Veritas et Venustas: Architecture Critic of the Year: James Howard Kunstler

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Thursday, January 24, 2008

Architecture Critic of the Year: James Howard Kunstler

THE 2008 results are already coming in. Those who don't know Jim Kunstler's work should look at his Eyesores of the Month. Here's the January 2008 Eyesore — you might think it's a Photoshop joke, but it's just another monument to Starchitecture and the human ego (text by Jim and the Starchitect):

Another American city bends over to pick up the soap for a gang of Eurotrash art theory hustlers. The addition to the Akron Art Museum by competition winners Coop Himmelb(l)au. (That's how they spell it -- cute, huh?). Here's what the designers say about their building:

The museum design introduces the firm's unique approach to historic structures, pioneered in Vienna, to the United States.... The museum of today is not any longer only the storage of knowledge, it is an urban concept. The museum of the future is a three-dimensional sign in the city, which transports the content of our visual world. There are no longer showrooms, which show digital and analogue visual information in the most diverse forms, but also the spaces which cater to urban experiences... Rather than going to the museum simply to look at art, visitors are welcomed to engage in artistic discourse, attend music and arts festivals, or maybe just hang out on their way elsewhere.

Well, okay. Whatever. To me it just looks like a mechanical alligator snarfing down a Beaux Arts post office. Note the baleful blank wall that the addition presents to the street. Surely this is not an "innovation," since American cities are composed of little more than blank wall buildings. The upper jaw thing hanging over the original building is called "the roof cloud." I suppose it will allow visitiors to "hang out" on the roof of the old building when it's raining out. Or something like that.

December's Eyesore: "The winner of the competition for the new National Library of the Czech Republic in Prague: a previously unknown parastic protozoa related to Cryptosporidium muris, which causes debilitating diarrheal disease in rodents, also believed to be transmissable in humans and responsible for a recent outbreak at the Czech National Bramboráky-and-Bratwurst Cook-off in October."

January 24, 2008 in Architecture, Culture, Current Affairs, New Urbanism, Weblogs | Permalink