wallowing in the crud

...Both of these forms earn the condemnation of many designers, who complain that a grid renders all streets more or less equal, foreclosing the possibility of creating the broad diagonal boulevards that in European cities lead to important public plazas and buildings...

...Those grand European-style boulevards that terminate in huge public spaces don't work in the United States partly because they slow down the traffic...

...It is, in a word, un-American, so we are under no obligation to understand it, much less to love it...

...In most writing on the subject, the car is styled the scourge of the landscape, the mechanical manifestation of a shadowy, maleficent corporate capitalism...

...Whitaker is at his best in understanding the car's importance in American culture and showing how it has shaped what we build and how we build it...

...While one gas station with a tall sign is entirely forgettable, four gas stations of similar size with similar signs, one on each corner, are memorable...

...It continues with malign efforts to undermine the railroads and mass transit and culminates in the dark forces' masterstroke, the Interstate Highway Act of 1956...

...If you follow this theory to its logical conclusion, then the American landscape as we know it is little more than a big mistake, a disaster inflicted by powerful outside forces...

...This assured that Americans, despite their better natures, would leave the cities and scatter over the countryside, polluting the landscape with their tawdry split-levels and fast-food palaces...

...The grid and its suburban counterpart are well suited to a democratic and egalitarian society...

...It begins, in most popular tellings, during the 1920s with the auto industry, led by Steven Lagerfeld is deputy editor of the Wilson Quarterly General Motors, buying up healthy big-city trolley systems and ruthlessly destroying them in order to enlarge the market for buses and cars...

...Whitaker sometimes seems a little too eager to understand the American environment, too reluctant to ponder ways in which we can strengthen our civic life through design...

...Whitaker, by contrast, doesn't run from the fact that Americans love their cars, and mobility in general...

...Whether the road is Fifth Avenue or the wildly developed Route 30 commercial strip, which connects two interstates in Breezewood, Penn., Whitaker says, the logic is the same...

...Our world is shaped, he says, for a people on the move...

...That is one reason why anti-car polemics are such a staple of this literature and why ritual denunciations of the automobile continue to roll from the presses with regularity...

...Surveying our endless interstates, our sprawling subdivisions, our chaotic commercial strips, and our haggard cities, architects and urban planners have seen the embodiment of all that is wrong with crass, commercial American culture...

...Signs can also add drama and interest to suburban intersections, he points out...

...With some notable exceptions, however, few of them have workable ideas about what to build for a country whose people generally do not want to live in traditional cities, no matter how much designers wish otherwise...

...Two good examples of this American exceptionalism on the ground are the gridded city and what Whitaker insists is its functional equivalent, the suburban subdivision structured around curved streets...

...Its practitioners include the late J.B...

...But that, says Whitaker, is exactly the point...

...Often accompanying this withering view is a semi-theological doctrine, two parts fact and one part conspiracy theory, about how things came to this sorry pass...

...We need, in other words, to create much of our sense of place on the road...

...The Arc de Triomphe in Paris is a destination standing at the intersection of 12 roads...

...One of these critics recently summed it all up in one word: We live, he declared, in a "crudscape...

...The jumble of signs, buildings, and empty spaces creates a jazzy, uniquely American rhythm for the passing motorist as certainly as rows of trees define more sedate streets...

...On the few occasions when they have tried to borrow Europe's "authoritarian symbols and patterns," designers have been forced to reverse course, as Pierre EEnfant famously did when he laid a grid over his much grander basic design of 1791 for the nation's capital...

...Jackson and the great landscape historian and writer-architects such as Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, Vincent Scully, and Witold Rybczynski...

...For all their enchantment with convenience and the open road, Americans today seem to be increasingly interested in community, and the social and architectural infrastructure of community is not easily reconciled with that of the road...

...This year's model is the forthcoming Asphalt Nation: How the Automobile Took Over America and How We Can Take It Back, by Jane Holtz Kay, architecture critic for the Nation...

...He argues that the American landscape is no accident, that the very sameness that critics deride when they compare a Miracle Mile or a suburban subdivision outside Houston with others near Cleveland is proof that important cultural values are at work in our architecture...

...the nearly identical Memorial Arch in New York's Washington Square Park merely marks "a pause between the end of an important street and the beginning of a park— people want to go through the arch, not to it...

...In keeping with his principle that we should honor the journey, not the destination, Whitaker even suggests that planners pay attention to the size and spacing of signs and billboards in order to manipulate the highway's rhythms...

...Craig Whitaker, a New York architect, has thoroughly absorbed their lessons and added a few of his own...

...Yet Whitaker is right that the great task before our architects is to recognize the uniquely American characteristics that have shaped our landscape and use them "to ennoble the journey as well as to create a sense of community along the way—rather than to hope we will someday change who we are...

...All streets are equal, and so are the building lots that line them, while more important buildings are distinguished by subtle alterations in the spaces separating them from other structures and from the road...

...The critics who put forward this point are as numerous as the buildings they deplore...

...They may not be distinctive places, but they are distinctively American—unlike anything one would find in the outskirts of Milan or Oslo or London...

...The focus of the American experience was not buildings or monuments at the end of the road but the road itself," he observes...

...Yet there is also a critical tradition of looking at American cities, suburbs, and highway culture sympathetically, if not always lovingly...