Monthly Archives: September 2021

Welcome to Telosa, a $400bn city of the future, according to its founder, the billionaire Marc Lore. The city doesnt exist yet, nor is it clear which state will house the experiment, but the architects of the proposed 150,000-acre project are scouting the American south-west. Theyre already predicting the first residents can move in by 2030.

Telosa will eventually house 5 million people, according to its website, and benefit from a halo of utopian promises: avant-garde architecture, drought resistance, minimal environmental impact, communal resources. This hypothetical metropolis promises to take some of the most cutting-edge ideas about sustainability and urban design and make them reality.

The plan combines ideas about urban farming (the beacon tower of the project will house aeroponic farms) and quality of life (a city where everyone can live and work and play within a 15-minute commute) alongside new green technologies and a model of land ownership proposed, but never executed, by the nineteenth-century economist Henry George. These are ideas that have remained in the abstract or only attempted on a small scale; now they will have a whole American metropolis to experiment with, brought to life by the creative ambitions of one very rich man.

Telosa certainly is a city of the future, but not in, like, a great way. Yes, it probably will have a very shiny public transportation system, but it seems futuristic more in the sense that, as the world deteriorates, the ultra-rich seem increasingly interested in telling the rest of us how to live. No longer content to just sneer down at us from their private jets, they take over our homes, our towns, our society. Clearly Lore has gone to the Aspen Ideas festival at least once, and at some point maybe, I dont know, a curator he hired to fill his shelves with aesthetically pleasing old books accidentally included some economic theory (if only he had found Charles Fourier before he got to the George!), and now he has notions.

As anyone who has an adult relative who rules over their basement miniature train set with an iron fist, or who has spent any time on social media listening to 22-year-old leftists talk about what life will be like after the revolution, knows, a lot of people have ideas about the way cities, countries, and societies should work. We are usually protected from seeing those ideas realized, and dealing with the consequences of their megalomania, simply by preventing any one person from building enough wealth or power. But I have something to tell you about the tax policy of the last couple decades and the way a small number of people have benefited, and youre not going to like it

Now that individual men and women possess more wealth than entire countries, they find themselves trying to circumvent politics and make their mark on the Earth in a much more literal way. What if I built something that looked more or less like a penis, and made everybody look at it? Such thoughts continually plague billionaires such as Amazons spacecase Jeff Bezos and now tower-builder Marc Lore.

Look, I get their hesitancy. Pay taxes? To this government? The same government that decided to nation-destroy and nation-build and nation-destroy Afghanistan for almost 20 years instead of feeding and educating American children? The same government that subsidizes factory farming, despite its deleterious effects on our environment and our health and the wellbeing of animals? The same government who heard the pain and outrage about the misuse of power by police across America and answered, How about more police, is that what you want, even more police?

Watching all this, it almost makes sense that someone with the means and the desire to help might want to take a more direct route. And the ideas of this fake little town are grand! Green architecture, environmental technology, transparent governance, innovative urban planning ideas if this works, it could advance our thinking on how humans can exist in a changing world and live harmonious lives during the coming environmental and economic calamities.

But it wont work. It wont work because one guy doesnt get to decide how the world, or even a city, should work. Even if hes collaborating with the greatest thinkers and architects and scientists of our time, just a glance through Lores portfolio will reveal that all of his big ideas and fancy language about the betterment and advancement of society are pretty hollow.

This is a guy who built his fortune in part through Walmart, a labor-busting company that pays its own workers so little that they often have to rely on government-funded welfare programs despite being employed full-time.

Lore made another chunk of his fortune by selling a venture to Amazon, a company so odious in its treatment of workers that even the Wall Street Journal has turned up its nose. Both of these companies have been instrumental in funneling money and joy from the lower classes and handing it over to a select few who can think lofty thoughts about, What would make society better?

What would make society better? Is it skyscrapers in the desert? Or would it actually benefit the world more if billionaires had less influence over the way society operates?

Telosas name, as has been mentioned often in its promotional materials, comes from Aristotles use of the word telos to mean highest purpose. Perhaps a better name could have been derived from Hybris, the Greek goddess of insolence and reckless pride. But its best not to wait for some divine act to mete out judgment for our little Icarus here. We the people are in a much better position to bring about his fall. Send in the taxman.

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A billionaire wants to build a utopia in the US desert. Seems like this could go wrong - The Guardian

Ever since Nyle DiMarco came in first place during season 22 of America's Next Top Model in 2015 he was the second male winner and first deaf winner he hasn't stopped. Case in point: he took home the mirrorball trophy during Dancing With the Stars, starred in Hulu's comedy series Difficult People and walked for Giorgio Armani at Milan Fashion Week Spring/Summer 2017.

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Now, the 32-year-old has something else up his sleeve he will be releasing a book about his life in the near future, and it's safe to say he doesn't hold back.

