Beautiful House of the Day

America's small towns are full of gorgeous old houses like this one:

(Manchester, IA)

Beautiful house of the day

(Dubuque, IA)

Quote of the day

Quote of the day:

“Cheap gasoline made it possible for the majority of Americans to live great distances from their workplace, which diminished their ability to care about either the place in which they lived or the place in which they worked – and especially the places in between.”

-James Howard Kunstler, Home From Nowhere: Remaking Our Everyday World for the 21st Century

A Surreal Walk Down Lafayette Street Pt. 1

My recent walk down St. Louis's Lafayette Street, between Jefferson and Grand, was a rather surreal experience. The most striking aspect is the number of empty lots between buildings, like this one:

These new buildings have been added on what were presumably empty lots. While infilling is almost always a good thing, and the buildings at least were brought into harmony with the area with brick facades, I'm not a huge fan of their architecture, which is out of step with the neighborhood.

(More after the jump.)

Beautiful house of the day

(Dubuque, IA)

Quote of the day

Quote of the Day:

"It's amazing how terrible new houses look these days."

-James Howard Kunstler, Home From Nowhere: Remaking Our Everyday World For the 21st Century

Concrete boxes, part one

This is what passes for architecture today: a concrete box in a parking lot. (More ugliness below the jump.

(Jackson, MS)