’s plain and to the point.”

“Maybe when I’m dead they’ll name it after me. Bullocktown.”

“They ought to.”

“Doesn’t really roll off the tongue, though, does it?”

“There’s worse. Near us back in Virginia was a little burg name of Chugwater. And another one called Stinktown. Well, that was more like a nickname for Stickleyville.”

One larger structure stood out at the center of things, and that was the meeting hall, offset from a little grassy square at the end of the main street. Bullock’s people all generally took a mid-day meal together there and schooled the few children that they had managed to produce. It was a plain but dignified clapboard building, with large light-gathering windows, and a cupola on top for additional light. All the buildings were whitewashed.

“Is this your church?” Brother Jobe said.

“Sometimes,” Bullock said.

“Where do you stand on religion, if I might ask?” Brother Jobe said.

“[We're] not against it.”

“But you don’t minister to them.”

“Beyond my competence.”

“Maybe you’re unnecessarily modest.”

“Well, I’m not Superman. After all.”

Copyright © James Howard Kunstler 2008

Duncan Crary: [chuckle] That was great! I wasn’t expecting it to be funny.

James Howard Kunstler: Well, one of the elements of this book is actually that it contains a certain amount of comedy. This character Brother Jobe I’ve created is especially interesting.

I originally imagined that these southern evangelicals were going to be kind of dark villainous characters, and that Brother Jobe would be the chief villain, but as he came on stage, he started doing things that were more and more amusing.

And I liked having him around. And I decided I didn’t want to make him a villain after all. And if anything, he ended up being kind of quasi-crypto supernatural. But he’s not the bad guy in the piece.

And for me this is going to be an interesting element is that the evangelicals do play a large part in this book. One of the funny things about it is that their constantly proselytizing everybody that they meet, right? And they’re always failing.

Duncan Crary: [laughs]

James Howard Kunstler: Every time they come on to somebody about “Have you found Jesus?” the characters usually say things like, “Well, I really don’t have time for that crap.” And they dismiss the whole thing.

So they’re not particularly good at that, but they do have a lot of skill. They do even have a lot of good intentions. And so they’ve been set up an opposition to the rest of the community in this strange situation.

Duncan Crary: Well, in The Long Emergency, one of your predictions is that one of the only corporations that’s going to survive in the post-cheap fuel era is the Church, correct?

James Howard Kunstler: Well, yeah, and I was speaking in sort of — as an extreme case. But in the story of World Made By Hand, the townspeople in this little town in upstate New York, their activities really do center around the congregational church, which is a very mainstream, not very dogmatic, not very weird kind of church.

And the minister who is the best friend of the protagonist, the minister’s name is Lauren Holder, and he’s a middle aged man who’s going through a lot of — he’s being challenged in his faith.

He’s an interesting character. One of the weird things about it is, he’s one of the few characters who even curses in the book. I kind of decided as a policy that there was going to be less cursing in this book than in most contemporary novels.

Because I decided that in the future we would have different attitudes about it and that would be a distinction between this society in the future and how we behave now, where everybody is using bad language all the time.

But the church has become the center of the community’s activities in the absence of regular jobs. There are no corporations left. They’re not reporting at nine o’clock in the morning to some building to give their life structure.

Even the schools are basically defunct. The little school that’s going on is basically a form of church schooling or home-schooling. And probably the most important activity around this “church thing” is that the people in town have to make their own music.

It’s very important to them; it’s one of the few adhesives that holds their collective life together.

Duncan Crary: Kurt Vonnegut talked about that once. I don’t know, I can’t remember exactly what he said but it was something like — Every little clan, every little tribe, had the talented singer, the talented actor, talented performer. But once, TV and radio and mass media came out they just weren’t as good. Nobody watched them anymore. They really lost their role in society.

James Howard Kunstler: Well, it became professionalized and canned. In World Made By Hand, there are no longer any canned entertainments.

