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Rory Sutherland, vice chairman of the Ogilvy advertising agency, famously told a story about an office building where people complained that an elevator took too long to arrive. Instead of spending $1 million to make the elevators 5 percent faster, they solved the problem by spending around $100 to add mirrors so people could look at themselves whi... See more

The motels around the airports in Chicago and Atlanta are so little different from the motels around the airports of Tokyo and Frankfurt that all essential distances dissolve in likeness. What is truly separated is distinct; it is unlike. “The only true voyage would be not to travel through a hundred different lands with the same pair of eyes, but

James P. Carse • Finite and Infinite Games

The more tourists who were routed through these channels, the more their pathways through the nation became homogenized, like Waze routing cars through downtown Westport. An optimized version of Iceland emerged for consumption.

Kyle Chayka • Filterworld

Modern commercial flight depends on the reinforced concrete that forms the runways, approaches, and aprons of airports: they must withstand the repeated traffic of airplanes with a mass commonly between 150 t (Boeing 737) and 277 t (Airbus 380); runway concrete is up to 1.5 m thick and the longest runways are 3600–4000 m long.

Vaclav Smil • Making the Modern World: Materials and Dematerialization

Quick Passages

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The angles gave it a dramatic sense of perspective; the unusually shaped windows and skylights sent abstract shadow lines across the white walls and wood plank floors,

Paul Goldberger • Building Art

Cities are amalgams of buildings and people. They are inhabited settings from which daily rituals — the mundane and the extraordinary, the random and the staged — derive their validity. In the urban artifact and its mutations are condensed continuities of time and place. The city is the ultimate memorial of our struggles and glories: it is where th

The tendency all too often is to see urban form as a finite thing, a closed thing, a complicated object. I want to stress what we know instead to be the case — that a city, however perfect its initial shape, is never complete, never at rest. Thousands of witting and unwitting acts every day alter its lines in ways that are perceptible only over a c

While we wait for flying cars, here’s our flying boat - @navierboat N30! Alameda to downtown SF is now 12 mins and I love the stunning view of the city and the Bay Bridge! Foiling across the Bay (and skipping the traffic, obviously!) https://t.co/wXtlAq40tp

Sampriti Bhattacharyya x.com