Behold the winner of eVolo Magazine’s 2016 Skyscraper Competition. I know… “Say, what…?” you say. This latest exercise in techno-narcissism by trendster architects Yitan Sun and Jianshi Wu imagines the massive excavation of New York’s Central Park and the re-fashioning of its bedrock into a fantasy sunken wilderness landscape with a 1000-foot high glass wall around the whole more »
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March 2016
Behold! The Raptor has landed! Hail Santiago Calatrava’s World Trade Center Transportation Hub, with its grand opening this month. Starchitecture’s latest bowling trophy is less huge (yuge-uh!) than it looks. Check out the scale of construction vehicles at it’s beak end (or is that cloaca?) Cost $4-plus billion. It is not, by the way, New York more »
February 2016
Support this blog by visiting Jim’s Patreon Page! Behold the Evolution Tower in Moscow, the clever DNA-themed behemoth joining the other bowling trophies in the Russian Capital’s jazzed-up Trade Center district skyline. It will be interesting to see how they clean all those curvey windows. Techno-narcissistic building stunts of this kind signal the end of an more »
January 2016
Behold, the renovated exterior of the Peterson Automotive Museum under construction in Los Angeles. We build these horrifying objects because we can. They are enabled by computer aided design (CAD) and the computer aided fabrication of modular construction materials. Sounds like a good deal, huh? Except the diminishing returns of technology never sleep, and in more »
December 2015
Behold the proposed new headquarters for “artist” Damien Hirst’s new one-man gallery (i.e. Museum gift shop) in Lambeth, south London, just west of Waterloo station. As with so many contemporary Gotcha buildings, it seems as though we’ve seen this one a dozen times before because it’s so original. It would replace an ugly five story apartment building that more »
November 2015
Behold the stylish new Dr Chau Chak Wing Building at the University of Technology Sydney (Australia) by starchitect Frank Gehry. Every college has to have its Gehry. This one appears to be a stack of old-fashioned brown paper grocery bags, or something like that. Here’s the catch: it will never be renovated. It will have one more »
October 2015
Hey, who left that stack of Fed-Ex boxes in the middle of downtown Vancouver? Wait a minute… that’s the proposed new Vancouver art museum designed by Swiss starchitects Herzog & de Meuron. Anyone who’s been through the Vancouver Airport knows that they are very into the “environmental look” there. In the building trades, that means lots more »
September 2015
Behold: the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston all pimped out with exciting bling! (Note the “gold” chain supporting the colorful whaddayacallit — five-armed ju-ju talisman? Hypnotic ass pillow?) Here’s what the Gardner Museum Bulletin says about it: Fenway Deity is part of the Garden Deities series created by Ken Smith. The large inflatable installation, with a more »
August 2015
Behold the Anaheim, CA, Regional Transportation Intermodal Center (ARTIC). It’s a LEED Platinum champeen! It is also running a $2 million operating deficit after opening earlier this year. Revenue was expected from naming rights, but so far no corporation has paid to have its name plastered on the end-wall. An average of 460 Metrolink and 300 more »
July 2015
Behold the condo renovation of the Holy Trinity German Church and Rectory in Boston’s South End designed by Finegold Alexander & Associates for developer New Boston Ventures. It was approved a few weeks ago by the Boston redevelopment agency. Granted, the task does raise the question: just how do you cram 33 condo units to a structure more »
June 2015
Behold the “Pterodactyl,” a combination parking garage and office structure designed by Eric Owen Moss for Culver City, California, To this observer, it’s more train wreck than prehistoric flying reptile. It’s also yet another demonstration of how buildings can be torqued and tweaked with computer-aided design (CAD) in order to produce maximum maintenance problems and the more »
May 2015
Behold the new Government Center Transit (“T”) stop in Boston, Mass., with the 1966-vintage “Brutalist” City Hall looming balefully in the background. What you see here is the artist’s computer rendering. See below for a photograph of the actual thing under construction. Thanks to Architecture blogger David Brussat for illuminating the failures of this humdinger: more »
April 2015