Duncan Crary: One of my favorite science fiction books about the future is H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine. I know that’s an obvious one, but what I really love about it is that, in H. G. Wells’ future, there is no technology. Everything is run down and reverted back to a more natural state in a way.

There’s this other thing with Morlocks and stuff but when we envision a future, a lot of it we think of flying cars and all that stuff. And your book takes it a whole other direction.

James Howard Kunstler: The mentality of the 20th century, especially in sci-fi literature, was always this idea that there was going to be more of everything, and everything would become more complex. In fact, the whole Long Emergency is largely about the failures of complexity and the collapse of complexity, and the diminishing returns of technology and how we got ourselves in trouble with that.

I chose the title World Made By Hand, very carefully because what’s happened is we have reverted to some quasi-medieval existence. Although with a whole lot of recognizably American culture, landmarks, and hallmarks and earmarks.

Duncan Crary: Well here’s something I’ve noticed about these “Apocalypse” movies like Mad Max. You know these future — Do you notice that even in Mad Max they’re all driving cars?

James Howard Kunstler: Absolutely!

Duncan Crary: [laughing]

James Howard Kunstler: One of the queerest things about that, and people are always imagining that my version of the future is like Mad Max, which couldn’t be more wrong. Yeah, Mad Max is a car chase.

Duncan Crary: Even Kevin Costner’s Water World, there’s no land left but they’re still driving jet skis.

James Howard Kunstler: Yeah, and it’s hilarious. In World Made By Hand, there’s really only one car in the whole book, and it’s moving under rather peculiar, pathetic, and tragic circumstances. And it’s not on stage very long before it stops running.

And in fact, the whole automobile thing is over. And indeed, the electricity has flickered out. These people are not getting radio or TV. They barely even know what’s going on in the United States. Somewhere out there is a president named Harvey Albright.

Duncan Crary: Where is he, in Minnesota?

James Howard Kunstler: Yeah, he’s in Minneapolis because Washington’s been bombed. But they have no idea how he got elected or what he’s doing. For all practical purposes, life is all about what happens in their county, and not much beyond that.

Duncan Crary: Well, thanks for talking with us about World Made By Hand. Everyone go out there and buy a copy. Thanks a lot Jim.

James Howard Kunstler: Yeah, it’s a ripping yarn.

[background music]

Duncan Crary: [laughing] Thanks a lot.

Listener Caller: This is David Reese. I’m in Waltham Massachusetts. I’ve just listened to the first two KunstlerCasts. I think this is just a great addition and I will eagerly look forward each week to a new KunstlerCast. Thanks very much for having them.

Duncan Crary (as host): You’ve been listening to the KunstlerCast featuring James Howard Kunstler. To leave a listener comment, call toll free at 866-924-9499.

Send email to:

You can download episodes of this program and read transcripts at KunstlerCast.com.

I’m your host, Duncan Crary. Thanks for listening.

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The following is a transcript of KunstlerCast #2: Small Cities & Towns. You can listen to and subscribe to this weekly audio program at KunstlerCast.com.

[intro music]

Duncan Crary (as host): You’re listening to the KunstlerCast, an audio program about the tragic comedy of suburban sprawl. I’m your host, Duncan Crary.

Each week I bring you another conversation with James Howard Kunstler, author of The Geography of Nowhere and The Long Emergency.

Today’s topic: The end of oil: small cities and towns.

Duncan Crary (interview): Jim, thank you for joining us for another installment of the KunstlerCast.

James Howard Kunstler: It’s always a pleasure to be here with you, Duncan.

Duncan Crary: I just finished reading The Long Emergency and I want to talk with you about it. But first, for our listeners, can you give a — like, a brief synopsis of what The Long Emergency is about?

James Howard Kunstler: Well, yeah. It’s really about how we are heading into a period of resource scarcity and the depletion of our oil supplies, and the disruption, long before we run out of oil, the disruption of the oil markets and the allocation of this crucial resource all around the world, and the geopolitical implications of those inequities.

