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Why Every City Feels the Same Now
- throwaway4747l 6y agoNo, they don't. No, I won't honor this provocative headline with a click to 'read the article' either.
- nameless912 6y agoSame. I just moved back to the Midwest from Seattle and while Seattle has certainly become more "boring" and "samey", our new neighborhood is vibrant, diverse, affordable and full of fabulous people. The whole city feels big enough to have everything we could want, while not being so big it gets boring. There's plenty of life left in US cities, you just have to look outside {Seattle|SF}.
- throwaway0a5e 6y ago>vibrant, diverse, affordable and full of fabulous people. If the last 20yr of history is any indication none of these qualities will survive a prolonged deluge of west coast money in their city.
- balabaster 6y agoI've spent time in many cities in North America and I would have to say the vast majority, but definitely not all, feel almost the same. Toronto doesn't feel vastly different than Calgary, Houston, Manhattan, Washington DC, London, Brussels and a large portion of Paris. Seattle felt different, perhaps because of the ocean, but saying that it felt quite distinct from Vancouver which very definitely has its own vibe that I adore. Bar Harbor as a city felt kinda like a quainter version of Boston, it reminded me very much of Cabot Cove from Murder She Wrote which I loved, but both Bar Harbor and Boston definitely felt like their own cities distinct from one another and from any other. The last city I spent time in was Nijmegen, NL and I felt a lot of similarities to Colchester and Canterbury where I grew up in the UK and York and to some extent even though it looked a lot different, it had the feeling of old Carcasonne which I adored. I've yet to visit San Francisco, but from everything I've seen and heard about it, I would be surprised if it feels vastly different than Toronto.
- flerchin 6y agoNo matter where you go, you'll still be you.
- throwaway0a5e 6y ago"You can leave the trailer park but the trailer park will never leave you" Pretty much every culture has some form of this proverb.
- ghaff 6y ago>Bar Harbor and Boston definitely felt like their own cities distinct from one another and from any other Well, one is a little summer tourist town and the other--while also having a summer tourist component--is a large metropolis. (Which is also fairly distinct--at least in the core--from other cities.) Bar Harbor isn't really that distinct from other New England coastal towns like Camden though.
- throwaway0a5e 6y agoThe thing that makes Bar Harbor distinct from Boston is that it's just far enough away from Boston that your average Masshole can't convince the wife and kids to pile into the Land Rover/4Runner and drive there on a Friday night or Saturday morning. Look at Portland for contrast.
- ghaff 6y agoI would actually have said that Bar Harbor and the Old Port area of Portland were more alike than different other than the surrounding small city in Portland's case where tourists don't generally go. And Bar Harbor has cruise ships although they've continued to fight off actually building a pier for them.
- throwaway0a5e 6y agoI'd agree. Both have more in common with each other than either has with e.g. Ellsworth or Lewiston but the businesses overtly catering toward yuppies from points south drops off a cliff once you get past Portland.
- bestouff 6y agoAt least in Europe they don't. At all.
- Toine 6y agoFor now.
- Mediterraneo10 6y agoEven Europe has seen a great deal of architectural convergence. The Nordic style, for example, spread from Finland to the surrounding countries, and if one has known the Baltic countries since the 1990s, one marvels at how in the post-Soviet era they have begun to converge architecturally, and in terms of certain aspects of urban planning, towards the Nordic countries.
- tokai 6y ago>The Nordic Style Do you mean Nordic Classicism or Funkis?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Mediterraneo10 6y agoI mean Funkis and post-Funkis trends.
- Markoff 6y agowithin Europe I would tend to agree, if you stay in city centres - it's just old buildings with churches, narrow streets and cobblestones, you could hardly distinguish the countries if it weren't for language, which makes sense considering how compact Europe is but if you compare European, African and East Asian city you can clearly see differences
- riffraff 6y ago> it's just old buildings with churches, narrow streets and cobblestones Just to talk of a single country: Rome has its kind of old buildings and churches, which is different from Florence, which is different from Venice, which is different from Milan or Trieste. Even the cobblestones are different!
