Famous Architect Rem Koolhaas is disappointed with American cities:

“Don’t tell anyone… but the 20th-century city is over. It has nothing new to teach us anymore. Our job is simply to maintain it.”

I live in Old America — the Northeast, the Rust Belt — and in decades to come, the rest of America will also become an old country. Many more of its people will embark on that twilight journey that seems to be a mystery (or a dead end) to Famous Architects — the one where you gain wisdom through maintenance, instead of knowledge through innovation. These are two different and possibly divergent paths of knowing. Not only will this play out in families that suddenly find themselves having to take care of aging Baby Boomer relatives, but yes, the establishment of a single new subway line will become a new kind of heroic struggle that they will not understand in Shenzhen or in Famous Architects’ Studios. (It’s not a job, it’s an adventure; but Koolhaas doesn’t sound convinced.)

Yet jarringly, the triumphalist American dance goes on during this current presidential election. We can win a war with three countries at once (i.e., Iran too); we are not in a recession; after eight years of Bush, we can not only feel good, but feel better than ever; and the world will love us and let us lead again…

By the way, has anyone noticed how more reports about daily life in China, and Chinese affairs, have been creeping into mainstream American news? We’re now learning what life’s been like for Europe and the rest of the world all these years, when they would open their papers in the morning and read America this, America that. Hey, the media is just going where the story is. And that story is not in Old America, where thousands of maintenance workers are even now disappearing from the narrative — yet mysteriously, live on.