Excellent.

"we're normal.  we're normal, we're normal"

who cares?

He has a point, but his medicine is worse than the disease... a Stepford nation of neo-traditionalist throw-back villages... Read Atwood's "A Handmaid's Tale" for a food description of the type of people likely to live in such a nation. Hint: the people running things will probably have guns and those will be trained on you.

Yep, Urbanist nails it.  I love Kunstler's rants but he is HARD CORE traditional styles and has no openness to contemporary work of ANY kind, nor does he have any patience (or even civility) with people (commenters on his blog, for example) who try to explain why contemporary design has value.

Kunstler is a fun guy!  However, he is fun primarily because he takes a central nugget of a good idea and surrounds it with unsupported, vitriolic, irrelevant fluff.

Given this, should I be concerned that he is frequently cited as a source for all these urban-design writings?  It feels so...unscientific.

Kunstler is entertaining, but no, not scientific. He is a writer, his job is to create colorful stories.

mix - agreed - plus it's much easier to use actual data that shows that suburban sprawl is heavily (and disproportionately) subsidized by taxpayers - and without all this government money low-density development wouldn't even happen in the first place.  developers tend to follow incentives.

I guess using highly contrasting visuals and apocalyptic rhetoric is much more effective...

Road maintenance and construction is not a direct subsidy to housing development; the national highway system would have happened with or without associated low density residential development. It's merely a symptom, not a cause. On a local level, there is an incentive for the public sector to build infrastructure that supports the creation of future tax revenues.

The whole "user/non-user" point is moot. There are countless programs paid for by non-user tax dollars (one could argue most tax dollars do not directly benefit the taxpayer).

Donna-

Many architects, including most on this board, are HARD CORE modernists and have no openness to traditional work of any kind, nor do they have any patience with people who try to explain why traditional design has value.  Hence the inevitable adjectives such as "Stepford-like", "Disneyland-esque", "historical pastiche".

Yet the public finds beauty and value in traditional architecture and urbanism.  Instead of denigrating the laypersons who ask for traditional architecture as uninformed, foolish, or misguidedly nostalgic, I think the profession would be well served by asking themselves:  What is it about the work that we have produced that isn't connecting with the people that buy it and use it?  What is it about the great traditional cities that people find so appealing?  What is it about traditional architecture that people find desirable?  How can we provide an architecture that appeals to people beyond the architectural avant-garde?

Does the public find "beauty and value" in a Colonialesque McMansion that reeks of mold from crappy construction?  Or do they like how it looks because it doesn't challenge them, doesn't require them to consider WHY something should look a certain way?

That's a good question, and raises some important issues. 

Let me start to address that with an aside.  I think that the "Colonialesque McMansion that reeks of mold from crappy construction" is a bit of a straw man designed to marginalize the public's taste for traditional design.  It's uncanny how whenever I discuss the merits of traditions in architecture with modernists, the words "pastiche" and "McMansion" follow so quickly.  I assure you, bad design and bad construction comes in all flavors.

I believe that the public's preference for traditional design stems in large part because they find qualities in those buildings and those cities that they find appealing, that they feel exemplify their values, that makes them experience emotions that they desire to feel.  As architects, we can choose to decide that the public's attitude is childish, naive, uninformed, and to deny its validity, insist that there is something wrong with THEM, and continue to wrap ourselves in a cocoon of incestuous, ivory-tower elitism.  Another option is to take the public's taste seriously, try not to demean it,  but to understand it, and try to engage it.  This doesn't mean to pander to a lowest-common-denominator "yuck-taste".  But it does mean meeting the public half way and granting validity to their aspirations.  And I'm not suggesting that only traditional design can do this.  I'm very much an "both-and" rather than an "either-or" guy, and I design both in modernist and traditional languages.  But I do believe that modern architects can learn a lot about what makes people happy from traditional architecture (if they are in fact interested in making people happy.  That's a whole other discussion).

I also believe that the world of the "Colonialesque McMansion" is a world created by  modernists.  At the turn of the century, architects received a thoughtful education in the practice and rationale of enduring architectural traditions.  Architects learned to create beautifully proportioned and detailed buildings in traditional vernacular styles.  But the modernists took over the architectural education system, and, since the Bauhaus, architects have received no such education.  Gropius insisted that we wipe the slate clean, and "start from zero".