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- amelius 6y agoEverything feels the same now. Websites, they all look like they used Bootstrap. Smartphones, well they basically are the same as everybody has the latest iPhone. Fashion. Everybody wears jeans.
- rorykoehler 6y agoIt's interesting that this is the outcome of capitalism considering it was always a point used to ridicule communism. That and the deep state espionage which we've also got now.
- AnthonyMouse 6y agoIt's the outcome of having centralized power. Markets require competition to operate. We erected barriers to competition through regulation and lack of antitrust enforcement, so markets consolidated. Just enough competition to put up a fig leaf and claim they have some, not enough to actually be effective. The entire dichotomy is a fraud. The problem is centralization, not whether the centralized power is a state or a corporation.
- rorykoehler 6y agoI agree 100%. I'm a bit bemused that I've received down votes on such a neutral observation.
- tolbish 6y agoThe term 'deep state espionage' is neutral?
- rorykoehler 6y agoYes. Remember Edward Snowden?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- sailfast 6y agoThere are a lot of words in this article that are not really important to the argument so it takes awhile to get to the actual less link-bait conclusion. TL;DR: architecture is another means of control and we shouldn’t let corporate architecture (headquarters) or current hegemonic / imperial designs take over the local uniqueness because it is acceptable but instead embrace local architecture. The article highlights some places under threat, and some good examples and ends with a plea to avoid blotting our our current desirable places that are unique with hegemonic buildings. [many many examples included]
- Bedon292 6y agoIts interesting. I don't have experience with a large variety of cities, but Seattle and DC I am quite familiar with. They do not feel the same to me at all. Lots of history and monuments, and there are still pretty strict height restrictions in DC. Just don't have any of that feel in Seattle. The primary commonality is the horrible traffic. But, if you go to Bellevue and Tyson's Corner they feel the same. Perhaps DC is unique? Perhaps I am biased to the region I grew up in? How do other feel DC and Seattle compare?
- chapium 6y agoI think DC is the exception here. Most cities are cookie cutter buildings downtown, with the same restaurants. Out towards the suburbs its cookie cutter strip malls and the same restaurants. Oklahoma and Texas feel a little more unique since they tend to have a local set of franchises.
- leetcrew 6y agoDC is a fairly unique american city, in part due to the height restriction and weird layout of the major arteries. I often don't feel like I'm in an actual city when I walk around in DC. when I'm not right next to a monument or government building, it feels more like a particularly dense suburb. if someone else is driving, I might not notice that we've left silver spring and entered the city proper.
- Legogris 6y agoCan't speak of DC but I feel that even culturally, large cities have more in common with each other than they do with the sparesly populated regions in their own countries. London, Paris, NYC, Tokyo, Seoul, KL, Singapore, Cape Town, Shanghai, Buenos Aires... Same same but different.
- wenc 6y agoI've visited/lived in 7/10 of those cities, and really appreciated the fact that retail and public infra look the same between cities. In that sense, there's a certain "interoperability" (much like how most airports around the world work the same). It only takes a day or so to get used to how the public transit works and how to buy things. I could drop into a new city and learn how to get around in no time. (NY's subway was the least intuitive and took the longest to get used to -- it's complicated by inconsistencies like express trains, lack of electronic signage on multiuse platforms, doors not opening in certain cars for certain stops in lower Manhattan, etc. -- but even so there was a method behind the madness.) However, once you venture outside the central business districts/downtowns and into the neighborhoods, things start looking very different. It's in the neighborhoods that one finds unique cultures. Chicago for instance: the Loop is nice and all, but the character of Chicago is really in the 77 neighborhoods around the city. NYC's cultural hotspots are in boroughs like Queens. I would say most cities retain their culture in their neighborhoods, not in their CBDs/downtowns.
