“Confessions in a Crown Vic” is the story of professional displacement during the Great Recession, an Architect as Cab driver, while seeking Architecture work. It contains the last interview with Paolo Soleri, the late visionary Urban design architect, and the traffic engineer, Louis Lagomarsino, for Phoenix’s highways, as well as the author’s passengers’ marginalization for their lack of a car. It’s a journey through an Architect’s life and work in many genres of clientele from private to public projects. It takes us through different cities and urban environments. But most of all it takes us through history’s cycles of political change, the semantics of their origins, the delivery of designs, and the affects of colonialist attitude’s in America.
It’s a critique of Urban Sprawl, and the means that we currently use to determine a healthy economy. It examines Keynesian versus Classical economics in light of the last “American” century. It illuminates the American Dream’s unsustainable promise to even its poorest citizens, considering whether we can still re-materialize that dream out of its current mythological existence. Is this dream for everyone? Can we grow an automobile culture based on a limited fossil fuel economy? It challenges this dream’s configuration, while placing a heavy burden of responsibility for our economic demise on its mythical component, the greed that drove it, and the sprawl that has burdened it.
