Good Urbanism / Urbanized Applebee’s Warfare
Have you ever been confronted with the ghastly visage of steel-and-glass spikes seemingly pressing in on your very soul? You definitely have, but you didn’t mentally articulate it the way my genius brain just did. I know you’ve been plagued by a vague dissatisfaction while cruising down a cracked, four lane asphalt road littered with broken Modelo bottles at 45 miles an hour, screeching to a halt every three quarters of a mile behind a bus that could only smell worse if you were exposed to its occupants. At each three minute red light, if you aren’t too busy staring at your $1000 glow in the dark federal spywarebox, swiping through photos of soulless, dead-eyed retards with their tongues and tits out, you might survey your surroundings with a pang of unsettlement.
I shouldn’t be so harsh, dear reader, who probably agrees with me (if they’re reading this blog) already and is living for the knowledge that others are as hateful as he (or she, maybe). But also, fuck you. We’re all angry. Even the idiots who disagree with me. The minuscule bit of campaign work I’ve done has rendered me appreciative of spirit or passion of any degree with regard to the things that matter, given how utterly ambivalent vast swaths of the population are about pretty much everything except their favorite family-denigrating television show. At least the people who hate me are willing to fight for something, as much of a trope as that is.
But I’m getting off track. You see, the reason you are unsettled by miles of strip malls, brutalist concrete block public buildings, and characterless glass internationalist apartment buildings is because the infrastructure which surrounds you is fundamentally inhuman.
The larger point is that our civilization has abandoned beauty, or have at least accepted a petit-bourgeois notion of it. Architecture is a microcosm of this, but one which is especially relevant to daily life. Two acre parking lots in front of million-square-foot big box retail stores and low-slung tax services adjacent to the shady “compramos oro” storefronts familiar to many Americans are prime examples of aesthetic terrorism, although of ostensibly varying degrees.
I could go into detail about Vetruvius and Andrea Palladio, their notes on proportion and classical architectural motifs, but that would bore you, probably. Most people are content with what they intuitively perceive as beautiful. Italian town skylines full of steeples and clay roofs, grand Greek Ionic columns sheltering President Jefferson in Washington, D. C., and intricate brick masonry facades in nostalgic old American downtowns.
Our surrounding influence our souls and incline us toward or against virtue. Palladio especially stressed this. The old nature/nurture dichotomy doesn’t stop when we turn 18. On the contrary, we become lulled into submission by our environment, for better or for worse, when we are forced to confront it as adults. Where are you more likely to love thy neighbor? Fighting with a Guatemalan immigrant in a late 90s Toyota for a parking space in front of the fucking Applebee’s? Or walking on a cobblestone plaza common to your neighbors and countrymen, going to buy fruit from an old woman in a booth?
Sure this might be an idealist pipe dream of an American frustrated by the triumph of convenience over beauty. Yeah, that’s exactly what it is. You know in your heart as well as I that beauty is more important than GDP and import/export ratios. Hopefully this makes you think. Maybe if you like this I’ll get into the weeds about the infrastructure of localism or what we’ve lost. But for now, cultivate that inner dissatisfaction with your surroundings. It will open you a world of knowledge that I wouldn’t dream of attempting to summarize here.
-Sallus’ Friend