And how these problems are going to combine with climate change and… In so many ways relating to everything from how we produce our food, how food is distributed around the world…

Duncan Crary: The end of the 7, 000-mile-Caesar salad, as you say.

James Howard Kunstler: Yeah, how we’re going to have trade and manufacturing when Wal-Mart dies. And not least, what the destiny of the suburban, car dependent, happy motoring living arrangement is. Which is probably, for me, the biggest part of the equation.

Duncan Crary: Yeah, I mean if I were to sum it up I’d say, “We’re going to run out of oil, we’ve always known this. A lot of alternative fuels are sort of fantasy.

“We’ve just been living with reckless abandon up to this point, just ignoring the inevitable future. It’s coming, it’s going to happen.”

Whether it pans out exactly the way you envision it — ehh, you know that’s — well that’s yet to be seen. But it’s going to happen.

James Howard Kunstler: Yeah, my version is only one plausible future. And even its plausibility may be arguable.

Duncan Crary: OK. So some of your critics on the Internets, I’ve been reading — one thing in common they all say is that they think your looking forward to this, almost like payback to all these idiots who’ve been driving SUV’s around. You know, living in McMansions. Are you looking forward to this?

James Howard Kunstler: Well, I’m not — I don’t feel vengeful about it, you know, like some character out of a Tony Soprano drama trying to whack his adversaries.

Duncan Crary: Right [laughs]

James Howard Kunstler: The way I feel about it is that we have got a manner of life that produces a tremendous amount of discomfort, distress, unhappiness, anxiety, depression, hardship, violence.

And that when circumstances compel us to live differently we’re going to benefit hugely from making these changes… from getting away from a lot of the habits and practices that we’ve been engaged in.

Duncan Crary: OK. So you’re not a “fundamentalist” New Urbanist who’s waiting for the apocalypse to bring about the end of suburbia. But you do think that…

James Howard Kunstler: Well, I’m not a Luddite. I am a New Urbanist, and I am in pretty thorough going agreement with their principles. They’re certainly not trying to destroy American society.

If anything they were among the reformers who had the most comprehensive and kindest vision of a possible positive outcome for the set of changes we’re heading into.

Duncan Crary: What about your critics — this I read more about The Geography of Nowhere — but what about your critics who accuse you of extreme nostalgia for a life before the car? How do you address that?

James Howard Kunstler: The word “nostalgia” itself is interesting because it literally means homesickness. It became evident to me that part of the whole suburban dilemma is that as a culture, as a nation, as a people, we are tremendously homesick — but not just for a box that we call “a home”; but for a real dwelling place for our society and our communities that is worth caring about.

The chief characteristic of just about everything we built in suburbia is that it ended up being stuff that wasn’t worth caring about. And that had tremendous cultural implications for us.

Duncan Crary: In reading your book (The Long Emergency), I wanted to ask you: have you sort of given up on New Urbanism to an extent? Have you sort of given up on putting the effort to curb sprawl?

Because reading your book, correct me if I’m wrong, but I almost felt like these systems are going to run out of steam anyway. So why even bother? Why not just sit back and get a good seat for the show?

James Howard Kunstler: Well, exactly. It will be self-evident that we cannot continue this for many reasons, not just for energy reasons. We’re also going to be running into severe limitations with the increment of finance that’s available to build anymore of this.

What it comes down to is we’re not going to be building anymore of a living arrangement that has no future, because it will be self-evidently an exercise in futility.

I haven’t given up on the New Urbanism at all. But I do regard their stock and trade of the last 15 years — the traditional neighborhood development running about 400 acres, built out in a cornfield or cow pasture — I don’t think we’re going to see much more of that, for a number of reasons.

The New Urbanists, in recent years, became hostages of the production homebuilding industry, and they hitched themselves to the methods and practices and financing increments of that industry. And the production homebuilding industry is now crapping out — they’re going down.

