NSFW: Jim Kunstler responds to the Southern Poverty Law Center responding to Jim criticizing their HQ

ON HIS BLOG, and also available at Kunstler.com, Jim wrote this about Montgomery, Alabama:

Here and there around the rest of the downtown, other weird experiments in American post-war anti-urbanism presented themselves, most notably a "building" designed to look like a small-scaled Death Star, all black reflective glass, canted concrete and steel walls – which turned out to belong to Morris Dees' renowned Southern Poverty Law Center -- deployed directly across the street from the modest white clapboard-with-green-shutters house once occupied by Jefferson Davis after Richmond fell and the Confederate leadership skeedaddled further south. There were a few recently-built government towers that looked like Nascar trophies. But the rest of the downtown – the parts not dedicated to surface parking – was the ubiquitous array of muffler shops, or restaurants and churches that looked like muffler shops.

He must have had a reply from the SPLC, because he also wrote this:

Dear Mr. Levin— I have your letter of Feb 3 concerning my criticism of the SPLC building in Montgomery.

You say: “While I’m used to a love-it-or-hate-it response regarding our design….”

That should be an immediate signal to you that you have made a mistake. How many people have that sort of reaction to your state Capitol? Or to the Dexter Avenue Church? Or to the Jefferson Davis house across the street from SPLC. Or to just about any traditional civic building in your town? It can be stated categorically: nobody.

You say, “…I was CEO when the building was designed and constructed and lived with that process for almost three years.”

Well, you got hosed. You bought the Emperor’s New Clothes.

UPDATE: Here's a street-level view of the building, courtesy of Nathan Norris:

(continued)

“Morris and I made the decision to maintain the Center in its downtown urban environment, despite the significant savings that could have been achieved by relocating to a flat, suburban Greenfield site.”

I assume you are a lawyer. I suppose there is a technical term for the kind of false, diversionary argument you make. Are you saying that you could have put a crappy building out-of-town somewhere where it might not bother people – among the muffler shops and the donut huts? That is hardly the issue.

The issue is what you did on the site you chose. (And by the way, in case you wonder, I am a registered Democrat and a New York Jew, not a conservative.) You put up a building that looks like the Fuhrer Bunker. It dishonors the site and it even dishonors your mission of social justice. The design of the building makes social justice appear despotic.

No doubt you will defend your decisions to your dying breath, but I venture to say that you got hosed, you fucked up, you put up a building that is a horror, and I’m glad that I said so in public. Now I am only sorry that I did not know you were responsible for the building, or that you were in the audience, because I would have singled you out for opprobrium.

Sincerely,

James Howard Kunstler