Quote of the Day

Today's quote is from James Howard Kunstler's short address to the Vision of Europe conference in Bologna:

This is what I think lies at the heart of the classical tradition -- it is not a collection of motifs, not a menu of styles. It is an attitude toward the project of civilization, which is based on the idea that we are poised between memory and hope; that we have come from someplace memorable and are bound for someplace hopeful, and that the present time we occupy ought to be endowed with grace.

Modernism turned Traditional and Classical thought on its head, teaching that the lessons of the past were irrelevant: they could no longer be used, except at the most abstract level. This eventually produced our current situation, in which Americans often feel that when it comes to making new places, the present is worse than the past, and the future is hopeless.

At the beginning of Modernism, hope for the future was very bright. There was a belief that by eliminating the weight of the past we could build a brave new world. In many ways, we did just that.

We tend to forget that in 1940, most Americans thought college was an unattainable goal. And that in 1960, America's capital still had legally segregated facilities.

More recently, Eastern Europeans still suffered under Communism in 1988, and apartheid still had several years left in South Africa.

Some argue that progress doesn't exist, but a sure measure of it is the growth of individual freedom and the expansion of democracy. Before, the 18th century no government believed the "self-evident" truths proclaimed by America and the Founding Fathers. While it is clear that here in the early 21st century we live in an age of democracy. This is precisely what frightens Osama Bin Laden so much.

Even post-war suburbs contributed to individual freedom in America, because people who moved to them often had more social and economic mobility than in the ethnic neighborhoods they left behind. Barry Levinson's Baltimore movies are classic illustrations of the personal restrictions of an old Jewish neighborhood in the city and the freedom of the new suburbs that rose in the 1950s. The vastly inferior Saturday Night Fever nevertheless shows the way an Italian neighborhood in Brooklyn as late as 1970 could still try to inhibit ambition and force its residents to "know their place." (And we see the same story in new immigrant movies like My Big Fat Greek Wedding and Bend It Like Beckham.)

But with the 20th century over, we are rapidly discovering that we often prefer the qualities of the old buildings, neighborhoods, towns and cities – without their old social restrictions – to what we've built for the last 50 years. In a nutshell, Modernism has done a terrible job of providing us with a usable past: it's produced a small number of great buildings, but few great places, and an overwhelming amount of crap.

Over 80% of American has been built since World War II, and on the whole, it ain't pretty. That is what has produced the phenomenon of NIMBYism, which never existed until 10 or 20 years ago. Before that people believed that new construction would make better places, rather than worse.

The Renaissance, one of the greatest civilizing forces in the history of the West, began when the Florentines rediscovered the ancient world and thereby imagined a better present. The American Renaissance -- the period from 1890 to 1915 marked by the work of architects like McKim, Mead & White and artists like Augustus St. Gaundens -- came about because American artists went to Europe for their schooling, where they studied the great cities, buildings and art of Europe.

They came home to build much of what is best about our towns and cities in the City Beautiful movement. What would New York City be, for example, without the Metropolitan Museum, the New York Public Library, Grand Central Station and the Woolworth Building, as well as the neighborhoods of the period, the Upper West and East Sides?

Kunstler is right. NIMBYs are the negative side of our realization that what we've recently built isn't good enough, and that by neglecting the public realm we've degraded the common good. Physically, Americans want a richer past, in order to imagine a better present and a more hopeful future.