Values: hints from the not-yet-built environment
“You can tell what’s informing a society by what the tallest building is. When you approach a medieval town, the cathedral is the tallest thing in the place. When you approach an eighteenth-century town, it is the political palace that’s the tallest thing in the place. And when you approach a modern city, the tallest places are the office buildings, the centers of economic life.” — Joseph Cambell, the Power of Myth
What comes next, after the grand office? What buildings will our societies and markets value, consolidate attention and resources into, make and keep beautiful?
Folly to speculate perhaps, but useful to dream into and notice where your heart and reason are pulled.
I see: bastions for togetherness, the communal, the sacred or sacred-if-secular. Community centers that are the best show in town. Neighborhood living rooms maintained by the loving hands of dozens. Solarpunk bodymind libraries for lifelong learning. Intergenerational regen block-projects. Clubhouse-hotels for internet-tribes and Network States.
Fanciful as that smorgasbord may be, the central hints are clear: I see and seek a society that makes space for a plurality of more connectedness, more community feeling and expression, more collective presence.
It is reasonable to assume I’m not alone. We1 are social beings, who have never lived more atomised and physically isolated lives. We have a need to be seen and felt and yet we’re not seeing our friends.2 We have a need to belong and a need for meaning, and both are team sports.
Social fabric is physical. What buildings do you see?
noted that this “we” is neither universal nor royal; rather, a modern Western city-heavy view.
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