Everyday Architecture (A Vast Wasteland)

A long-deserved survey, of the everyday building types that line our suburban roads and parking lots, affords an informative and diverting critique of their architectural and sociocultural foibles.

This project began with an essay on the “McMansion” phenomenon, and it grew to become a meditation on the assorted different building types that are found in every American city and suburb. While it’s true that good buildings do exist for each of those categories, they are very much the exception, these buildings more typically ranging from dull to assertively ugly. The book is meant to be a fairly pitiless and revealing look at this “vast wasteland,” with an architect’s hat on but without resort to the profession’s fads and verbiages.

Several natural categories inform the organization of the contents, including commercial, residential, and institutional, even including cars and other manifestations of “architecture on the move” that have also lost their way in stylistic terms. The writing includes capsule histories of many of the building types included, plus some lesser-known facts and some sidebars on sociocultural aspects which make up much of one’s experience of these places. Stylistically, a bit of an acerbic tone makes for diverting as well as informative reading.