Este video (vía @xtrevi) de una presentación de James Howard Kunstler, es una genialidad (a ratos un poquito pasado de lanza), pero el argumento y la forma de transmitirlo son muy buenos. El pedacito que cito de la transcripción lo dejé en inglés, porque el video se puede ver con subtítulos en español.
This is the other side of the building. This was the winner of an international design award in, I think 1966, something like that- it wasn’t Pei & Cobb, another firm designed this. But- there’s not enough Prozac in the world to make people feel OK about going down this block. This is the back of Boston City Hall, the most important significant civic building in Albany- excuse me- in Boston, and what is the message that is coming- what are the vocabularies and grammars that are coming from this building and how is it informing us about who we are?
This in fact would be a better building if we put mosaic portraits of Josef Stalin, Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein, and all the other great despots of the 20th century on the side of the building because then we’d honestly be saying what the building is really communicating to us. You know, it’s a despotic building, it wants us to feel like termites.
…
That- that is the message of this form of architecture! The message is- we don’t give a fuck! We don’t give a fuck.
Andrés, gracias por compartir este video. Hablando de «a place worth defending», este vide me recordó a un pasaje del libro «Chasing Clayoquot» de David Pitt-Brooke, donde describe la transformación de los bosques de British Columbia en espacios urbanizados:
«We are a rainforest people, native or naturalized, by birth or by choice. These forests help to shape our sense of shared identity; of our place in the world. What will become of us when they are gone? We will become a people of strip malls, I suppose, and big-box retail outlets, and multi-lane highways to nowhere worth going.»