Since that time, the architecture schools have been turning out graduates with no thoughtful training in classical or vernacular design, to practice in a marketplace which is still asking for traditional design.  So we now have vast wastelands of suburbia, the "crudscape" that Kunstler decries, filled with pseudo-traditional buildings designed by architects unqualified to design them.  This is the world created by modernist architectural education.

It's my opinion that the architectural avant-garde is diverging further and further from any kind of consensus with the public it claims to serve.  I think this is the great shame of our profession.

By the way, why would you think that traditional design doesn't require the public to consider or understand why it should look a certain way? 

It would work better if the styles flowed naturally from a specific technique of building.  If you're building in a very traditional way, the architecture naturally flows from that, and you'll get a more traditional building.  "Carpenter-ed" building connections, old-growth wood, solid masonry walls, etc. all spring from historic methods of building, and if you want to use them, you'll probably get something that looks a bit more historic.  Double points for living like people in the past did - Victorian-era chopped-up sequences of rooms match a particular lifestyle.

I think where the problem comes from is when people want the look of the historic styles, but don't really want to build that way.  They build using modern construction techniques and glue on 'historic' as a style, which looks pretty tacky and is also unnecessarily wasteful!  To compound the problem, they then use modern spatial layouts designed for modern lives, and these don't necessarily always shoehorn into a traditional form very well.

Why not just remove the cruft and let the building naturally flow from the way it was made?  If you want traditional construction techniques and spatial arrangements, and don't mind the poor thermal and spatial performance (or have ways around it), build this way; otherwise, adapt to the systems you are using currently and build in the way that the materials and systems you are using naturally want to exist.  Don't build one thing and then glue something on the front to make it look like something else!

I've always thought Americans are obsessed with questions of authenticity, 'history', and 'tradition' because of a lack of a cohesive and coherent collective history or identity.  We are a diverse, polyglot population spread over a huge land area, living in a society that has always celebrated these very qualities--individualism, difference, freedom from having to belong to a group.  And this is all wonderful, except that that there's probably a certain security in belonging to something greater than oneself.  And there's probably security in some idea of permanence, but when you live in a country that's only 200+ years old where most structures are made of pretty impermanent materials, and the last 40 or 50 years have been marked by social and economic upheaval, and where the concept of disposability was invented, these things are hard to come by.

stylistic preferences reflect the deeper aspirations of the public, which is why emerging nations often prefer forward-looking aesthetics.  where i come from in europe, people are sick to death of the old stuff, and can't wait for the 'modern'.  (when i asked a family member in the old ancestral village about my family's history, he exasperatedly said, 'what's to know?  everyone's just always lived here.')

here in the states, we just keep looking for that sense of security and belonging. and as our 'traditional' architecture so eloquently points out, it's usually false.

most 'modern' architects have a lot of appreciation for vernacular structures, they just wouldn't design them because it makes no sense given current technologies and processes.  i for one love fancy brickwork and craftsman houses, but i love them too much to try to reproduce them using brick veneer and tacky home depot applique.

If Europeans are "sick to death of the old stuff", why haven't they torn down Florence or Vienna or Venice and built new?

They wouldn't think of doing that, because they they love the buildings and the cultural continuity they represent.  They reinvent those buildings in a way which makes them relevant to each new generation.

BTW, Elinor, we design lots of buildings using traditional styles, using traditional materials, detailing and techniques, without resorting to Home Depot applique.  When you are ready to design that craftsman inspired house, give me a call. =)

i'm from the 'emerging' part of europe, where living in a 'historic' building usually means living in historically-appropriate conditions-- it's drafty, damp, there may not be proper central heating, and the plumbing sucks (if there is plumbing...) i could go on... :)

but even in western europe, there's much less new-historic construction going up than there is here. 

oh, and my german relatives moved out of a 200-yr. old house with beautiful wood stoves and 15-ft ceilings to an american-style subdivision.  we were horrified, but they're ecstatic.  they love the driveway, the backyard, and their sliding-glass patio door.

(it is, at least, a stylistically modern subdivision...)

Have Americans just been brainwashed into thinking that a house needs to look a certain way by the explosion of home building and suburbia after WW2, therefor any house design outside of certain learned design parameters breeds caution? I may need a history lesson here but wasn't housing before suburbia "B.S." (get it B.S. ha that is a good one!) more individualistic and detailed? Although there were copies of design and form, brownstones etc. for the most part houses had an one off quality. Yes? No?

