Fractured Cityscape

I promised some images to illustrate yesterday's rant, so here they are. The photo above is the house across the street from the new excrescence. I start with it not just to foreground my point, but because I want beauty to top any post here when I can. The folks who live here never say hello when I pass in the morning. There are assorted motorcycles and cars. I know they are devout Catholics by reason of a prominent Mary, and they are evidently heterosexual and be-childed in a neighborhood that is the center of the gay world. Never quite understand why people cannot say a warm hello to a passing neighbor, but of such self-absorption is much urban living made. Besides, it's their right. They can be grim, circle-the-wagon, 'publican Catholics if they want ... it's their right. But I do respect one thing about them. They made a beautiful house for any passer-by to enjoy.

Look at the reflection in the picture window. That is the monstrosity these poor souls must gaze upon daily. There used to be a rock massif there, with a rickety staircase that led to a ramshackle cottage on the top. But they ripped that out, and chiselled out the rock, and then built this ...

You have to realize, of course, that some trained architect, probably in snazzy clothes with a fresh kewel haircut sitting in an Aeron chair in a great open airy office ... some bloody architect actually drew that streetscape. Somebody actually felt that this was what urbanites want to look at. What a scam. A finger in the eye of every passer-by.

I believe that city government should look at plans like that and toss them out the window. Try again, sonny boy, come up something that befits a beautiful city.

Here's one more shot ... looking up at this energy hog of a "home" which bears no architectual relationship to the neighborhood in which it landed like some kind of rogue spaceship. With any bad luck, after the crash, a bunch of latter day hippies will move in and chill out on the great views ... and maybe rip the doors off the garage and make an open market or a crash pad or at least something better than a silo for a planet-destroying pair of giganto SUVs.


Cranky. We should helicopter this thang out to the 'burbs whence it emerged.

Photos by Arod, with his eyes shut.