I waited until April 2 because this is no joke. Behold the proposed new Kingdom Tower for Jeddah, Saudi Arabia — at one full kilometer in height, about twice the size of New York’s new Freedom Tower. The Kingdom Tower comprises 252 floors of mixed market apartments, hotel rooms, and offices. It is an axiom that more »
March 2015
Behold the proposed new Google headquarters, Mountain View (Silicon Valley), CA. Google, of course, has enough walking around money in its deep pockets to indulge in the most fantastic architectural status stunt — meaning that the diminishing returns of great wealth and cleverness will bite extra hard. This, uh, structure, by Bjark Ingles and Thomas more »
February 2015
Here come the borgs! Introducing the new US Federal Courthouse in Salt lake City designed by Thomas Phifer and Partners. They’ve really caught that old security state spirit in a building that looks uncannily like the computer server that contains your credit record, your tax filings, your phone log, your internet purchase trail, the drone photos more »
January 2015
Behold, another 80-story hotel / condo tower by the industrious Chicago architect Jeanne Gang for a site on the south bank of the Chicago River. I suggest this new style be labeled “architwerkture,” since it looks like a digitized schematic representation of something Miley Cyrus might do on an awards show. The project is a more »
December 2014
Behold the grandiosity of the George Lucas Museum of Narrative Art proposed for the Chicago lakefront. It is unclear exactly what it might contain besides the costumes and props for Lucas’s Star Wars cinema franchise. The public relations bullshit cooked up to promote this roughly 30–story-tall monstrosity tells the tale in superlative bombast: The Lucas more »
November 2014
Behold the official reception hall of the Kansas Expo Center in Topeka, the state fairground. Heritage Hall, one of the oldest buildings in Kansas, has been retrofitted as a party shack enclosed between the convention center, Capital Plaza hotel, and a great American desert of parking lots. Curiously, they stuck a plastic portico on the sandstone more »
October 2014
Behold the creeping bollards of Boston. These globules are found in front of the Tip O’Neill Federal Building on Causeway Street in Boston. Combine post 9/11 paranoia with the endemic American hatred of artistry, with the opportunity to money-grub in the trough of public works, and you end up with another parody of civilized life. Below, more »
September 2014
Behold the new gerbil cage for children in Queensbury, New York. Notice that there are no children there. The reason: it is a completely unrewarding place to play. In fact, it was designed not for children but for lawyers in this lawsuit-happy land. In attempting remove every possible hazard to health and safety, they more »
August 2014
Behold, the latest addition to the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass, by architect Tadao Ando. Add to your collection of sleek Modernist bowling trophies. The world has had enough of minimalism on steroids; it just doesn’t know it yet. It’s ironic, for sure, arising as it does out of such a maximalist culture more »
July 2014
Behold the proposed new addition to the suite of glass boxes on Granville Street in Halifax, Nova Scotia. O Canada! Are you trying to out-do the stupidity and vulgarity of your neighbor to the south? Apart from the obvious perversity of cantilevering over the historic Province House — an early legislative building — note the more »
June 2014
Behold the Aqua Tower by architect Jeanne Gang, Chicago. Of course, the skyscraper is an obsolete building form because the ones we’ve already got will never be renovated in the coming era of resource and capital scarcity. But that doesn’t stop the developers and architects from creating new ones — especially at this climax moment more »
May 2014
WTF ???? Behold the proposed new public artwork for the Boulder, Colorado, Library. Which part is the “art?” you may ask yourself. Why, the grand affirmation Yes! Straight out of the Nike advertising playbook, this totemic gesture informs all Boulderites (Bouldarians? Boulderopolitans? Boulderholics?) that yes! they can… er… what…? Cross the six-laner safely? more »
April 2014
Behold the new Emerson College “complex” (s0-called) for television, film, and advertising production studies on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, designed by Thom Mayne of the firm Morphosis, which has been reviled on this site before for its techno-narcissistic archi-stunts. This one is as if the Jolly Green Giant dropped a crate of seltzer bottles more »
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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!