I am speaking in generalities here I know one farm house in Indiana pretty much looked like the one next door and brownstones could of been twins but after Levittown and other track home developments the general public had thousands and thousands of houses reinforcing the vision of a home. One with a front gable or two a porch and garage and less and less detail.

So after decades of this indoctrination "plane folk" are unwilling to place their money on a modern or progressive design. Instead they go for the "comfort home" the one that brings back the embedded memories of a better time that most people did not have and wished for. Leave It To Beaver anyone?     

This is not about style but rather social culture and what industrial designers call human factors.

Architects and developers largely ignore social culture and human factors in favor of financial and imagined aesthetic (for lack of a better term) objectives.

Kunstler's criticism is a no-holds barred attack on this sad state of affairs.

Typical Americans think they want all the charm of jolly of England, or the rustic charm of a 200 year old stone cottage, or the pedestrian ambiance of a european village....but they would never commit to the real deal.  They opt for  the faux charm, "architecture" applied, and  larger, much larger, in the burbs, with enough trees so they can't see the big box stores and endless sea of a.c. paving down the street, or the ethnic types in town..(too scary).. Of course now they want "green" materials, because that bamboo floor in their 4,000 sf craftsma-torian will be a great conversation starter at their next wine and cheese party. 

The contempt you have for "typical Americans" is really quite breathtaking. I'd recast your proclamation this way: typical Americans want buildings that have characteristics that they love in old buildings, but contemporary architects refuse to give them.

I'd have to echo EKE's comment on the "typical Americans" broad brush.

Such open disdain is one reason our profession gets its own negative stereotype of elitism and snobbery.

I have been called both an elitist and a snob, and I'm fine with that. The masses are not for me, nor am I for them.

Given this, should I be concerned that he is frequently cited as a source for all these urban-design writings?  It feels so...unscientific.

It's scientific in that planners and urban designers who occasionally survey the general public directly or hold charrettes usually find that most people prefer Greeco-Palladian architecture to be the most appealing variety. Of course, this isn't just limited to the US as there's practically a Roman knock off on every single continent. There's even an abandoned building in Antarctica complete with a Roman-ish portico with two columns built by the Finns.

Road maintenance and construction is not a direct subsidy to housing development; the national highway system would have happened with or without associated low density residential development. It's merely a symptom, not a cause. On a local level, there is an incentive for the public sector to build infrastructure that supports the creation of future tax revenues.

I guess road vs transit was not a good example - but there are direct subsidies to low-density suburban development in the residential mortgage tax credit and various funding for commercial construction.  but you do raise a good point about tax revenues - and from what I understand how sprawl ends up looking has more to do with whether the municipality is funded by property or sales taxes....  here's some info on true costs of big-box development.

anyway -  the point I'm trying to make is that if you follow the money, low-density sprawl isn't terribly efficient from an economic standpoint, it's fueled by bad policy and incentives - and I think it's easier to use the evidence that is out there to support this argument rather than this nonsense about cheap oil or something that appeals to a particular vernacular or cultural sensibility.   This "modern vs. traditional" argument is a non-starter for me.

JJR -

My wish is that he would cite these sources and studies more, so that we could have a good literature review and maybe a bit more of a basis in something other than his own opinion.  'Visual surveys' are a good technique to get the opinions of a particular population, and - of course - averages break down at the individual.

Maybe it's changed a bit, but I once did a thesis in urban design, and it was pretty common to find his work in citations - it concerned me, given the absurdly high ratio of vitriol to point.  It's my own bias towards unemotional scientific knowledge, but I think it's an area where some extra work is necessary.

This discussion (to me) seems really off-track, and Miles is the only one who has actually caught the point of the arguement.

I didn't really get anything out of Kunstler's lecture about style. There is no "style" to proper urban design, and that wasn't the point he was trying to make. Again, we're getting into this style-arguement because of the adornments of the streetscape, when really this is about the streetscape itself and it having inviting proportions to give people comfort in the space. It doesn't matter what style the building subscribes to, or if that particular style bares any resemblance whatsoever to the building next to it - this is secondary, arbitrary information. What DOES matter is the cohesive streetscape as a whole. Whether the street in question looks like or includes "contemporary" or "traditional" buildings doesn't matter, and a lot of people are getting caught up on that point. Kunstler isn't ranting on ALL contemporary architecture (at least not in this lecture; I'm not familiar with his past work), he's ranting on the Wal-Marts and the Targets in the middle of nowhere. Nowhere in that arguement did I get the impression he was advocating for ALL town centers to be turned into mazes of Roman arches and Gothic cathedrals - but he WAS advocating that all town centers take those historical examples to bring the focus back to the streets a-la the writings by Jane Jacobs.

