Confessions In A Crown Vic: A commentary on the American Dream.

“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 interviews Paolo Soleri the visionary Urban design architect, and the traffi c engineer, Louis Lagomarsino, for Phoenix’s highways, and the author’s passengers’ marginalization for their lack of a car. It’s a journey through an Architect’s life, beginning with schooling, travels, design, internship, and practices in many genres of clientele from private to public projects for the U.S.P.S., U.S.A.F., and the U.S.A.C.O.E. It takes us through diff erent cities and urban confi gurations. 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 aff ects of expansion and colonialist attitude’s in America. It’s a critique of Urban Sprawl, and the irrationality of relying on housing starts to determine a healthy economy. It examines Keynesian versus Classical economics, comparing them with the events of the last “American” century. He 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 a culture based on the automobile and a limited fossil fuel economy? It challenges this dream’s confi guration, 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.