In every skyscraper In every skyscraper there is someone going mad. Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities 21. Four-Story Limit architectureurbanismmadness
Madness All our madness comes from having our stomachs empty and our heads full of air. Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote foodmadness
The modern infrastructural ideal The form and possibility of the "modern infrastructural ideal" is increasingly under threat, as cracks (sometimes literal ones) show up in our bridges, our highways, our airports, and the nets of our social welfare systems. For these and other reasons, broken world thinking asserts that breakdown, dissolution, and change, rather than innovation, development, or design as conventionally practices and thought about are the key themes and problems facing new media and technology scholarship today. Attached to this, however, comes a second and more hopeful approach: namely, a deep wonder and appreciation for the ongoing activities by which stability (such as it is) is maintained, the subtle arts of repair by which rich and robust lives are sustained against the weight of centrifugal odds, and how sociotechnical forms and infrastructures, large and small, get not only broken but restored, one not-so-metaphoric brick at a time. Steven J. Jackson, Rethinking Repair How Buildings Learn infrastructurehope