- dfxm12 6y agoThere's so much more to how a city feels than its architecture. Though I do agree that the International Style is a bit overdone.
- Markoff 6y agono it doesn't, I fail to see how is Prague same as Beijing vs KL vs New Delhi for instance unless you stay in CBD like author of this piece and I am pretty sure it would feel very different also in Africa
- exabrial 6y agoOn the same note, why is every city council obsessed with attracting tourism? For whatever reason it's seen as the holy grail of industry.
- Markoff 6y agoI guess people in Barcelona, Venice and Prague would disagree, this is really the best side effect of coronavirus despite the loss of income I will rather have less frequent public transport to save money the whole city (center) occupied by tourists
- xapata 6y agoParis is best in July and August, when the locals leave.
- scsilver 6y ago"Amity is a summer town, we need summer dollars."
- Spooky23 6y agoEasy. Tourism generates sales tax revenue, keeps storefronts occupied and employs people.
- ForHackernews 6y agoIt's relatively non-polluting and leads to growth in amenities that can also be enjoyed by locals.
- QuesnayJr 6y agoIf you think about it, it's a weird consumerist way to think about buildings -- what's important about a building is why I, the tourist, thinks of it, and not the people who have to use it every day. Most people don't spend their time going from hotel to hotel not knowing where they are, so buildings aren't built to keep those people from being bored.
- Nasrudith 6y agoWhat is really consumerist about it is that it is the ultimate first world problem in treating minor inconveniences as grand oppression and demanding the world change how it operates alienated, smuggly alienated from the realities of production and calling themselves enlightened for it. Get a disgruntled real estate developer with a few drinks in them to lower inhibitions and demand make less homogenous housing. Prepare for an earsplitting rant about every last detail they need to go through from economies of scale, cost of getting it, to building codes to zoning approval processes and meetings as they lack and the utter presumptious cluelessness of the demand from someone practically irrelevant to the whole process.
- doonesbury 6y agoThis article explains why travel in a lot of the US (born and raised here) is not interesting except for New Orleans and maybe Austin, or SF and Berkeley. There's a despair here that I bet the French or Portuguese have a perfect word for. I hope old Europe doesn't fully go this way because it's my favorite place to go. It's oldness is very soothing which is a sensibility or modality I got from my father.
- YinglingLight 6y agoYikes, racist undertones.
- leetcrew 6y agoI'll concede that most US cities are probably not worth traveling to for the architecture alone. most US cities I've visited do have some hidden gems though. it's not stuff you'd easily find researching for a vacation though. when possible, I try to stay with a friend who already lives in the place I want to travel too. I've always been pleasantly surprised by what a city has to offer when I travel this way.
- blaser-waffle 6y ago> There's a despair here that I bet the French or Portuguese have a perfect word for. Why those languages? I'd imagine that kind of dispair would be the specialty of German or some East European language.
- ricohboy 6y agoIt's a different "flavor" of despair then what you're probably thinking those languages might have
- culopatin 6y agoI've traveled most of the US on wheels and I feel this. I have an intense urge to take my oldest car on a long unplanned roadtrip just for the adventure of doing it, but I never go because 'Where would I go? It's all an interstate and a bunch of nothing new". Yes, there are small towns, but even through those you have to drive 15hs to find something that stands out. What they don't tell you in movies about the American roadtrip in a convertible is that it's really long no matte where you go and really boring for the most part.
- ghaff 6y agoTo the degree that there is a certain sameness, at least in the US, the other thing that probably contributes is chain stores/restaurants. It's more pronounced in some places than others but both urban shopping malls and places on the street overlap a great deal from city to city.
- bluGill 6y agoOur needs as humans are mostly the same, as are our wants. Thus chains to fill the same needs the same way everywhere.