The point he was making about the New Urbanists had more to do with the planning of the town. I admit that Andres Duany's design choices there are a bit cheesy with the finishes on all the buildings, but consider if all of the buildings were contemporary designs , situated in the same high-density spacing. I'm certain those public spaces would still act as succesfully as they do now.

I agree with you, Ben.  It's really not directly about style.  Good urbanism can, and should consist of buildings of many styles.

However, I believe the recipe for good urbanism is more than simply creating high density spacing.  The buildings must engage the streets and plaza in a way that encourages lively interaction with citizens.  The architecture needs to provide delight.  This is what the best traditional architecture and urbanism has done so well, and where the modernist avant-garde often misses.

even though he does not reference style directly, he uses coded terminology that alludes to a certain belief system--'sense of place,' 'character,' references to a common culture, etc. 

where were all these believers in urban public space when americans were ready to throw away entire cities, wholesale?  i don't know too much about kunstler, but why isn't he out there trying to save existing examples of formerly successful american public spaces, like, say, central detroit?

Thanks for bringing this back into focus. As I said before, the issue is not style but substance. In this matter the substance is human experience through interaction with the built environment.

While that may be difficult for architects trained in the application of style to comprehend, it is essential for creating any substantive work.

Boston City Hall is a good example. On a conceptual level it is a perfect metaphor for government - the plaza is an empty plain, like a desert; the building is a series of repetitive elements, like a machine; and the entrance is for all practical purposes hidden - unless you know where it is, the only way to find it is by watching others enter or leave.

On a substantive level it is a complete failure. The largely treeless paved plaza is bleak and uninhabitable; the building dominates the plaza like a fortress; and how the hell do you actually get in? That's without consideration for the back of the building, which has a multistory wall next to a busy city street, making about as uncomfortable an environment as possible for pedestrians.

also, you can drive around the us and find examples of small town centers that have all the qualities kunstler goes on about, but are derelict and empty save for a check cashing store and a chinese takeout restaurant.  but all this has been said before.  these arguments about 'successful urban form' and 'good public space' are just fronts for the deeper political and ideological arguments of the american culture wars.

this is not to say that i think sprawl is good or that existing planning policies are successful.  far from it.   these are far deeper issues that aren't helped by this kind of polarizing pop-journalism.

While that might be true elinor, I think there is a substantial correlation between good urban design (via traditional or contemporary modes; it doesn't really matter) and a higher satisfaction in these public spaces vs. bad urban design and lower satisfaction. As architects/urban designers/planners it is certainly on our shoulders to make good decisions about these areas, but alas we can't solve all the problems of the world. You make a good point, especially about Detroit, but can architecture really be the driving point in the revitilization of that city? It seems like there are many more social and economic problems causing the decline there. but we're starting to get away from the point. Architects can do their job and do it well, but we can really only take it so far.

EKE: I don't necessarily agree with that, as there are many contemporary buildings that succeed in all of these aspects. I think it has much more to do with the planning regulations in the particular vacinity - ALLOWING arch's/urban des's to make terrible infill choices by giving them the power set the building 60 feet back from the street with a parking lot seperating the two, things like this need to be changed pronto. Modernism (in a nutshell) only proposed a new way of thinking about designing; the basic needs and goals never changed.

American had, probably in every city at one time or another, most of the things that he say's are successful. Just go into the city hall..(which has often been moved to the outskirts of the city), and see some of the historical photos of what was once a bustling downtown, with actual reatailers on the ground floor, offices or residences above. Places where you could conduct most of your life within walking distance or public transportation. Of course, the 1950's turned many downtowns into pedestrian malls, that eventually moved pedestrians and businesses away.

