Dissing Rem

Friend Gaunilo cautions against his own (potentially) half-assed blogging and for the sake of his readers takes some time off.

Me, I just stumble along, more or less aspiring to half-assedness.

So, at the risk of making you all think I've switched the topic of my research from theology to architecture and urban planning...(Is it true that if I were studying architecture and urban planning I would be blogging about theology?)

Here is an excellent critique -- well, really just more of a smackdown -- of Rem Koolhaas' (disciple's) rotten proposal for Museum Plaza in Louisville, which I mentioned earlier. (The post title was How Cool is That? The answer, I suppose, is too Kool -- and that's not cool.)

Here is James Kunstler, inveighing against this monstrosity:

Can you fail to be impressed by the malignant stupidity of this building
proposed for downtown Louisville, the 61-story Museum Plaza,designed by Rem
Koolhaas's Office of Metropolitan Architecture?... Indeed, the aim of all
Koolhaas's work has been to confound our expectations about how the city and its
buildings ought to work, and to find ever more innovative ways to make people
uncomfortable, while doing everything possible to disregard the public realm.

If you think 'malignant stupidity' is just rhetorical excess, then you haven't seen the thing.

Kunstler is a sold-out evangelist for sustainable growth and new urbanism, and is a detractor of sprawl; these are all good things, nay great and important things. Here is a link to his 'Commentary on the flux of events', the subtitle of his blog whose main title I can't really print. Kunstler gets a lot right -- every reader of Gower Street knows I am a convinced supporter of urbanism, old and new -- but sometimes I find his rhetoric a little too...preachy... and 'hand-wringy'. But go check him out for yourself, because style considerations aside, he's right.

(BTW, thanks to The Gutter for the reference to Kunstler dissing Rem.)