Tuesday, April 14, 1998 | 11:40 a.m.
An author, historian and noted critic of America's urban planning says Las Vegas is "where the American spirit crawls to die."
James Howard Kunstler on Monday told students at UNLV's Paul B. Sogg School of Architecture that American cities are in deplorable shape.
"This downward spiral will end up destroying our culture," said Kunstler, a former editor at Rolling Stone Magazine and a frequent contributor to the New York Times Magazine.
Kunstler, who also has written eight novels, has written two popular books on the issue of urban ills -- "The Geography of Nowhere," a book about the economic and social consequences of suburban sprawl and the need to change our current methods of land-use planning, and a follow-up book entitled "Home From Nowhere."
He had harsh words for the state of American cities in his lecture at UNLV, but his most strident comments were made after his remarks to a standing-room only group of students.
Kunstler noted that he has been in countless American cities.
"But I haven't been in a more depressing, demoralizing town in the United States than Las Vegas -- including Detroit," he said of this city's urban planning and its architecture in general.
Kunstler was particularly critical of the homes here, which he said seem to have been cloned rather than designed and built.
"In general, the houses are not only monotonous and demoralizing, they are not well built. They seem designed to fall apart in 20 years," he said. "Basically, they are a time bomb of a monumental urban slum problem.
"Of all the places I've seen in America, Las Vegas seems to have less of a future," he said. "You have created a physical form that is doomed to fail the people of Nevada."
He said even Los Angeles doesn't have the problems Las Vegas will have.
"This is worse than Los Angeles," he said. "When the current orgy of profits ends, you are going to have a gigantic automobile slum."
The problem with cities in America, which are magnified 10-fold in Las Vegas, according to Kunstler, is that streets are too wide, cities are being built for cars instead of people and there is no reason for people to care about their communities anymore because they are becoming so isolated.
"The love of a city is transmitted through generations," said Kunstler.
European towns, he said, are people-friendly, built for permanence, function, beauty and interaction, while America's buildings are built for the moment without a real eye to the future and constructed so that groups and individuals are segregated.
"We have a terrible time in creating public places in America," said Kunstler.
Public places, those areas where most of the public has access, generally are the streets in this country.
Buildings that line the streets are the "walls" of the streets, and these walls are losing their identity and purpose, he said.
"Today's architecture says nothing, conveys nothing," said Kunstler.
He said people become uncomfortable when space isn't defined.
European cities, he said, have well-defined public places where people meet and interact.
"It is spiritually nourishing," he said. "Public space in a European city is the kind of place people care about."
But, American cities actually discourage this in their planning.
"And when you degrade and dishonor the common ground, you degrade and dishonor the common good," he said.
American buildings have large blank walls, he said, that designers somehow believe are enhanced by the placement of a shrub or tree or an antique-like lamp post.
He noted the correlation between America's social ills and its urban planning, which creates isolation and forces young people to focus their time and attention in one part of a house where they spend all their time watching television and becoming tomorrow's social misfits unable to make good choices in life.
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