Downtown San Jose, CA was a thriving downtown, today it is a pathetic urinal...Efforts to revitalize downtown has been just as pathetic. The final insult happened when Santana Row was built, a few miles from downtown. Santana Row is a cartoon city, fake in every sense. New buildings representing everything from french quarter to moderne, it, indeed has all the amenities that Kunstler deems successful. Ironic, that it is directly across the street from the shopping mall that sparked the exodus from downtown. It is considered a huge success, the place to be seen by and for silicon valley types. Million dollar condos above the shops, hotels, eateries, even a street that passes through the middle to make it look urban, cavernous parking garages on the side streets. And upscale whitey doesnt have to deal with the "riff raff" of a true urban center, that has been left to decay. Building new to replicate what could be reborn a mile away seems wrong to me. One mayor believed that moving city hall back to downtown, and having a Richard Meier design would put downtown back on the radar, of course, the mayor reject all designs, until Meier came up with a design that included a dome, because city halls must have domes....Downtown is still a urinal, but San Jose got it's 350 million dollar dome, surrounded by empty storefronts, homeless, and crime. and a mile or two away, cartoon land thrives.

I've never been to Santana Row, but from what I can tell it's one of those mixed-use streetscape shopping centers that have sprung up in many cities.  We have two of them here here in Los Angeles, Citywalk and The Grove.  I agree, they are fake in every sense.  They are really shopping malls which simulate an urban experience, completely cut off from the rest of the city.  The architecture is so completely illiterate that it simply reinforces the synthetic quality of the experience. 

Yet, people like to be there.  The two developments here in LA, particularly The Grove, are very successful.  People go there in droves (and not just "upscale whitey"), often just to hang out, dine, window shop, people watch.  Why is that?

I think that it's because, despite the dreadful cartoon architecture and the somewhat creepy falseness of it, people respond to it because it possesses many of the urban elements Kunstler identifies.  Even in a diluted, synthetic version, there is tremendous power in the kind of urban planning Kunstler is advocating. 

boston city hall plaza was very obviously modeled after the campo in siena.  it's actually quite similar...large, paved, red brick, subtle level changes, central urban location.  admittedly, the campo is better enclosed as a 'room', but there you go...clearly the architects did at least think of 'character' and 'sense of place' and history and the nature of civic space...whether they succeeded is a whole other issue

citizen, because I respect you and your criticism of my broad brush strokes vis a vis "typical" American tastes stings a little, I just want to clarify something in my attitude: I do consider "typical" Americans to not understand quality in architecture.  But I'm also very aware that I am totally, utterly "typical" when it comes to appreciating quality in music, movies, wine, clothing (I wear CABI.  Enough said.), etc. as well as in my understanding of finance, law, good health...pretty much any area of life in which anyone can be a specialist or snob, I am as much a part of the unwashed masses to them as they are in my area of specialty, architecture.   

And EKE, to this: ...despite the dreadful cartoon architecture and the somewhat creepy falseness of it, people respond to it because it possesses many of the urban elements Kunstler identifies.  Even in a diluted, synthetic version, there is tremendous power in the kind of urban planning Kunstler is advocating.  I agree! What angers me is that Kunstler and others are absolutely not willing to accept that the "traditional" urbanity of a small New England town can be just as well-wrought in a contemporary design as in Georgian or Craftsman or whatever.  Scale, proportion, texture, harmony...those things exist, well or poorly, in ALL design, contemporary or not.

I'd be very interested in cataloging information and images on successful urban places and spaces in modernist styles, which exhibit the kind of urbanity Kunstler is describing.  If anyone can point them out to me, I'd be very grateful - this would help me with material for a future lecture.

I agree that they potentially exist in all design.  But I believe that the big reason that the general public prefers traditional architecture is because it has more reliably produced places that exhibit those values.  Modernists are capable of providing this as well, but have often either neglected to do so out of ignorance, or refused to, for reasons about which I can only speculate.

Here's an interesting topic:  You said you think that typical Americans don't understand quality in architecture.  What IS quality in architecture?  Who defines it?  Artists? Architects?  Society? The general public?

If architects produce work that appeals primarily to other architects, is it quality work?

If the public needs to be "educated" in order to appreciate an architects work in the public realm, can the work be considered of high quality?

Miles - it's a bigger failure than it would have been because they also completely destroyed the neighborhood to the north and west of city hall plaza.  but I agree - that giant wall at congress street is awful.  elinor - those changes in grade aren't subtle - it's a maze of stairs. and in siena there is no differentiation between the street and the plaza.

"I'd be very interested in cataloging information and images on successful urban places and spaces in modernist styles, which exhibit the kind of urbanity Kunstler is describing."

