The Future City

An assignment for an English class at The Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc), instructor Claire Phillips, 2012

The streets bustle. The air fills with noise, and man’s ultimate physical confinement becomes apparent. Within his shell, he is imposed to stringent anthropomorphic limits. As his limitations in the world withhold form him the true grasp on his environment, his cities grow more crowded with the day, as he stuffs himself within his bounds. The city becomes his living prison. It toils with him, and it meanders with his movements into an abyss of meaningless work. He yearns for a breach from the monotony. He tightly scrapes at the idea of his physical incapabilities. They stifle him. His cities fill block beyond block, box after box, clinging to ill-preached homogeneity. Throughout this modernist wasteland, man roams. He clings to the air. Like tentacles, it reaches around his monstrous glass towers into the heavens.

The air is everything, and man is only one small speck, one numerated subject in its serfdom. The air does not die, it does not live, and it does not feel. It is fair; it lacks his pejorative nature towards the greater forces around it. It is indifferent to his foibles and inconsistencies. His economies do not phase it. It has no conception of frameworks or timetables. Unlike the rail, his greatest achievement, with its thousands flocking from one block to another, the air is everywhere at once, but man can only inhabit his immediate space while his comrades pass their time contributing to a larger picture.

Their millions of daily actions feed a larger society, and yet, in the end, they are consumed. They themselves become the sociology of this city. Individual worthlessness abounds. It is by these parameters that man realizes his next step, that the physicality of the body is no longer conducive to his current state. He is now a spiritual being. His is a psyche irrelevant to the confinements of flesh and bone. Bodily individuality cannot coexist in this brave new frontier. Man must become omnipotent. Only then may this next phase of his existence harness the true ambiguities of the world, savoring every shade of its wonder.