- heydenberk 6y agoI'm less concerned with central business districts having the same architectural form. That's clearly function following form to some extent; people who work in those places want space and light, and as much of it as possible in a small area. I'm more concerned about the Brooklyn-ification of everything. Interior aesthetics, menu items, playlists, etc., are converging in places like Saratoga Springs and Omaha in a way that really dulls the sense of place you used to get traveling America.
- aaron695 6y agoObviously it's the internet. But the internet also allows one to go deeper into cities. So at the moment we are still breaking even. In part poverty helps keep things different, this to is disappearing. The destruction of culture is an important part of progress. This is seen as unfortunate for the viewers on the outside but swapping a ramshackle house that floods for a brick box that works and access to McDonald's is a godsend for the occupants. Pre internet it might have been a local burger joint. Now the (physical) Irish pub delivered in a shipping container has gone to a (designed) shipping container Irish pub.
- blaser-waffle 6y ago> The destruction of culture is an important part of progress. You lost me here. > This is seen as unfortunate for the viewers on the outside but swapping a ramshackle house that floods for a brick box that works and access to McDonald's is a godsend for the occupants. Do some reading about all of the terrible things large fast food conglomerates have done to our food supply. Cheap food is easy to get in places like India -- rice and dahl for what would be pennies in USD -- and eradicating their culture via McDicks benefits no one. > Now the (physical) Irish pub delivered in a shipping container has gone to a (designed) shipping container Irish pub. This sounds like all of the worst parts of Irish drinking culture, inside a metal container, and without any of the things that make Irish pubs appealing, such as old crackpot sods who've sat at the same stool for ~20+ years.
- aaron695 6y ago> and eradicating their culture via McDicks benefits no one. It's up to you, but when I stopped calling Microsoft M$ it allowed me to mature a little in the software world and be able to critically look at things. It sounds silly, but for me it worked. https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6185/is-m-for-microsoft-allowed-considered-ok/6188 https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6185/is-m-for-micro...
- helen___keller 6y agoThis is a little ranty so it's difficult at a skim to get the core arguments of the author down But the main call to action seems to be to preserve local culture, architecture, and design, rather than letting the world become a homogenized corporate sameness enforced by hegemonic powers. A noble goal, but not one that's really actionable. The architectural sameness spreads for the reason most architecture spreads, which is practicality. Ultimately the people with deep pockets build and buy, and those people are influenced by current trends and what is most practical (affordable and featureful). You can show me the most beautiful architecture in the world, and I'll show you a builder creating a bastardized version of it with 30% more square feet. The mcmansion with 30% more square feet makes the sale.
- Spivak 6y agoCollective action, especially purchase preferences, are notoriously hard to change but that's where the action comes from. The trend of putting every dollar into square footage, number of bedrooms/bathrooms, didn't come from nowhere. They are easily quantifiable metrics about a house that sorta-kinda-if-you-squint give you an impression of livability and they're what every house searching tool gives users to filter on and $/sq. ft is the most prominently displayed metric for "value." Worse, even if you don't care about playing stupid games, you still likely have to play if you ever want to sell your house. Changing how we evaluate the quality of a house changes how they're built.
- helen___keller 6y agoThat's true. I've been looking at housing a lot because I'm hoping to buy next spring, since my wife and I finally just finished saving enough for a down payment. I've started considering it a "smell", if you will, when a recently-constructed single family home is in the range of 2800-3500 square feet. Almost inevitably, I look at more detailed pictures on the floor plan and layout and see all sorts of weird choices - a little "half office" right at the top of the stairs not even in its own room (just like, an empty space). Questionably shaped rooms that interact strangely with the roof. And so on. Additionally, my personal preference is not even to have that much space - I'm nearly content with 1000sqft for a family of 3, what could I do with 3 times that much? - but I must confess that I do play the value-per-sqft game without meaning to when I'm comparing a 1500 sqft against a 2000 sqft home.
