Support this blog by visiting Jim’s Patreon Page And thanks to all my Patrons for your support Behold the Bel Air (Los Angeles) real estate venture called The One. (There is no other One… it’s the only One). This exercise in wretched excess on steroids (with sugar on top) is a house, in case you more »
Visit this blog’s sponsor. Vaulted is an online mobile web app for investing in allocated and deliverable physical gold: Kunstler.com/vaulted
Additional support from SageRestoration.com:
If you’re interested in supporting this blog, check out the Patreon page.
Attention Movie Producers!
JHK’s screenplay in hard-copy edition
A Too-Big-To-Fail Bankster…
Three Teenagers who bring him down…
Gothic doings on a Connecticut Estate.
High velocity drama!
Now Live on Amazon
“Simply the best novel of the 1960s”
Now in Paperback !
Only Seven Bucks!
JHK’s Three-Act Play
A log mansion in the Adirondack Mountains…
A big family on the run…
A nation in peril…
Get your Official JHK swag on Cafe Press
The fourth and final book of the World Made By Hand series.
Battenkill Books (autographed by the Author) | Northshire Books | Amazon
JHK’s lost classic now reprinted as an e-book
Kindle edition only
Archive | Eyesore of the Month
RSS feed for this section
December 2021
Support this blog by visiting Jim’s Patreon Page And thanks to all my Patrons for your support Behold the proposed Affirmation Tower by Brit architect Sir David Adjaye for a site adjacent to the Javits Convention Center in New York City. At 1,663 feet, it would be the new tallest building in the city, surpassing the more »
November 2021
Support this blog by visiting Jim’s Patreon Page And thanks to all my Patrons for your support Behold, the alluring paint-job on the abandoned St. Joseph’s Hospital in Sudbury, Ontario, Canada — a land renowned for its horrifying buildings. This head-shaker of a humdinger — called by locals “the once-a-year Halloween Zombie Hotel” — is the more »
October 2021
Support this blog by visiting Jim’s Patreon Page And thanks to all my Patrons for your support Behold The Moon Resort and Casino proposed as the next big Wow for Las Vegas in global capital’s never-ending search for titillating alternatives to reality. The usual superlatives apply to this $5-billion project: 5,000 suites, 2,500-seat theater, an attached more »
September 2021
Support this blog by visiting Jim’s Patreon Page And thanks to all my Patrons for your support! Welcome to the new annex (gray thing, right side) for Liljevalchs, Stockholm’s Museum of Contemporary Art, an above-ground version of Berlin’s Fuhrerbunker, (circa 1943). Notice how well-harmonized and proportioned (not) every element between the two structures is — scale, cladding, more »
August 2021
Support this blog by visiting Jim’s Patreon Page And thanks to all my Patrons for your support! Behold the Brøndby Garden City in Denmark, an experiment that has been around since 1964, but worth discussing in these day of hysterical Green-O-mania, the social response to climate change activism aggravated by worsening resource and capital scarcity, plus more »
July 2021
Support this blog by visiting Jim’s Patreon Page And thanks to all my Patrons for your support! Behold, the Luma Arts Tower, Arles, France; architects: Frank Gehry Anabelle Selldorf, Selldorf Architects. Arles, you recall, was the headquarters of the painter Vincent Van Gogh in his prime (1888-89). And so the idea in recent years has more »
June 2021
Support this blog by visiting Jim’s Patreon Page And thanks to all my Patrons for your support! Behold, the “Little Island” mini-park in the Hudson River, occupying the former site of Pier 54, now demolished, where survivors of the Titanic landed in 1912. This is the second big public art statement installed around the lower Manhattan more »
May 2021
Support this blog by visiting Jim’s Patreon Page And thanks to all my Patrons for your support! Behold the CopenHill Energy Plant and Urban Recreation Center, Copenhagen, Denmark, Arch-Daily’s “Building-of-the-Year,” designed by the super-hot Bjarke Ingels Group… embodying all the tragic contradictions of the contemporary condition: the desperate desire to connect to “nature” (and to have more »
April 2021
Support this blog by visiting Jim’s Patreon Page And thanks to all my Patrons for your support! Behold: Blockchain City, Nevada, proposed for a wasteland outside Reno. Styling itself as a new “cryptocurrency-powered smart city,” the project un-smartly (i.e. stupidly) incorporates every techno-narcissistic trope possible: megastructures, “green” everything in the desert, a continuation of car-dependency, more »
March 2021
Support this blog by visiting Jim’s Patreon Page And thanks to all my Patrons for your support! Behold the Helix, Amazon’s new East Coast headquarters proposed for Arlington, Virginia, across the river from that great National Swamp of grift and favors known as the District of Columbia. You know what’s going on here, right? Trick question more »
February 2021
Support this blog by visiting Jim’s Patreon Page Behold, a proposal to redevelop the block around St. Lucy’s Church, Jersey City, NJ. Yet another exercise in misunderstanding the future counterposes a human-scaled ensemble of traditional buildings squashed underneath a despotic death Borg of computer-assisted banality designed by the firm MVMK (Minervini Vandermark Melia Kelly). You more »
January 2021
Support this blog by visiting Jim’s Patreon Page And thanks to all my Patrons for your support! Behold, the fabulous sculpture called “Jubilee!” installed next to the Home Suites 2 by Hilton (a hotel, if you’re wondering) at the Sea Shells Collections Shopping Center in Gulf Breeze Florida . It is supposed to represent three more »
December 2020
