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“Confessions in a Crown Vic”
Second Edition

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 designer, the traffic engineer, Louis Lagomarsino, for Phoenix’s highway designs, and the cab passengers’ short stories of 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 the private to public projects for the USPS, USAF, USACOE, NAVFAC and manufacturing semiconductor facilities. It takes us through different urban configurations. 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 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 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.

About the author:

PETER J. LAGOMARSINO RA | NCARB | AIA | LEED GREEN ASSOCIATE

Peter Lagomarsino, a Senior Architect, lives in Melbourne Florida and has practiced Architecture for over twenty four years. He has Bachelors of Arts in Architecture from the University of New Mexico, and a Masters of Architecture from Clemson University and is LEED Accredited. Part of his Masters, was at the Charles E. Daniels Center for Urban Design at Clemson’s Campus in Genoa Italy. While there he traveled extensively in Europe, Greece, Egypt and the Middle East and worked with the Israel Antiquities Authority for their Surveys and Excavations at the end of his travels, to produce measured drawings for their Banias Area ‘B’ site literature. Mr. Lagomarsino has an extensive range of experience in many different fields of his trade. His skills balance the artistic and technical approach to presentation and comprehension which involve (A)rchitecture, (P)hotography, (P)ainting and (A)uthoring – A |P | P| A .

He’s worked with federal and private clientele in many U.S cities for the U.S.A.F, the U.S. Army and Army National Guard, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, NAVFAC, The U.S. Postal Service, as well as many high tech Industrial semiconductor manufacturing plants in the US, and a Pharmaceutical facility in Dublin Ireland. His travels to many cities around the U.S. and the world give him a unique perspective and exposure to urban environments and how they may best benefit from different approaches and policies that service their inhabitants.