The main purpose of this community would be to isolate its residents from the propaganda that Beck believes Americans are exposed to in their current society, as well as provide them with freedom and a place to live that doesn’t discriminate based on income.
“Before you send your kids to college, you spend a week with us. We’re gonna tell them exactly, we will show them the truth, we will tell them what they’re going to try to do, and we will deprogram them every summer, if you care.”
— rt.com
32 Comments
What could possibly go wrong?
somehow, I imagine a cross between Albert Speer and a Thomas Kinkade painting...
like a Rem Koolhaus for paranoid conseratives. only true believers need apply
nah, glenn beck is leon krier. he should just move to seaside,fl
Yet another pointless inclusion in Archinect's cutting-edge news feed. I'd like to lobby for updates on Lindsay Lohan... that's coming, right?
hey at least the thread title isn't biased!
this definitely is influenced by and could have influence on architecture culture, citizen. why pointless?
and, frac, i don't think you have to be a complete lefty to think that mr beck is a little crazy, do you? maybe i'm blinded by my bias, i don't know, but i can't think even my more conservative peers would take him seriously. but then i don't even understand the draw: it's not like he's even all that charismatic.
this sounds like another version of ave maria [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ave_Maria,_Florida], this time with capitalism as a religion instead of catholicism. might be ok, might fail miserably. if he can get the backing, so be it! the remarkable thing about ave maria is that it was so unremarkable from an architectural standpoint. seaside had an impact because - despite being a throwback - it was overall a novel approach to town development for the time it was initiated. celebration, to some extent, was also remarkable because it pushed seaside's approach into the disney-audience mainstream. ave maria was derivative of these and really made no splash. it's probably fine for those catholic folks who want to live in a pretty, controlled catholic ghetto.
beck's proposal sounds similar: a place for people to remove themselves. despite rand's idealization of this removal, we've already seen that gated communities have their own kinds of pathologies. a further separation/isolation may only exacerbate them.
someone needs to do a cliff's notes version of foucault's 'of other spaces' for mr beck. not that he'd care if there's a chance he could make bank on this effort, but a separated community will begin to organize itself just like the community from which it separated. the same distinctions will become manifest over time. it would be interesting to check in on ave maria in, say, 10 years, see what's happening...
I'm not sure why people keep pushing this false alignment with politics and aesthetics when there are counter arguments enough to make the whole discussion seem irrelevant. The early modernists courted the Nazi regiem before being thwarted, as has been well documented.
Mr. Beck is a charlatan, plain and simple. It dosen't matter if he believes in what he's saying or not, the only thing that's clear is he's in it for the money, like all those fake religeous conservatives selling salvation to the most fearful of modern society. They prey on the weak. It's a con-job, but that being said, cudos for Archinet for shedding light on it. To be vigilant, one ought to look at everything out there, even if for a minute, if only not to fall prey to the ignorance and isolationism that people like Mr. Beck traffic in.
Conservatives building utopian commonwealths has become like liberals moving to Canada.
Uber-weird idea being pitched for Detroit by Oakland County conservatives
okay i just started to watch the video posted above. why does the dude speaking have an image of that nazi guy (killed by his son) behind him and holding a flag with a huge-ass swastika on it? subliminal message? no, subliminal messages are subtle!
and, frac, i don't think you have to be a complete lefty to think that mr beck is a little crazy, do you? maybe i'm blinded by my bias, i don't know, but i can't think even my more conservative peers would take him seriously. but then i don't even understand the draw: it's not like he's even all that charismatic.
okay now i finished the video. 4:47 long and i thought it was just going to be glenn beck's pitch for this self-sustaining utopia. instead you get about 1:30 of beck (with giggles and snarky comments a la them there young turks) followed by 2 minutes of pakman calling this a cult. yeah, that's not biased at all, steven!
and then pakman finishes the last minute asking his viewers to sign up for his bonus show (and it would be nice if he could pronounce beijing correctly) to get more money to support '... alternative, progressive media ...'. the HELL? where's the glenn beck coverage in this clip?
I find it highly ironic is that he's part of this tinfoil hat agenda 21 conspiracy crowd, yet his images look like something out of a CNU marketing brochure. He's against smart growth and zoning, but wants a master-planned city that looks like smart growth projects.
If he wanted to create a true libertarian utopia, he'd be showing yona friedman - but we all know that no one really wants to live in spatial city.
around 1:05 -> t.j. if you want to pass on truth embed it in architecture - where was the discussion about that? nah that just gets dismissed, glossed over.
then the sidekick says i know what this is about, you give glenn beck all your money so you can live in his city!
all right, let's wrap this up, gives us more money to subscribe to our alternative, progressive bonus show! (do they even see the irony?)
I wonder is Mrs Jimmy Baker will be on his board of directors. Now lets talk about understanding style.
I think Texas already has what he's looking for in Eldorado.
Hey Glen, how about building this thing on the moon?
The early modernists courted the Nazi regiem before being thwarted, as has been well documented.
TD You must be referring to Mies's Reichsbank project 2 months after Hitler's 1933 takeover. It was an invited competition. Mies didnt win. The two or three other Mies projects never went anywhere as well. Mies left Germany in 1936.
Modernists didn't do well with the new Nazi cultural policy. It took about a year and a half to end the modernist input.