Support this blog by visiting Jim’s Patreon Page Behold: the proposal for a 160-story, 2418-foot tall “carbon neutral” skyscraper from the French architecture firm Rescubika on New York City’s Roosevelt Island. It incorporates 36 wind turbines, 8,300 shrubs, 1,600 trees, 83,000 square feet of plant walls, and nearly 23,000 square feet of solar panels. The project is more »
November 2020
Support this blog by visiting Jim’s Patreon Page Architect Sir David Adjaye becomes the first back-to-back winner (Oct, Nov) at the Eyesore of the Month with this unfortunate and misconceived humdinger for lower Manhattan at 130 William Street. Unfortunate because this kind of residential mega-tower was the-thing-to-do just a year ago, before Covid-19 rang out around more »
October 2020
Support this blog by visiting Jim’s Patreon Page Behold: the New Princeton University Art Museum! Or is that the box that it came in??? Yeah, I know, an old gag, but it still works. What you get here is just another exercise in fake originality. How many of these floating boxes are there in the world? more »
September 2020
Support this blog by visiting Jim’s Patreon Page Behold, the second coming of St. Thomas Parish Church Washington, DC (1517 18th Street NW, off Dupont Circle). Kind of looks like the musical instrument that the space aliens flew down to Earth in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Spielberg, 1977) to play the dumb-ass tune that more »
August 2020
Support this blog by visiting Jim’s Patreon Page Behold the “Shipwreck Tower” in Prague, proposed to be the Czech Republic’s tallest building at 440 feet, about 40 stories. This humdinger was conceived, obviously, before Covid-19 raced around the world. What you get is another colossal art stunt incorporated into an office building, a virtue-signaling gag telling more »
July 2020
Support this blog by visiting Jim’s Patreon Page Behold: the Perot Museum of Nature and Science in downtown Dallas, Texas — if you can even call this inchoate mash-up of low-rise crapola, parking lots, and freeway ramps a downtown. The building was designed by Eyesore of the Month All-time Champeen, Thom Mayne (countless humdingers over the more »
June 2020
The Eyesore of the Month! Support this blog by visiting Jim’s Patreon Page Behold, the Grand Castle Apartment Homes, Granville, Michigan. “Live like a King!! the brochure says. Well, fer sure, because America is going medieval after the New Great Depression is through with us. Actually, there are federal penitentiaries that have better-designed neo-medieval details than more »
May 2020
Support this blog by visiting Jim’s Patreon Page Architect Thom Mayne and his Morphosis firm are great favorites here, year after year, and they’ve come up with a new humdinger expressing every trope of techno-narcisismo idiocy in circulation — at least until the corona virus put the schnitz on what used to be considered our more »
April 2020
Support this blog by visiting Jim’s Patreon Page Behold: The embassy of the Peoples’ Republic of China, Washington DC, a fortification undreamed of in the most garish nightmares of the Marquis de Vauban. Only this death-star was designed by American architect, the late I.M. Pei’s outfit, Pei Partnership. What were the Chinese expecting back in 2007? Godzilla? more »
March 2020
Support this blog by visiting Jim’s Patreon Page Behold the Universita Luigi Bocconi, School of Economics, Milan, Italy by Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara, principals of Grafton Architects, Dublin, Ireland, winners of this year’s Pritzker prize. The Pritzker is considered the most prestigious prize in the architectural world. The Pritzker committee is crazy for Orwellian dystopias, and more »
February 2020
Support this blog by visiting Jim’s Patreon Page Behold the Court of Justice (Provincial Offenses Office, no kidding), Brantford, Ontario, in Canada, our neighbor to the north. Kind of looks like a water-boarding salon. Or maybe try a relaxing session in the Iron Maiden sensory deprivation casket! Tired of manicures? Have your fingernails removed altogether more »
January 2020
Support this blog by visiting Jim’s Patreon Page Behold, Appleton Wisconsin’s new “Big Head” public sculpture by local artist Paul Bobrowitz, constructed of welded empty propane tanks. It occupies a site in one of Appleton’s historic districts. Contemporary art generally includes a manual of metaphysical theory to explain itself, but apparently this one was loosed upon the more »
Read More
Living in The Long Emergency
Available for pre-order
Publication March 2020
Click for autographed copies from Battenkill Books
Global Crisis, the Failure of the Futurists, and the Early Adapters Who Are Showing Us the Way Forward
Forget the speculation of pundits and media personalities. For anyone asking “Now what?” the answer is out there. You just have to know where to look.
In his 2005 book, The Long Emergency, James Howard Kunstler described the global predicaments that would pitch the USA into political and economic turmoil in the 21st century—the end of affordable oil, climate irregularities, and flagging economic growth, to name a few. Now, he returns with a book that takes an up-close-and-personal approach to how real people are living now—surviving The Long Emergency as it happens.
Published by BenBella Books, Inc.
Too Much Magic
Wishful Thinking, Technology, and the Fate of the Nation
The nationally best-selling author of "The Long Emergency" expands on his alarming argument that our oil-addicted, technology-dependent society is on the brink of collapse—that the long emergency has already begun. Published by the Atlantic Monthly Press.
CBRN: Surviving Chemical, Biological, Radiological & Nuclear Events
"We live in a dangerous world, and it is constantly being made even more dangerous by technological developments, many of which bring with them unintended consequences which technology is often powerless to remedy."
CBRN, by Piero San Georgio and Chris Millenium is all about surviving, chemical, biological, and nuclear events. Important!