I don’t think that the finance for projects that large is going to be available in the future, because there’s going to be a hell of a lot less capital for investment in this kind of thing.

We’re not going to build new developments of any kind in the cow pastures and meadows and cornfields because we’re going to need the ‘ag-land’ in any case.

That kind of work that was done by the New Urbanists will be viewed in hindsight as a transitional, transformational mode of development. The real achievement of the New Urbanists was not building the projects like Seaside, etc.

It was diving into the garbage can of history and retrieving that important principle and methodology for understanding how to design and assemble real towns and real cities.

And I think that it will now be applied to the existing small cities and towns, in places like Troy; it’s already happening in Saratoga — and increasingly, that will be the case.

The increment in development will be smaller. Instead of doing these 400-acre new town projects, we’ll be lucky if we can do a new intersection or a new corner in a town, or a new block; or, for that matter, one or two really good building lots on a block.

Duncan Crary: I’ve got to say, it might sound very dark to some people. To me, it sounds overly-optimistic. I feel like you’re being overly-optimistic in the American people.

Aren’t they going to be building malls and cul-de-sacs right until the very end, the very last drop of oil?

James Howard Kunstler: Yeah, I think we’re doing that now. It is the very end of that. One of the things that we are seeing, just now in the winter of 2008, is that a commercial real estate crash is following the implosion of the residential real estate crash.

And you know it makes sense because, in essence, the commercial stuff always follows in sequence the residential development. And so now you’re seeing huge problems with the strip malls and office parks and ‘big box’ power centers that were permitted way back in 2005, 2006.

They are now running into enormous financing problems. Their customers are losing their disposable income as they lose their jobs and their incomes go down, and they get into troubles.

The whole equation of commercial building is changing very quickly and drastically. I think that we’re going to be in serious trouble in five years.

There’s no question that we’re going to be running into trouble with the oil export crisis, which is a new layer of market instability on top of the general depletion picture.

Duncan Crary: Now, I mean, I own a car. I drive a car. But I don’t make 11 trips a day in my car.

I like having a car if I want to drive it, but I felt myself kind of looking forward to some parts of this future you envision, a return to the local, better transportation ideas.

One of the reasons I moved to Troy, New York is I spotted it as a nice, livable, small, manageable city. I could have sort of the benefits of an urban neighborhood, but I could walk out into the country fairly easy.

People laugh at me for living in Troy, New York — they’re out in the suburbs. I feel like, once the Long Emergency starts, places like Troy will be perfectly suited for the new future. Am I a crank or what?

James Howard Kunstler: Well Troy is an interesting case, because it was so neglected for so long that it actually retained a tremendous amount of very valuable pre-automobile dependent fabric. You know, great neighborhoods composed of really sturdy, brownstone, row houses.

Duncan Crary: They left about 75 percent of the city standing.

James Howard Kunstler: Yeah.

Duncan Crary: Which is a lot for these days, right?

James Howard Kunstler: You bet, because you know, for example, Columbus, Ohio?

Duncan Crary: Yeah.

James Howard Kunstler: Seventy-Five percent of Columbus, Ohio is surface parking.

Duncan Crary: Wow!

James Howard Kunstler: You see, and that’s not unusual. But Troy had just a tremendous amount of great buildings.

In fact, the part of the old downtown was so wonderful that Martin Scorsese went up there in the 1990’s and used it as a set for his movie The Age of Innocence.

Duncan Crary: Yeah, I know.

James Howard Kunstler: These places are coming back. One of the reasons that they will, is that in the future we’re going to have to have human urban habitats that have a meaningful relationship with productive ag-land outside of the city that’s not 3, 000 miles away. We’re going to have to grow a certain amount of our own food closer to home. In short, what had either already become suburbs or was slated to become more suburbs, that whole relationship is going to come to an end.

