A skyscraper can be many things, or better stated, many-sided or multifaceted. It can even have a metaphorical or descriptive aspect. But another thing it cannot be, especially to the patroning individuals utilizing its spaces and functional provisions. Architecture is primarily for those who inhabit its spaces.

Towards building why

  Going to the Moon is very important for the future of humanity.  The promise of peace as the natural state of being beckons where beyond the earth where our lineages have had such a long record of development.  What had been difficult centuries and millennia before were overcome in many ways so that peace is possible.  Peace is not only the beginning but the goal.  To be together without lamely thinking ourselves as like unthinking beings out for gains lasting a moment or two - we are beings that dream and plan and work in cooperation to realize the worthwhile realities.  The idea that the moon is a new beginning is the idea that we can start anew.  It is the new frontier in the sense that the Americas has been the new world.  The land of opportunity and dreams, the society of peace and order.  

The sight of the bright white moon in its phase strikes me with a profound sense of contentment and reassurance.  The presence of the first and immediate celestial body.  A place we haven’t been, a place we will soon go.  Everything is possible.  The way there will be made.  That this one here is possible makes the rest across the incomprehensibility in vastness also there and teeming with the possibility of real existence.  To make this first step, the importance cannot be overstated.  Just as venturing from the stasis of tradition to a realm of pure potential was the foundation in human action that allow the dream of the ideals and values defining societies today in the Americas.  What is freedom?  What is hard work?  What is making?  The move to the moon will not be merely a duplication of circumstances and choices.  Just the same, the endeavors into space will bring those to new heights of human experience.  What these realities could be we will never discover should we not venture beyond this home of a vibrant and lush garden. 

Carl Sagan wrote that we are upon the cosmic shore gazing into the deep oceans of space.  The grand stage of unknown proportions from these sittings of such modest proportion.  The amphitheater the presents an infinite count of drama depicting all that could be possible beyond the reach of any or all of our imagination.  What presence, what meaning could be discovered and made that I am this one, here, this small subjectivity, that exists within what is all and could contemplate my own existence within all that is and changes.  From the moon is a new vantage offering a view into what surrounds us everyday and every moment, which yet eludes us as we travel through the wonderful devices of our own making, under the firmament of the blue sky.

Life on Mars

 

 "As much as level designers try to emulate the design of the real-world, we spend just as much time trying to work around the limitations those rules impose.  We strive to create a world the player can understand and relate to, but then we add elements - not for their function - but because their presence is indicative and convincing of a deeper, richer world than the one we have actually constructed." p179

"We pick and choose from the world we know to create one we don't, curating aspects of our environment, shuffling them around, and reseating them to give a sense of the familiar in pursuit of something fun." p181

from The Making of Dust: Architecture and the Art of Level Design by David Johnston

de·moc·ra·cy

a form of governance where people through their selective inclination place various emphases at various sites of influence, culminating in the constitutional act of voting for leaders in effective roles in government

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(the commendable drawing with 

the re-interpretational crop)