Keane Moraes

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

But when architecture falls out of sync with the conditions we live in, home begins to feel more and more precarious. The reason we dislike contemporary architecture is because it fails to achieve this essential purpose, to, as the architect Antonio Sant’Elia put it, “freely and audaciously harmonize man with his environment”.

Articulating what you like is the only way to make great stuff

If you’re disappointed by the mundane nature of this process, so was I. When I arrived at the office, I was half-expecting a bunch of artsy weirdos bedazzled with tattoos and attitude. Instead, I met a group of plainly dressed nice folks, mostly in their 20s and 30s, who worked hard at their craft but tried to keep the real world in sight. When I... See more

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

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.

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.

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.