History Repeated -- From Louis Sullivan to James Howard Kunstler

I became a fan of James Howard Kunstler in the mid-1990s when I read his books "The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape" and "Home from Nowhere: Remaking Our Everyday World for the 21st Century."  This sometimes humorous presentation he made at TED a few years ago will give you a feel for his thinking:  James H. Kunstler's TED Presentation  He continues to write weekly on his blog  and has published several additional books. (Pardon his language. I think he's become increasingly frustrated with the direction the nation has taken and uses some expletives. He does make good points though.)

I purchased architect Louis Sullivan's book  "Kindergarten Chats and Other Writings" 20 years ago at Taliesin West when I was in Phoenix for a workshop on writing environmental impact statements.  Sullivan was a mentor and one-time employer of architect Frank Lloyd Wright. "Kindergarten Chats" is a collection of essays originally published in the journal Interstate Architect and Builder in 1901 and 1902. In the essays, Sullivan chats with a fresh-out-of-school, fictitious architect, a kindergartener in the profession, and shares his outlook on the built environment's influence on individuals and communities as well as the influence of money on architecture and design.

Kunstler and Sullivan's messages are so similar, although they lived a century a part in time. When Sullivan wrote, the automobile was in its infancy and the nation had not yet weathered the World War I, the roaring 20s, the Great Depression or World War II.  Both men advocate for responsibility in design of buildings and communities and individual and collective participation to develop and implement policies for healthy, functional communities. Both believe that architectural and urban design are often corrupted by individual's or community's desire for personal financial gain.  Do local governments approve projects to improve the community or to gain tax base and favor from developers who stand to gain money from the development?

Here is an excerpt from Sullivan's essay on Responsibility, which feels as current and applicable to our nation's current economic situation as if it were written yesterday:

"There is a far too wide-spread, too general feeling in the mass (people), and too acute an accentuation of it in the individual, that this deeply and seemingly surely-founded social fabric exists solely for personal profit and exploitation; and that, once his taxes paid, or evaded, and his voting done or left undone, he, the individual, has rendered quid pro quo; that his responsibilities to his fellows, to his country, to himself are at an end -- that he may move on in his narrow groove of self-interest without detriment to his fellows, to himself, or to his country......

Nothing more clearly reflects the status and the tendencies of a people than the character of its buildings.  They are emanations of the people; they visualize for us the soul of our people.  They are as an open book.  And by this sign the tendency today is disquieting.

No, a people clearly is accountable, willy-nilly, for all its acts.  It cannot logically accept responsibility for one class of acts and deny responsibility for others; for a people is an aggregated individual, to be held in the balance of fate morally and responsibly for all his acts.

It is trite but none-the-less true to say that the national life is but the reflex of multitudinous individual lives; that Democracy varies in its states of health accordingly and likewise in the rhythm of its growth and development.  Individual neglect, indifference, inattention thus become, in the aggregate, national.  If the individual is not impressible by things, qualities, relations of a certain kind, that unimpressibility becomes by force of numbers a national trait.  If the individual denies or ignores his responsibility, how shall he protest when others do so? Thus, national characteristics accurately reflect the preponderance of individual characteristics; and thus our national politics, our municipal politics and our architecture are precisely what we are willing they should be.

Our national adolescence is passed and gone.  We are entering manhood and we must recognize and face its responsibilities, or pay the penalty.  A prudent man takes his bearings carefully.  So should a prudent people--entering, as we are now, over the threshold of a new era that is to liberate moral forces of power and insistence hitherto unknown though not unsuspected; a century that is destined to bring forth unique outbursts, explosions, catastrophes and cataclysms of new birth."