I happen to believe that the suburban project in the larger sense is coming to an end. The collapse of the housing bubble is viewed by a lot of people as just another part of a down cycle, in an endless set of repeating cycles. But I think in fact this is the end of all those cycles, and we’re simply not going to be doing it anymore.

Duncan Crary: So, just for the benefit of our listeners, I wanted to describe really briefly, Troy is a small city. It was built for probably 75, 000, now it’s about 45, 000 residents.

It’s pretty dense urban structure, but (downtown is) only about five blocks deep, situated on the Hudson River. So you have access to waterways, an extensive system of waterways.

There is some sprawl outside of town, but, I don’t know, the hilly geography or something has prevented your typical sprawl tumors that bubble up on the outside of town. So I’m sure there are tons of other cities, small cities around the country, situated in a similar spot.

James Howard Kunstler: You’d be surprised how in many ways different they are, and how different their circumstances are.

There are some things that fairly uniform. Just about every town in America has its mall, has its asteroid belt of suburban, commercial crap outside.

But Troy is an especially interesting case because its economy died so completely after about 1960, and a lot of that suburban stuff just didn’t happen on the outskirts.

Duncan Crary: Well, you also, in The Long Emergency kind of go through different regions in the country and you predict, you foresee their future.

Troy being in the Northeast, you think the Northeast is going to do pretty well after the end of cheap oil. Except for the megapolis from Boston to Baltimore, right?

James Howard Kunstler: Well, yeah. I gave some thought to these things. It seemed to me that the places that had brighter prospects were the places that were near water; water for different purposes: drinking water certainly and water for households, but also the possibility of water power generating electricity on a modest scale.

And water transport, which I think is going to become a much bigger thing again. And of course, Troy is in the Hudson River estuary, which is one of the truly great waterways of our country.

I also said that the Sun Belt was going to be troubled going into the future. And that there was going to be an inverse relationship to the degree that it prospered in the late 20th century and to the degree that it has tremendous trouble going forward now.

Duncan Crary: Let me just clarify, the Sun Belt you’re talking about, on the West Coast?

James Howard Kunstler: Actually, there are really sort of two sun belts. There’s the wet Sun Belt which is the Southeast, Atlanta, basically from the Atlantic Ocean to Dallas. And then there’s the dry Sunbelt which is everything west of that to the Pacific Ocean, and that includes Phoenix and Tucson and Los Angeles.

Both of those regions are going to be in a lot of trouble, but not exactly for the same reasons.

Duncan Crary: So do you have any recommendations for a young guy like me? Should I stay put in Troy or what should I do?

James Howard Kunstler: I have a very different view of what’s going to be happening to the big cities than many other commentators.

I think that the big cities are going to be contracting substantially, and in probably a pretty disorderly way. They’re going to enter insolvency, bankruptcy, difficulty in maintaining services. It’s going to be pretty gnarly in the big metroplexes of America.

Personally I think that the small cities and the small towns are going to tend to be the more successful areas. And that young people ought to be very careful about choosing the places that they go.

Part of that whole decision will be a regional decision. Do I move to Phoenix, Arizona or do I move to the Northeast or to the Upper Midwest?

I think the places that are around water, that have good agricultural land. Places that have small cities that exist at a scale that can be rebuilt are all going to have advantages.

The Upper Midwest now is a basket case, but it’s also the center of the Great Lakes, which is the greatest freshwater inland sea in the world, and has tremendous possibilities at least for maritime trade on a regional basis.

These are things that we’re not thinking about at all yet, but they’re going to come to play a much larger role in our society.

Duncan Crary: All right, well Jim, it’s always a pleasure talking to you. Thanks a lot.

James Howard Kunstler: Always a pleasure to be here with you.

[music]

Duncan Crary (as host): You’ve been listening to “The KunstlerCast,” featuring James Howard Kunstler. To leave a listener comment, call toll free at 866-924-9499. Send email to

You can download episodes of this program and read transcripts at KunstlerCast.com. I’m your host Duncan Crary, thanks for listening.

[music]

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