Fair of face with feet of clay

I think these two articles go together.  Virginia Postrel writes on “The Allure of Techo-Glamour” and says “you can’t counter glamour with statistics.”  BLDGBLOG reviews Robert Sullivan’s Rats, which reminds us that hip infrastructure has its own set of problems. ‘They design buildings to support pigeons and for infiltration by rodents because they don’t think about it. Grand Central Station, right? They just renovated it, right? Who knows what they spend on that, right? You know how much they spend on pest control? You know how much they budgeted? Nothing.”

More about the rats here, here, and here. Glamourous it ain’t.