"I want to be able to tell my story from a deaf perspective and from someone who is in a fourth-generation deaf family and to have the opportunity to be heard is completely mind bending," the model exclusively tells OK! at the The Runway of Dreams Foundation's fashion show in New York City. "Its something that I have trouble believing sometimes, but my book is called Deaf Utopia, and if you have ever heard me talk about my childhood, its because, truthfully, my childhood was a utopia, and it brought me to where I am now."

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The New York native wants others to know that he "100 percent" grew up within the deaf community, and going forward, he hopes to educate others on his background. "I hope that they take away a little bit of my story and understand that its such an environment really built for deaf kids," he says.

DiMarco admits writing the tome was "a bit cathartic."

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"At first, when I was interested in writing the book, I thought, 'I dont know if I really have enough story to fill these pages.' But once I really got through the process, it helped me in so many ways make connections from my past to today, which has been incredibly interesting and therapeutic in a way," he shares.

Although the handsome hunk is looking forward for others to hear his side of the story, he is a "bit nervous" for the release.

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"A part of me does feel that its in an invasive process," he explains. "I am offering full transparency into my life, and I might lose every sense of privacy that I have had in all of this time, but I am very excited to share my story with people in the world who really need to hear it. I think I have given everything I have to this book its all on the table."

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In the meantime, DiMarco is thrilled that he was able to attend The Runway Of Dreams Foundation Fashion Revolution Event, which took place during New York Fashion Week.

"I am most excited that I have the opportunity to assist adaptability and fashion is so much more mainstream now and for Runway of Dreams to host this show where all of these amazing people with different disabilities can come and really rock the runway is really amazing and feels full circle," he gushes.

Even though DiMarco is busy, he isn't planning on slowing down anytime soon.

"I think next for me, honestly, is really more work in the entertainment industry," he says. "Pitching more ideas, pitching more TV showsand more films I mean, why not? We are seeing those types of people in our every day life, why is that not reflected on the big screen? We want to be seeing them more on TV and more in film."

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Model Nyle DiMarco Reveals His Upcoming Book 'Deaf Utopia' Offers 'Full Transparency Into My Life': 'It's All On The Table' - OK!

Maine Lobster WeekThrough Saturday. Locations statewide.mainelobsterweek.comIf you love lobster, youre going to have a shell of a good time gobbling up Maines favorite crustacean during Maine Lobster Week. Upwards of 50 restaurants are offering mouth-watering lobster specials and classic lobster rolls. Here are a few examples: At Boones Fish House & Oyster Room in Portland, theyre serving a three-course meal with lobster bisque, lobster fritters and your choice of steamed or baked stuff lobster. And at Peppers Landing in Brunswick, theyre offering six variations of lobster rolls. The Maine Lobster Week site has the full rundown of offerings, so hop online and get cracking!

David Byrnes American Utopia7 p.m. Thursday, 5:30 and 8 p.m. Friday. Strand Theatre, 345 Main St., Rockland, $9, $8 seniors and under 12. rocklandstrand.comYou may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile as you make your way to Rockland for a screening of David Brynes American Utopia, one of the most epic concert films you could ever hope to see. Filmed in 2020 by none other than Spike Lee, the film captures Byrnes Broadway performance, and youll hear songs from Byrnes solo career along with several Talking Heads classics like Once in a Lifetime, Slippery People and Road to Nowhere. All told, there are a dozen musicians on stage, and their singing, playing and choreography will knock the socks clear off your feet.

Harvest Moon Craft Festival11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday. Mindful Folk Farm, 290 Morse Road, New Gloucester, $5 at the gate. mindfulfolkfarm.comMake your way to New Gloucester for the Harvest Moon Craft Festival, where youll find more than 30 makers as well as live music, food trucks, face painting and farm animals. When word got out that the Common Ground Fair wasnt happening this year, several of its vendors put their heads together and came up with this wonderful alternative. The tunes will come courtesy of Ellen Gawler, The Pineland Fiddlers, Pam Weeks and T-Acadie. Rain date is on Sunday.

Mother Jones in Heaven7 p.m. Saturday. St. Lawrence Arts Center, 76 Congress St., Portland, $25 in advance, $32 at the door. stlawrencearts.orgThrough a dozen original songs interwoven with stories, youll come to know and love labor organizer Mary Harris, who was better known as Mother Jones. Mother Jones in Heaven is a musical written by playwright, folk musician and labor activist Si Kahn, and its a one-woman show starring Vivian Nesbitt, with musical accompaniment by John Dillon.

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Things to Do: Film, theater, crafts and lobsters galore - Press Herald

In 1917, in the same month of the Russian Revolution that swept Lenins Bolsheviks to power in Petrograd, the New Statesmans founders, Sidney and Beatrice Webb,drafted Clause IV of the Labour Partys constitution. According to the clause, the aim of the Party would be to secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry or service.

