Great cities attract ambitious people. You can sense it when you walk around one. In a hundred subtle ways, the city sends you a message: you could do more; you should try harder.
The surprising thing is how different these messages can be. New York tells you, above all: you should make more money. There are other messages too, of course. You should be hipper. You should be better looking. But the clearest message is that you should be richer.
What I like about Boston (or rather Cambridge) is that the message there is: you should be smarter. You really should get around to reading all those books you've been meaning to.
B&W photo is from my camera, second photo of shelves from linked article.
Upon stumbling upon it, you might imagine a story of a college athlete who fell from society’s grace, but rumor has it, this unusual sight is actually an art installation that just “popped up” in May of 2014 and has been steadily expanding and attracting visitors who sometimes add their own trophies to the collection. Although the trophies are not bolted to the four metal shelves in any way, free to be taken, people just don’t.
Writing about style in architecture, the nineteenth-century theorist Viollet-le-Duc asserted that "style consists in distinction of form," and complained that animals expressed this better than the human species. He felt that his contemporaries had "become strangers to those elemental and simple ideas of truth which lead architects to give style to their designs," and he found it "necessary to define the constituent elements of style, and, in doing so, to carefully avoid those equivocations, those high-sounding but senseless phrases, which have been repeated with all that profound respect which most people profess for that which they do not understand."