Prominent author and critic of the American landscape James Howard Kunstler will present a lecture at 3 p.m. Feb. 28 in Maxwell Auditorium. The lecture is open to the University community and is sponsored by SU's School of Architecture, the American Institutes of Architecture Students Organization (AIAS) and the SU Student Association.
Kunstler is author of 10 books, including the critically acclaimed "The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape" (reprint edition Touchstone Books, July 1994) and "Home from Nowhere: Remaking Our Everyday World for the 21st Century" (Simon & Schuster, 1996). Kunstler says he wrote "The Geography of Nowhere" because "I believe a lot of people share my feelings about the tragic landscape of highway strips, parking lots, housing tracts, mega-malls, junked cities and ravaged countryside that makes up the everyday environment where most Americans live and work. A land full of places that are not worth caring about will soon be a nation and a way of life that is not worth defending."
"Home from Nowhere" is a continuation of that discussion with an emphasis on the remedies. A portion of the book appeared as the cover story in the September 1996 Atlantic Monthly. His new book, "The City in Mind: Notes on the Urban Condition," is due to be published in December by Simon & Schuster.
Kunstler has also written eight novels, including "Thunder Island" (Bantam, 1989) and "The Halloween Ball" (Bantam, 1987). He is a regular contributor to The New York Times Sunday Magazine and op-ed page, where he has written about environmental and economic issues.
Born in New York City, Kunstler is a graduate of the SUNY College at Brockport. He worked as a reporter and feature writer for several newspapers and as a staff writer for Rolling Stone magazine. He began to write books on a full-time basis in 1975. He has lectured at Harvard, Columbia, Dartmouth, Cornell, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Virginia, among other higher education institutions. He has also presented to such professional organizations as the American Institute of Architects and the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
He resides in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., with his wife, Jennifer Armstrong, an author of children's books.
