The root of all evil is commercial real estate. You can see it in its hideous manifestation as commercial architecture. Any sort of building built facing the money inside is damned. A building is an exterior — the warmth, the worth within stems solely from the love and respect of its tenants, made possible by the good intentions of its caretakers. For the rich, interior “amenities” are fig leafs for the sterility, planned obsolescence, and soul-crushing crassness of shoddy beige cladding, offensive metal and glass, and unbreathable interiors with unopenable windows and no outdoor space because outdoor space is a liability.
The dull wealthy are fleeced for exorbitant rents and have their minds crushed by real estate magnates. The middle class and rural wealthy live in the suburbs, in gated communities or uninspired tracts, bland cookie-cutter shit with the illusion of space and nature but only isolation and alienation. The poor have no choice, and are fleeced the most, in for-profit trailer parks and SROs and unmaintained housing projects, with all the negative aspects of housing for the wealthy without the bread and circuses. This is not to mention the brutality of the commercial boxes we must enter to work and buy goods.
In America there are few true buildings left. True buildings are desperate, awe-inspiring, ephemeral, cultural, religious, necessary, rushed, prolonged, ornate, byzantine, brutalist. Anything existing outside of the smothering calculus of capital. Buildings built from some needof the soul or the body, structures that could not be left unbuilt or that are impossible to believe were everbuilt. When the capitalist machine, when the flow of money is expedited to the extent that it is now in America, there is no room for error, for human inspiration or failure, for any kind of human purposefulness. It is simply another algorithmic optimization for the benefit of those controlling the real estate industry, except it is worse than the algorithmic destruction of other things like music or design in that shelter is a human right, in that we must all look at these monstrosities every day, to live and work in them.
The aspects of our control are everywhere, even demanded by us in our self-defeating search for ease. Instead we must relentlessly hound the Eichmanns who call themselves “architects”, the real estate Görings who buy and sell a human right as essential as air, to make their crimes public, to make them famous and shamed, to destroy their livelihoods, to make buildings a national and creative endeavor, to remove profit, to take inspiration from a time, not long ago, when every building had by necessity a spark of the real about it, a human idiosyncrasy, and to find a new world of beautiful buildings for all.
