Home From Nowhere

Home From Nowhere: Remaking Our Everyday World for the 21st Century

: The everyday environments of our time, the places where we live and work, are composed of dead patterns. These environments infect the patterns around them with disease and ultimately with contagious deadness, and deaden us in the process. The patterns that emerge fail to draw us in, fail to invite us to participate in the connectivity of the world. They frustrate our innate biological and psychological needs - for instance, our phototropic inclination to seek natural daylight, our need to feel protected, our need to keep a destination in sight as we move about town. They violate human scale. They are devoid of charm.

A discussion of the AntiPatterns (such as the obsession with car ownership [AmericanCulturalAssumption?]) that lead to bad buildings and suburban sprawl, and the architectural and civic solutions posed by the "NewUrbanism" movement. Discusses ChristopherAlexander, FrankLloydWright, LeCorbusier (and LeModulor) amongst other things. The book is an extension of an article originally published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1996, and which can be read online at http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/96sep/kunstler/kunstler.htm