on the new culture

What’s actually happening is even more incredible: the internet is a mesa verse. It’s concerned with what’s within ( mesa = ~within). The internet isn’t meant to give a graphical representation to our bodies. The internet is what allows what’s inside — our minds, our souls, our many selves — to interact with the insides of others.

Like reality TV and video art installations, McMansions are inherently postmodern. Postmodernism, to paraphrase the philosopher Frederic Jameson in an essay on the subject, involves the commodification of culture, art, and, ultimately, of one’s lifestyle. Postmodernism removes context from subjects, weakens or eliminates historicity, and effaces... See more

This leaves us with some low-hanging fruit for humanness. We can tell richly detailed stories grounded in our specific contexts and cultures: place names, sensual descriptions, local knowledge, and, well the je ne sais quoi of being alive.

Architecture is not an economic commodity that can be corrected by market forces, nor an engineering problem that can be honed towards an optimal solution. Architecture is a spiritual ethic, one that both shapes and is shaped by the ambient zeitgeist of the society it stands in.

Understood this way, “common sense” might better be called a “communal sense” to distinguish it from what usually comes to mind when most of us hear the phrase. Under these conditions, to know is to share a world. A world in this case is more than just the things out there. It is a community of interpretation.

Today’s terror of short-termism — which, with fatal consequences, we mistake for freedom — destroys the practices that require time.