William Stout sells out

“One day I decided to open a bookstore and sell books in our apartment … It didn’t have a lot of room, but there was a big living room and kitchen. So, we made that into a ‘bookstore,’ which was just a round table with books all over, most of them from my own library.” William Stout, legendary bookseller for over 40 years in San Francisco, has sold his eponymous bookstore, and his personal library, to the Eames Institute, who sat down with him to discuss his life, legacy, and what he considers his rarest book. Notably for me, he was also the publisher of the second edition of a book on Gordon Drake, the original Californian modernist architect. A brilliant exposé on a little-known genius, originally published not long after his untimely early death in the 1950s, now with a foreword by Glenn Murcutt.

Rafael Vinoly dies

Uruguayan-born and New York-based, Rafael Vinoly, who designed major commercial and cultural buildings in nearly a dozen countries, died this month. He was a great and prolific modernist, more recently known for controversies with construction faults with his slender residential tower in New York and the ‘Walkie Talkie’ building in London that burnt down a car with its concentration of solar rays. His greatest architectural skill was enclosing large spaces under glass, creating luminous interiors, including the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts in Philadelphia and the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago; but the best was the Tokyo International Forum, a favourite, that squeezed a giant almond shaped plan between rail lines and roads. Don’t take my meagre pictures as evidence, see the images on his website that are sensational. And also see his obituary in the New York Times.

AUKUS to USUKA

The brouhaha over some silly subs, dragging in former PMs, may have surprised some, but for seasoned housing policy experts it came as no surprise, having seen these moves from Labor and PM Albanese before. This consummate politician knows that if you make a promise (for, like, say, subs or social housing) but push it out to some far distant time, you will appear to be doing something, whilst in fact doing nothing. There are three elections before anything has to be done about paying for the useless toys, and another six before it is supposed to deliver the real deal on USUKA (note the correct order of countries). No one believes any government will spend the vast amount of money quoted, equal to 550,000 fully furnished social houses, or 30 hospitals in the Pacific, including staffing for ten years. Not that anyone thinks that this new do-nothing government would ever build a tenth of those ideas either. Morrison left a stinking pile of foreign affair’s dog poo, and Albo kicked it into the long grass. That Keating and Turnbull took Albanese seriously shows how politically gullible they are.

Acronymic Putdowns

Further to Not in My Backyard NIMBYs, and Not Over There Either NOTEs and Citizens Against Virtually Everything CAVE dwellers and Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything BANANAs my favourite creative acronymic putdowns that came in this week is CATNAP, for Cheapest Available Technology that Narrowly Avoids Prosecution. I love it, and it’s the cause of all the NSW Building Commissioner’s anxiety.

Bookends

We end the week with a brief review of two books on a similar topic. The impending economic apocalypse is popular right now. The bright shiny book is Peter Zeihan’s The End of the World is just the Beginning. Lots of fawning press here and here. And the author is all over social media audio. But the book has three fatal flaws: it’s full of USA exceptionalism; its written in a cloying ‘wink wink’ chummy chatty style; but worst of all for us, it is devoid of any analysis of the failing physical fabric of cities, buildings and housing. It is completely homeless about the homeless crisis gripping big cities. If you seek an analysis of the end of civilization in cities, it’s far better you turn to Mike Davis. City of Quartz on LA is the standout. But Planet of Slums goes worldwide, and the best introductory reader is Evil Paradises, edited by Daniel Bertrand Monk and Davis.

Here’s a sample from Emir Seder’s essay: The Most Unjust Country in the World: “Brazil presents a very contradictory image to the outside world. The seductive face of Brazil is represented by its music, soap operas, football, innovative cities like Curitiba, and of course the delirious aphrodisia of Carnaval. However, Brazil is also the daily violence of its cities and the misery of its countryside. It has the world's highest national ratio of socioeconomic inequality and remains racked by violence, including the massacres of children and indigenous peoples, as well as by the record destruction of nature.”  

A bullseye that Zeihan never hits.

More things next week. Tone Wheeler is an architect / the views expressed are his / contact at [email protected].