- the-dude 6y agoHaven't read the article, but here in Europe I see more McDonalds, Starbucks, Subways and UberEats in my own city as times goes by. I hate it. edit: I forgot the KFC and BurgerKing. WTF is Kentucky Fried Chicken doing in the most northern city of NL?
- blaser-waffle 6y agoCOVID is gonna kill the small local joints. Large chains, or well-entrenched local places are the only ones that will survive. Over time, they take over. Post-COVID is going to look like a cyberpunk dystopia.
- randcraw 6y agoProbably true, but will that dystopia persist indefinitely? I doubt it. Yes many iconoclasts will lose their small business in the next year, but a couple years thereafter I suspect new gainsayers will arise. They may be fewer or farther flung geographically than before. But with some of the other likely consequents of COVID like a long-term rise in remote work and less commuting, more funky restaurants are likely to pop up in less expensive enclaves where more of us prefer to live and can better afford to set up funky shops of our own. It's still hard to predict the future.
- bluGill 6y agoBusiness come and go. A city is resilient not because of the business but because there is something. Chains come and go too. Kmart used to be bigger than Walmart, now gone.
- michaelcampbell 6y agoOr the set from "Idiocracy"
- jstepka 6y agoI wonder how much the locals thought the same thing when the Dutch East India company setup shop. What goes around, comes around.
- jolesf 6y ago“America has only three cities: New York, San Francisco, and New Orleans. Everywhere else is Cleveland.”
- blaser-waffle 6y ago"At least we're not Detroit!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZzgAjjuqZM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZzgAjjuqZM
- jessaustin 6y agoHaha, like NYC and SF are so different.
- bartread 6y agoI think the fundamental error here is to think this is in any way a new phenomenon. This line, in particular, holds the key: > Others evolved over the centuries: Islamic architecture encompasses both Moorish horseshoe arches and the turquoise domes of Uzbekistan, but the unified features such as minarets and geometric ornaments tell you these are lands conquered and converted by Muslim empires. (Emphasis mine) This architectural homogenisation has always happened to some extent except that, in the past, its sphere of influence was limited to the area of a certain empire, nation state, or religion. Nowadays the actors are powerful corporations with global reach, and hence the homogenisation is global in scope rather than more localised. There may be a solution to this but I don't think calling for a preservation of local architectural style and culture is it, because it's not dealing with the root cause of the problem. That may go back to valuing function over form and getting the most value for money out of buildings, although neither do I think this is a complete explanation.
- lacker 6y agoThat's a good point - in the past, when lands were conquered by the Muslim empire, they started to share architectural style. Now, as more lands are conquered by the international-corporate-capitalist empire, they too start to share an architectural style ;-)
- avocad 6y agoHere, in the Netherlands, towns get more similar. Mostly because all the shops are part of the same big chains, with the same cheap building style, and the same ways roads are upgraded. Cities all have their own history, so there is more variation there.
- anm89 6y agoI have spent the last year trying to open up a cafe and small space where I could build custom motorcycles. I think on paper it is the kind of project that people would say brings life to a city but the city I live in seems like they have designed their zoning laws to be as stacked as possible against someone like me opening up a business that does not fit a cookie cutter mold of some other existing business, at least not without hundreds of thousands of dollars to pay lawyers and architects.The building I want to use could be moved into tomorrow without a penny of changes. I had a realization while going through the process that this is the thing that causes our cities to be so drastically inferior to european cities which were designed before zoning laws were in vogue. I get that I don't want a power plant or steel forge next to my house, but that's not what we are talking about here. I can't put a cafe (literally an espresso machine and a few tables and chairs) in a structure in residential neighborhood without a huge investment in lawyers and architects and likely installing 70k worth of elevators and a 30k sprinkler system in a two story 3k sqft building and even then, if a single person on the review board dislikes the project on a whim, it's out. And then surprise surprise, all of the things open in the city are chain restaurants which everyone complains about backed by large corporation who have huge budgets for construction, and architects, and lawyers and palm greasing so our cities slowly morph into this. It really sucks.
