Behold the Cahill Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics at Caltech in Pasadena, California, designed by Thom Maynes’ Morphoses team. I’d call the style “Bizarro Corbu” after the early Modernist, Le Corbusier (human name: Charles-Édouard Jeanneret). Bizarro derives from the trope in the old Superman comics, “Bizarro World: an alternative universe of industrial madness populated by sub-humanoids with more »
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October 2016
Behold, “The Vessel,” designed by one Thomas Heatherwick for the gigantic Hudson Yards apartment project on Manhattan’s West Side (developer: the Related Companies). This ridiculous “urban landmark” (so-called) will be 15 stories high, composed of 154 flights of stairs and 80 horizontal landings. Heatherwick says the idea is based on “the ancient step-wells of India.” more »
September 2016
Support this blog by visiting Jim’s Patreon Page! Behold the Aspen Art Museum designed by Shigeru Ban, winner of the 2014 Pritzker Prize for Architecture. As the old joke goes: is that the building or the box that the building came in? Beneath the plywood lattice stands something that looks like a dog food processing facility. more »
August 2016
Behold the new Easton, Pennsylvania, city hall, yet another dismal composition of blank masonry walls and tinted glass curtain claddings for that perfect despotic government effect. Note how its demeanor resembles the attitude of a prison chain gang guard. See below the old Easton city hall, a 1920s beaux arts beauty (and the tallest building more »
July 2016
Behold the National World War Two Museum in New Orleans, Louisiana. Observe the interesting relationship between the incoherent building and the freeway on-ramp, with the mediating embellishment of chain-link fence. A better visual metaphor for the mechanized brutality of the mid-20th century would be hard to find. Yet, one might ask: does it make the city more »
June 2016
Megaphone to distant alien civilizations? No, just a decommissioned Kentucky Fried Chicken bucket on San Francisco’s Geary Boulevard. Rather than scrap it, they transformed it into “street art.” (Probably would have been cheaper to take it down.) Geary Boulevard is one of the more remarkably depressing thoroughfares in urban America, considering that the more »
May 2016
Behold the new addition to San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art by the Norwegian architecture firm, Snøhetta, opening in two weeks. Thanks for yet another mystical genius innovation in building form, lending the institution the look of a collapsed Japanese paper lantern with moth holes. Note that the genius crumpled fiberglass cladding is guaranteed to trap more »
April 2016
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 »
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 »
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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!