Andrés Duany on Mark Lamster’s blog:

You can make the Asians do anything. They can drink their own piss. You tell them do it and they do. There is no comparison between an Asian situation and an American situation. They will do anything they are told. We will not. They will do anything they are told.

I’m not sure what bothers me most about this, the blatant racism, the complete lack of outrage among urbanists or that Scientific American chose to edit the racism out of Duany’s statements and thus presented his arguments in an undeservingly rational light.

Unacceptable no matter how you look at it.

Meanwhile, Andrés Duany, whose New Urbanism is a form of postmodern city planning, noted that what the New York intelligentsia belittles as postmodernism is really the style preferred by the vast majority of Americans. If most buildings with traditional motifs are poorly executed, he said, it is because the architectural elite has refused to design them

Ah yes, the New York intelligentsia. Interesting how someone, allegedly progressive, uses the same anti-intellectual boogeyman as the likes of the Tea Party. Another great argument is the suggestion that since a style is "preferred by the vast majority of Americans" it must be somehow more correct than other less popular styles – how very High School. And, just in case you missed the opening anti-intellectualism, Duany rounds his argument off with a stab at the "architectural elite".

What a maddening waste of time. Dormers aren't going to solve climate change. Conferences where "experts" discuss the architectural equivalent of angels dancing on pins are not going to house the homeless. It's astonishing to think that these types of discussions still take place in these times. Are we really going to worry about offending "the vast majority of Americans" architectural taste when considering the catastrophic impact of rising sea-levels?

If Postmodernism has achieved anything it has been the elevation of the absurd and the trivial at the expense of the serious and meaningful.

Link.