- dentemple 6y ago> and likely installing 70k worth of elevators and a 30k sprinkler system in a two story 3k sqft building and even then, if a single person on the review board dislikes the project on a whim, it's out. Your complaint is that your new business has to not be a fire hazard or completely inaccessible to the mobility-disabled? I get you on the fact that zoning laws can get pretty wonky, but these requirements here seem pretty reasonable to me.
- war1025 6y ago> completely inaccessible to the mobility-disabled? One of my favorite coffee shops is a little hole in the wall in the basement or an old brick building. Despite the fact that to get to the shop, you need to go down a narrow set of exterior stairs, the owner was required to put in a wheel-chair accessible bathroom. It's a small space and the bathroom is nearly as big as the seating area. It's an asinine requirement. The owner looked into moving to a different spot a block away, which would have been on the main level. He backed out of that when the city told him he needed to install a grease trap to meet code. This despite the fact that nothing he sold contained any sort of grease or oil that would make it down the drain. Zoning laws and HOAs are great in concept. But they tend to get taken over by the Delores Umbridge [1] types who love nothing more than punishing people for violating stupid rules. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolores_Umbridge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolores_Umbridge
- opwieurposiu 6y agoBuilding codes have made it extremely expensive and time consuming to build anything other than cookie cutter boxes. Of course the code also reduces fire danger and roof collapses are extremely rare now. The cost is uniqueness. Yet another case where you can't get something for nothing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Building_Code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Building_Code
- doorstar 6y agoADA rules also add a lot of expense that is important, I believe, but certainly limits the amount of 'uniqueness' that is possible when building new structures.
- samatman 6y agoAnd yet another case, I suspect, of the Pareto principle: 20% of regulations are load-bearing. They keep lead out of our pipes, asbestos out of our ceilings, and make electrical fires thankfully rare. The remaining 80% all look good on paper (or they wouldn't be there) but do things like require bathrooms to be wheelchair accessible, even if there's an accessible bathroom two doors down, at a business which would be happy to extend its use to any wheelchair-using customers. Or dictate ceiling heights so that the occasional 2 meter tall customer won't hit his head on exposed pipe. But these regulations aren't optional "best practices", they have the same weight as ones which prevent building collapse, fire, and cancer. And the sum total is a landscape which is prohibitively hostile, in many cases, to starting a small business.
- secabeen 6y ago> do things like require bathrooms to be wheelchair accessible, even if there's an accessible bathroom two doors down, at a business which would be happy to extend its use to any wheelchair-using customers This is not a scalable solution. Now does the business have to have the same hours as your business? If not, what does the handicapped person do when they have to use the restroom and it's not available? If we want disabled people to be full members of our society, we just need to pay the costs of reasonable accommodations to their needs.
- guyzero 6y ago"Now"? People have been making this complaint since the 80's.
- bluGill 6y agoIn the 1980s they told me it goes back to the 1960s. It is safe to assume the the grandkids of the first humans said much the same. And their grandparents complained that kids these days dont know how to behave like they did when I was a kid...
- guyzero 6y agoWell this is more than a good-old-days argument. Highly homogenized architecture nationwide really took off in the 80's as did the prevalence of franchises and the consolidation of department and grocery stores.
- qubex 6y agoThey don’t.
- Wistar 6y agoFrom 2015. Crosscut: "The new Seattle, where everything looks the same" https://crosscut.com/2015/04/the-new-seattle-where-everything-looks-the-same https://crosscut.com/2015/04/the-new-seattle-where-everythin...
- twirlock 6y ago>The Atlantic I assume the article frames this as an accomplishment.
- futureproofd 6y agoAside from the article the main header collage is fantastic.
- x87678r 6y agoShops, restaurants, clothes virtually all the same too.
