How did we get to this?

by STEEL

I was recently waiting to get into the Borders on Walden Avenue in Cheektowaga. The store had just suffered a power outage and was rebooting its systems. With time on my hands I decided to take a walk around the neighborhood. Of course this portion of our planet, like so many other suburban landscapes, cannot really be described in terms of being a neighborhood. Nor is there really any place to walk, certainly not without grave risk of bodily harm. The roaring 8 lanes of Walden Avenue was enough to keep me from sauntering over to the nearest thing of any interest, that being the Galleria Mall on the other side ( probably equal to 4 city blocks away but, felt more like miles away in the cutting, unblocked wind). The possibility of death was all too real as I attempted to plan my path across this river of steel. I could find no provision for human crossing.

With nothing left to do I walked back across the barren parking lot and into the adjacent Krispy Kreme to down a few glazed heart stoppers. After the doughnuts slid down my gullet the landscape of pure ugliness that surrounded me really hit home. In my field of vision was a world of grayness beyond gray. The sea of concrete and asphalt supported a thicket of zombie like poles holding any assortment of signs, signals, and tangled wires in a seemingly unordered composition. What color that did exist here (mainly in blaring signage) seemed to be mocked by the overbearing gray.

There were plants of course. But, these pitiful specimens, used to decorate the edges or to "hide" a transformer here and there, seemed more lifeless than the parking lots they kept company with. I have never understood the appeal of the suburbs and I have never held back my contempt, on this forum, for our society's penchant for sprawl. That said, I can not believe that even the most die hard suburbanite could stand in that landscape or the plethora of similar places across America and proclaim it as beautiful. We are eating up our farms and natural landscape at an alarming rate for this! Buffalo is sprawling even as the metro population is shrinking. The sprawl around our biggest cities has reached immense proportions. In Chicago for example, sprawl reaches hundreds of miles crossing 2 state lines and coves nearly the top quarter of the state of Illinois. Much of this sprawl, spectacularly ugly, is designed for consumption from a car.

The ugliness of sprawl is designed by marketers and legislators. Buildings are not architecture, they are marketing pieces. They are not necessarily designed to be attractive. They are designed to catch your eye and provoke certain responses. They are also designed to make a fast return on investment so quality materials and construction is not necessary. There are no places designed for people in these environments. Spaces are designed to keep cars and water flowing. Your only need is to get to the building and make your purchase. People are not welcome. Sidewalks are rare. No public gathering is welcome. I fancy myself as a decent architect but, if I were to design a building in this type environment It would more likely than not contribute its share to the ugliness and this would be no fault of my own because the ugliness is almost 100% preprogrammed into the system.

So why have we come to embrace this environment of unadulterated ugliness as the way to make the vast majority of our built environments? We have sold our urban soul to the promised convenience of the car oriented society only to find out that Satan really does come to collect. We no longer expect our everyday environment to be beautiful. Many people have known nothing other than the aesthetic of sprawl. To most this third rate environment is accepted as normal, as if there is no other way of doing things. Beauty is for vacations only. Beauty is for exotic "other" places. Our daily lives are supposed to be drab and ugly. We have lowered our expectations for the built environment and turn off our senses so that the truth does not sink in. We have given up so much for the supposed convenience of personal transportation (personal transportation that is not even that convenient anymore) that we don't even know what is missing anymore. Accepting a lower standard in our physical environment is a step to accepting a lower standard in everything in our lives and society. I hold out so much hope that this trend does not continue. The thing with Satan is, you may not realize he has already collected on his bargain until it is too late. Are we too late to stop this before it destroys our country?