But instead of faux fiberglass gargoyles, we got blinkety blink.

No sting, Donna.  My comment wasn't directed at any of yours.  I think we probably agree on quite a lot, from your posts.

My beef is with the view that summarily derogates all those gosh-darned American masses who refuse --refuse!--to read a book, take a shower, and change their tastes to appreciate more modern design.  This isn't a resignation to "the customer is always right," but maybe a recognition that the customer may have a point, or at least is entitled to her opinion and to spend her money her way.  Not that we shouldn't do our best to persuade and educate clients (and the public) about what we believe are much better ways to do things; we should.  But maybe we dial back the acid content in the discourse.

(In graduate school, part of my research was in cultural landscape studies, and how to see ordinary environments like vernacular buildings and neighborhoods as artifacts of a complicated cultural process that includes not only aesthetics but also politics, economics, social relations and technological change.  Buildings and neighborhoods that make me gag when wearing my designer's hat take on much more nuance for me (and less aesthetic revulsion) when considering them as products of a bigger phenomemon in which formal design and physical planning is only a part.)

this video has too much new urbanist sympathy for anyone to even give a fuck, MIles, you fundamental nostalgist

@ EKE re: "I'd be very interested in cataloging information and images on successful urban places and spaces in modernist styles..."

found by following an archinect link! It's a newly developed urban area in Hamburg. Rem Koolhaas was reportedly taking a shit on it in this interview, but I see a variety of textures, scales, and activities in this photograph. No cars! Is it humanism grafted onto an industrial background? Few will care. Seems to me like a great place to visit or live at, though. No trace of 'traditional' design, save for the cobblestones.

Enric Miralles' Santa Caterina market renovation (residential and commercial mix development over a historical market). The spaces on the residential side are of an exceptionally intimate quality, while the plaza in front of it is a bustling urban meeting point. And while (as with any good Catalan architecture) the context certainly is factored into the design, neither the surrounding urban fabric (medieval quarters), nor the historical stylistic elements of the market have anything to do with that. That multicolored canopy draws the crowd for the "front of house", and the detailing and massing of the residential side is responsible for the intimate effect. Myself, I wouldn't call this a modernist project (too much schooling that I refuse to apologize for), but it sure ain't a historicist  project - despite the fact that it deals explicitly with urban hsitorical artifacts.

Really there are so many places like this just in Barcelona alone, that it would completely derail this thread to post examples of well designed, successful and vibrant 'modernist' places and projects. If you must have more evidence, look up things Ken Frampton approves of - his idea of critical regionalism is perhaps just as retrograde as the new urbanist ideals, but it's all modernism all the way on the aesthetic and political side.

ps. what you (and many people who are wired the way you are) understand as modern, I understand as traditional in it's own right. The stuff's been around for over a century now. So long in fact, that within modernism there are countless strains of thought and traditions all to their own, and only a few of them have anything to do with style or aesthetics. This is the reason I originally placed traditional and modern in quotations - because it's simply too broad a distinction to draw, unless your entire evaluation system hinges on aesthetics alone.

To be redundant:

You can be the type of person to fancy the stucco on stone roman arches in the last image more than you do the ceramics on wood on steel arches above them, or the type of person who feels the exact opposite. Or you recognize the differences between them as a productive force in this design, and appreciate it as a whole because of it. 

Thanks for posting those Molotok. I should mention that I'm not really looking for "evidence". Not necessary... I know they exist. I was hoping to see some new examples.

Once we can admit that some things are ugly and some things are beautiful, we'll have climbed out of the architectural/artistic abyss of the last century.

Architects, symptomatically, love referring to themselves as 'designers', I think because they want the freedom to engage any commission (however unethical) and to design any g.d. thing they happen to come up with, beautiful or not.  Many architects are actively seeking the ugly. 

And, of course, the structural root of the above problems is that architecture itself is no 'steady rock', it is now a galaxy of jell-O, where you 'create' 'good' architecture through the sly use of verbiage, through bs about natural light and obscure design inspirations.

And 'beautiful' cannot easily be untethered from social and political ethical issues.  Most architects, especially starchitects, are accomplices to the mediocre moral vision of this generation's developers and moneymen.

"Most architects, especially starchitects, are accomplices to the mediocre moral vision of this generation's developers and moneymen."

Well put, although I would replace "mediocre moral" with "immoral".