Barbara Miller Lane's book ARCHITECTURE AND POLITICS IN GERMANY 1918-1945 is good on this
My point was't to tar the early modernists with the Nazi brush, rather to point out that architects are like everyone else (when it comes to work) need it to survive, and as such we should cool down the political incrimination game when passing judgement on work they might not like personally. To be fair to the early modernists, the Nazi party at that time wasn't the Nazi party we think of now-a-days, although I personally avoid bullys of any stripe.
I'm sure fat boy glenn beck would hate a true libertarian town. It would be filled with gays and weed smoking hippies. This kind of place would just replace the authority of the state with a like minded neo-conservative religious fanatic social authority...Authority is authority...The closest thing we ever had to a real libertarian city was probably the east village in the early 80's...diverse, artistic, inclusive, a mix of rich and poor, sure the state was technically present and imposed laws but the culture and physical structure of the city made it difficult to enforce them so it was pretty close to what a libertarian city would look like imo...Curious to know if any of you all think of any other places and times that were close to libertarian???
Maybe present day Somalia? In the east village they had NYPD's finest to make sure nobody got out of hand. Back in the 80's you could walk past them smoking weed out in the open, at least that's what I remember...it's all a bit hazy.
Yes it took about a year before the ban on modern architecture was implemented, After Hitler's speech on 'German culture'. After that modern architecture was unfit. Flat roofs equal flat heads equal Jews.
The crap about modernist architects looking for work with the Nazi's is just a story. It may have it's source from the lips of Philip Johnson who said that that even Richard Neutra (who is Jewish) would work for Hitler. When at sci-arc his widow, almost in tears, said that was totally untrue and called Johnson 'that Nazi apologist' . kinda makes the Nazi takeover sound like just another economic recession.
It wasnt just about 'getting' work. Thats why so many modern architects left. It wasnt just about work. They were in the cross-hairs marked for elimination. It was survival..
"The crap about modernist architects looking for work with the Nazi's is just a story."
Actually, I got it from this excellent book entitled "Architects of Fortune: Mies Van Der Rohe and the Third Reich" by Elaine Hochman. According to her, it was about getting work, before it was about survival, as was true for so many others.
I have the book. Mies looked for work but nothing came of it. Mies left for Chicago after he got an offer for ITT. He ran out of money and prospects and left Berlin then.
Hochman wrote a long piece like this for Oppositions, and went on the write the well researched and scholary Architects of Fortune , the book subtitle is Mies van der Rohr and the Third Reich, is there more to draw glances than to disclose any substantiated Nazi connections.
Mies wasnt the only one. Modern architects in Germany just left. America, Europe, even Turkey, Polezig for example.
Bruno Taut did more buildings in Turkey than anywhere else. He died and buried there in 1938 and responsible for architectural curriculum in Istanbul Technical University in addition to his well known buildings. Hans Poelzig died just before he left for Turkey. Martin Wagner lived in Turkey for three years and worked on the master planning of Ankara. Later, Gropius got a teaching job in Harvard but that friendship didn't last for too long since Wagner saw Gropius long abandoned socialist principles of community and working class and became a capitalist architect dancing with corporations.
Just couple of anecdotes.. These people would do nothing for Nazis and probably would be persecuted by them if they didn't leave Germany in the nick of time for being staunch socialists on top of being part of the degenerate art... No blanket statements please. Eric is right.
Mr. Ayyuce, you're a senior editor for Archinect who's mission statement is "to make architecture more connected and open-minded". In that spirit, could you clarify your blanket statement that "Eric is right"?
Eric said "The crap about modernist architects looking for work with the Nazi's is just a story."
followed by "Mies looked for work but nothing came of it" and "Mies wasn't the only one"
How's he right?
TD Eric said blah blah is just a restatement off the top of my head. It took a year maybe two for the ban and purge to finish.
Modernist architects were seen by the Nazi's as culturally suspect and under review. Mies' architecture was described and called anti-German.
Some expressionist-style orientated architects like Paul Bonatz continued to work, designing in a stripped-down Romanesque style (with the emphasis on Romanesque). I would describe Bonatz as one of those who stayed and found work.
The Bauhaus trained architects left or were forced out.
As to Mr Ayyuce blanket statement that "Eric is right". I usually am. So what? You got a problem?
OOOOOHHHHHHHHH!
He's a little late to the whole "Independence, USA" as the Capital for a Theocratic America Game by about, oh, 182 YEARS:
"In 1831, members of the Latter Day Saint movement began moving to the Jackson County, Missouri area. Shortly thereafter, founder Joseph Smith, Jr. declared a spot west of the Courthouse Square to be the place for his prophesied temple of the New Jerusalem, in expectation of the Second Coming of Christ."
Come to think about it wasn't that the pilgrim John Winthrop's concept in 1630 for Boston when he declared it to be a "City on a hill"? They where going to show old, currupt England how a truly christian life was to be lived in the new world.
Don't do it Glenn, look how we turned out!
T-D, you are right, Eric is right, I am wrong. I have no problem with that.;.)
Sooooo let me get this right. You want to 'isolate' people so they can be 'free'?
Glenn...your confusing. Are we not all free where we live now?? And you plan to "tell them the truth...". What, that you are a dummy??
Glen Beck, the next Jim Jones. Dont drink the kool-aid folks...even if you are thirsty.
I see this quickly turning into Lord of the Flies....
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