To a layman like myself technology seems to have slowed in its advance over the last few decades, with intellectual and financial resources that once turned out revolutions in agriculture, medicine, transportation, and energy now pooled mostly into computing. It seems as if attention shifted away from the “world of atoms” and into the “world of bits.”

So, the lesson is that when you run into an entrenched competitor with deep pockets who has essentially achieved regulatory capture of the corrupt legislators then you must be prepared to mount a counter campaign straight to the voters. It can be super expensive, but is definitely required in such situations.

one might describe neorealism as a form of methodological and stylistic resistance against the standard filmmaking techniques that weigh each scene’s productivity and efficiency in carrying the linear narrative forward. Neorealism focuses on visual marginalia and gets intentionally lost in the details happening behind the protagonists or at the margins of the frame. Neorealism is slow and processual in method. It’s about what Kogonada identifies as visual lingering.

a different kind of cinema and sensibility in which shots linger and veer off to include others, in which in-between moments seem to be essential, in which time and place seem more critical than plot or story.”

These non-human persons and personalities, in fact, have the power as built structures to influence not only people’s moods but their everyday rituals and patterns of daily life. Columbus is an ongoing experiment about whether architecture and design can influence happiness, productivity, and heighted perceptions of the quality of life.

In the modernist purview, glass has symbolically been associated with purity, hygiene, transparency, fluidity, and openness.

In some vignettes, Columbus as an applied visual-architectural theory perhaps even exceeds the abilities of theory in written, academic form. Take glass as symbolic material for built modernism.

Glass reveals and conceals. Glass displays and hides and symbolizes. Glass bespeaks transparency but is also disposed towards exclusion and control

The Staunton pieces broadly resemble columns with a wide molded base. Knights feature the sculpted head and neck of a horse. Kings, the tallest pieces, top the column with a stylised crown topped with a cross pattée. Queens are slightly smaller than kings, and feature a coronet topped with a tiny ball (a monde). Rooks feature stylised crenellated battlements and bishops a Western-style mitre. Pawns are the smallest and are topped by a plain ball. Pieces representing human characters (the king, queen, bishop, and pawn) have a flat disk separating the body from the head design, which is known as a collar.