James Howard Kunstler’s riff on the eighteenth [US] Congress of the New Urbanism [Atlanta GA] – “held in the shadow of a banking system in extreme crisis and an epic ecological catastrophe brewing in the Gulf of Mexico. The three crises of capital, energy, and global ecology will now determine what we do, not the polls or the marketing analyses or the whims of “consumers.” The great achievement of the New Urbanists was not the projects they built during the final orgasm of the cheap energy orgy. It was the knowledge they retrieved from the dumpster of history…”
See the full piece at: Out of Darkness (warning: occasional coarse language)
I met James Howard Kunstler at the Digital Earth Summit in Auckland 2006 where he signed my copy of his book “The Long Emergency” giving me a wry inquisitive smile when I told him I was an architect. I think it is fair to say that JHK is no fan of architects. I commented that, like writers, all architects are not the same.
His boilerpate bio says he was born in New York City in 1948. He moved to the Long Island suburbs in 1954 and returned to the city in 1957 where he spent most of his childhood. He graduated from the State Univerity of New York, Brockport campus, worked as a reporter and feature writer for a number of newspapers, and finally as a staff writer for Rolling Stone Magazine. In 1975, he dropped out to write books on a full-time basis. He has no formal training in architecture or the related design fields.
He has lectured at Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Dartmouth, Cornell, MIT, RPI, the University of Virginia and many other colleges, and he has appeared before many professional organizations such as the AIA , the APA., and the National Trust for Historic Preservation.