N.Y. State Capitol was also visited in the book. (sillive.com)

The New York State Capitol is not Eyesore of the Month, but an illustration filling in for an eyesore in Jim Kunstler’s World Made By Hand, which I finished rereading last night. Here is a passage from that book. The “made by hand” palace it describes evokes a range of feelings, from revulsion at its occupant to commiseration with the atavistic impulses behind its design.

The book was written in 2008. My review of it is reprinted in my last post. Kunstler has two more books of fiction in this series, noted in my last post, among his many other books and writings. I am sure what he describes below deserves a place in his website’s Eyesore of the Month series. I am also sure that (shorn of its evil) the design for a headquarters that buttresses the respectability of the Dan Curry character merits analysis beyond a sneer.

This is from Kunstler’s portrait of Albany, through which the plot of Made By Hand wanders briefly. The scene takes place 10 or so years after the collapse of America’s civilization based on oil, gas and electricity – now all gone. Kunstler’s group has discovered that the lost boat crew they are seeking are being held for ransom by Curry, whose lair they are about to enter.

Beside the big brick cube that housed the pump machinery stood a gallows, a place of execution, a symbol of order and terror meant to reinforce the basis of Dan Curry’s administrative authority. Just up the bank from that loomed a building designed to be formal and dignified, but in a crude approximation of Greco-Roman construction: Dan Curry’s headquarters. It sat on a high sturdy brick foundation, above the hundred-year flood level, which required an imposing flight of stairs to reach the portico, where four squared-off columns of rough-sawn boards held up a pediment. The columns had neither bases nor capitals. The windows were salvage, and not identical in either size or the number of lights within each sash. The whole thing was unpainted, as though it had only recently been finished, and you could even smell the sawn wood at some distance. It made up for its roughness by its impressive mass, and altogether the place radiated an aspiration to be dignified within the limited means of our hard times. It possessed a kind of swaggering charm, of something new, alive, and breathing in a time when most things were shrinking or expiring.

I’m sure this is not the most compelling example available to illustrate how classical architecture reflects mankind’s nobility of spirit. Still, should the aesthetic recollection of tradition that generated something above and beyond a box for the cruel administrator’s headquarters be spurned more thoroughly than the aesthetic rejection of tradition that is the basis for modernism? Even in the dark shadow of this most dubious example, the question answers itself.