// JavaScript Document topic = new Array(14); quotes = new Array(14); topic[0] = "Stupefying Ugliness"; quotes[0] = "We drive up and down the gruesome, tragic suburban boulevards of commerce, and we wince at the fantastic, awesome, overwhelming, stupefying ugliness of absolutely everything in sight. The fry pits, the Big Box stores, the office units, the lube-joints, the carpet warehouses, the parking lagoons, the jive-plastic townhouse clusters, the uproar of signs, the highway itself clogged with cars.

Its as though the whole thing had been designed by some diabolical force bent on making human beings miserable. And naturally, this experience can make you feel kind of glum about the nature and future of our civilization."; topic[1] = "The Suburbs"; quotes[1] = "Unfortunately, the relentless expansion and duplication of car-dependent suburbia has turned it into an everyday environment every bit as bad as the industrial city from which it was supposed to be an escape and a cure. Nature is present only in the berm between the K-mart and the Wal-mart."; topic[2] = "Destroying The Past"; quotes[2] = "One of the consequences of destroying the past, or making it inadmissible, is that you end up not being able to know where you came from. And then you don't know here you're going, and you can't live in a hopeful present. The modernists destroyed that, and made it the heart and soul of their practice and their message. Americans regarded it as being sexy."; topic[3] = "Starbucks"; quotes[3] = "Starbucks provides something very simple, in short supply: agreeable public space. They provide a nice place for you to hang out-- You pay $3.50 for their stupid coffee concoction, but you stay at their table for an hour and a half.

There are so few places that Americans can go, especially real public space, not a mall, so little real public space, that if you put in this artificial substitute, it's wildly successful. Starbucks is selling a public gathering place. Coffee is the enabling mechanism."; topic[4] = "Growth"; quotes[4] = "Eighty percent of everything ever built in America has been built in the last fifty years, and most of it is depressing, brutal, ugly, unhealthy, and spiritually degrading.

The village shopping plazas with their vast parking lagoons, the Lego-block hotel complexes, the junk food joints, the freeway loops around every big and little city with their clusters of discount merchandise marts. This is the whole destructive, wasteful spectacle that politicians proudly call growth."; topic[5] = "Cities"; quotes[5] = "Historically, cities contain the essence of a civilization. They are the marketplaces for ideas and cultural values as well as material goods. They are the repositories of cultural memory. The city, above all, is the public realm monumentalized."; topic[6] = "Contact"; quotes[6] = "The crisis of place in America is illustrated most vividly by the condition of our cities. Where city life optimizes the possibility of contact between people, and especially different kinds of people, the suburb strives to eliminate precisely that kind of human contact."; topic[7] = "Elimination"; quotes[7] = "I don't believe that automobile suburbs are an adequate replacement for cities, since the motive force behind suburbia has been the exaltation of privacy and the elimination of the public realm. Where city life optimizes the possibility of contact between people, and especially different kinds of people, the suburb strives to eliminate precisely that kind of human contact."; topic[8] = "Cost of commuting"; quotes[8] = "The amount of driving necessary to exist within this system is stupendous, and fantastically expensive -- anybody who commutes an hour a day in each direction spends seven weeks of the year sitting in his car."; topic[9] = "Sense of continuity"; quotes[9] = "What use to add up to a compact town, where everything was within a ten-minute walk, has been replaced with a public realm that is composed mainly of roads. The present arrangement has certainly done away with sacred places."; topic[10] = "Something for nothing"; quotes[10] = "Life was so easy here for so many for such a long time that Americans somehow got the idea that you merely had to wish something was so in order to make it so. The culture of advertising--which bombarded Americans daily, hourly--eroded our capacity to distinguish between the truths and the lies.

You could label a house traditional and someone would accept it, even if all the traditional relationships between the house and its surroundings were obliterated. You could name a housing development Forest Knoll Acres, even if there was no forest and no knoll, and the customers would line up with their checkbooks open."; topic[11] = "Addicted to Illusion"; quotes[11] = "Americans are as addicted to illusion as they are to cheap petroleum. They have more meaningful relationships with movie stars and characters on daytime television shows than they do with members of their own families."; topic[12] = "Social Costs of Big Box Retailers"; quotes[12] = "Men and women long used to steady jobs at good wages during the best postwar years now have to spend their final working years cobbling together a living from part-time service-oriented work at lower pay, often a long drive from town.

Then children and their children's children, who had no hopes for steady work at good pay, fall into the abyss of welfare, drugs, petty crime, and teen pregnancy-behavior that Americans more usually associate with inner-city ghettos."; topic[13] = "New Frontier"; quotes[13] = "All places in America suffered terribly from the way we chose to arrange things in our postwar world. Cities, towns, neighborhoods and countryside were ravaged equally. Sprawl and over-development were spawning megalopolis, destroying such age-old social arrangements as the distinction between city life and country life."; index = Math.floor(Math.random() * topic.length);