- dehrmann 6y agoI read another article a few years ago, I think also in The Atlantic, that approached this from the angle of every coffee shop, hip restaurant, and, importantly, Airbnb looking the same everywhere. Isn't this just the result of globalization? As people travel more, won't tastes naturally converge? And while I'll miss cities having their own distinct flavor, I'm also not sure it's inherently bad that things look more similar. What is bad is that the style and culture we're landing on is driven by the class of people who bounce between world-class cities.
- rrdharan 6y agoYeah I think there are economies of scale at work here, similar to how Hollywood designs blockbusters to be globally marketable (https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-53676789 https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-53676789).
- totablebanjo 6y agoMaybe this article was the one? https://www.theverge.com/2016/8/3/12325104/airbnb-aesthetic-global-minimalism-startup-gentrification https://www.theverge.com/2016/8/3/12325104/airbnb-aesthetic-...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- 205guy 6y agoYour comment made the think: The Atlantic, the Verge, Vox, New Yörker, they all sound the same to me. Whenever I pick up a magazine these days, I don't know what I'm reading. My other thought is that bouncing between cities is the unusual activity here. Maybe after sleeping in so many hotels or airbnbs, the brain no longer has a sense of place and gets confused. I'm sure universal IKEA-decor helps, but why do we expect to jet around and visit so many different places and feel connected to them. In most cases people are busy and stressed, moving around without getting to know the place, just to hop in a car, go to a meeting, then back to the hotel or airport. Maybe that's what the brain is having trouble with.
- lacker 6y agoAbout Apple's new headquarters: Shaped like a spaceship, it also suggests to the local community, which grants Apple huge tax breaks, that the company could take off and relocate anywhere in the world, whenever it wants. This seems precisely backwards. A massive, stylish new headquarters in Cupertino makes it harder for Apple to relocate anywhere else in the world, and ties it more to the local community. Indeed, the fact that Apple HQ is in Cupertino seems to define the essence of Cupertino more than anything else. I feel like the author is distacted by appearances and ignoring the substance.
- michaelcampbell 6y agoThe point is the perception, not the reality.
- 1123581321 6y agoThat perception is not widely shared. Cupertino sees the reality.
- philwelch 6y agoIt’s particularly curious that they compare Apple Park with the Pentagon. It’s a very similar design concept—arranging offices in a ring so as to maximize efficiency. But while Apple Park’s “UFO” aesthetic has the implication that it could take off at any second, the Pentagon was architecturally inspired by a star fort, which has the complete opposite connotation—one builds a fort when one is very determined to stay in the same place.
- votepaunchy 6y agoIronic then that the Pentagon was designed to be temporary. "It was supposed to be temporary. The Pentagon was the brainchild of Army Brig. Gen. Brehon B. Sommervell, who, in the early 1940s, pitched it as a temporary solution to the then-War Department's critical shortage of space as the threat of joining World War II became imminent. The plan was approved, and on Sept. 11, 1941, construction began. About 296 acres of land were designated for the building, which was supposed to be turned into a hospital, office or warehouse once World War II was over." https://www.defense.gov/Explore/Features/story/Article/1867440/pentagon-history-7-big-things-to-know/ https://www.defense.gov/Explore/Features/story/Article/18674...
- fuckyah 6y agolockdowns destroyed everything
- lgeorget 6y agoMaybe part of that feeling is due to the perfect grids cities are laid out as in America (North and South)? In Europe, roads look like they've been drawn by throwing a game of Mikado on a map. It definitely gives them some character. :-D
- arkanciscan 6y agoEvery place feels the same because every place is the same place; Earth. I can assure you that the only people who have even been to a different place have no trouble remembering which place they are in.
- 7ArcticSealz 6y agoSome time back I was looking at a commercial building/space for a personal music studio which would be only for myself, not teaching etc. I was shocked at the prices for even sub-par buildings. If you think homes are expensive, buying a commercial space is even higher in major cities.