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

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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.

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