It was a constitutional commitment to full-blooded socialism, based on the belief that working people were, under capitalism, denied the full fruits of their industry, that value was created collectively by workers through their work, but appropriated privately by the owners of capital. The remedy would be common ownership, popular administration and equitable distribution. This was a party founded to represent the labour interest and defend the dignity of work.

Over a century later, the Labour Party, and the late-Victorian economic model that spawned its creation, have been transformed beyond recognition. The factory-based mass production that had once made Britain the workshop of the world has given way to a service-based economy. Labour-intensive manufacturing has declined. It has been replaced with highly automated, data-driven, advanced methods of specialised production that employ a fraction of the workforce. Assembly lines have moved abroad in search of cheaper workers. The primary industries that fuelled a coal-fired economy have all but disappeared; the manual, back-breaking work that accompanied it replaced by so-called immaterial, cognitive labour carried out in silicon-dependent offices. An all-pervading finance sector powered by algorithms, high frequency trading and speculation sits alongside a debt-driven retail sector, the creative industries, the knowledge economy, and low-paid gig workers (for whom back-breaking work is still very much a reality) taking orders from mobile phone apps. Rapid advances in bots and computer software have decimated industries that were once thought immune to automation. Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning have spread the threat of mechanisation from blue collar, manual work, to white-collar, service-sector jobs as well. A 2018 report by PwC found that 30 per cent of jobs in finance and insurance were at risk of automation by 2029. Clerical work and human resources departments are being transformed by robotic process automation (RPA). Under these circumstances, under an economic model in which fewer tangible goods are produced, in which value is seemingly ever more detached from productive activity, in which technology is driving exponential productivity gains, and in which the manufacture of scarce objects seems to happen in another world entirely, ideas about work and the dignity of labour have altered dramatically.

Clause IV was dropped in 1995 as Tony Blair attempted to rid Labour of its militant leftwing image. But rather than reject automation as a threat to job security and workers livelihoods, a significant faction on the partys activist left has embraced it, taking up the promises of emerging technology, automation and AI to espouse a post-work futures and fully automated luxury communism. Recent technological advances, so this interpretation holds, have made possible an (almost) workless utopia, in which human needs and wants are satisfied by the ever-expanding productive capacities of robots and machines. The post-work Labourites are inspired by sections from Karl Marx, reinterpreted by leftwing Italian postworkerist theorists several decades ago: the Fragment on Machines predicted that as large industry develops, the creation of wealth comes to depend less on labour time, and thus the free development of individualities would be made possible. This is a post-scarcity world of publicly owned fleets of driverless cars, of mass-produced synthetic meat, of asteroid-mining for rare minerals, of state-run, solar powered dark factories churning out the latest goods, and of a digital and creative commons providing the wealth of humanitys cultural and intellectual output free at everyones fingertips. AI and automation have provided the catalysts for the party of labour to go from advocating full employment to one which attracts those that advocate for no employment.

The tendency reached the height of its influence during the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, when it found fledgling expression in 2019 manifesto policies like Universal Basic Income pilots, the move towards a four-day week, and free universal broadband for all. Former shadow chancellor John McDonnell promised socialism with an iPad and a hi-tech economy of the future even as critics lambasted his broadband communism as unworkable and unaffordable.

From 2015 onwards there was a flourishing of literature that was, says Jon Cruddas, Labour MP for Dagenham, intertwined with Corbynism. Influential texts emerged from leftwing academics. Inventing the Future by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams implored readers to demand full automation and demand universal basic income on its cover, while espousing a left accelerationism that embraced full-throttle technological change and a post-work left modernity. Leftwing writers like Paul Mason embraced visions of tech-enabled, automated post-capitalism, with machine learning, big data and computer algorithms working in the service of radicalised networked youth. The late pro-Corbyn anarchist academic David Graeber published Bullshit Jobs, which explained that automation had not led to shorter working weeks because people were increasingly employed in pointless professions that could easily be abolished. And pro-Corbyn journalist Aaron Bastani introduced the FALC acronym to a reenergised, youthful British left in a manifesto on fully automated luxury communism.

Initially I found this post-work stuff quite compelling, says Dr Harry Pitts, a lecturer in management, co-editor of the online magazine Futures of Work and specialist in work futures at the University of Bristol. When I entered the labour market in my teens I was doing a lot of precarious, service-based jobs and I was looking for a way of understanding how that differs from the type of jobs that my dad did, or my brother, or my grandfather the meaning and purpose and community that they got from their work was absent in mine. But, Pitts adds, the post-work tendency wishes away things that are going to be much more permanent and longer-lasting, and also some things that are worth returning to about work as well Theres something about work even the so-called Bullshit Jobs that can be a source of meaning and social life and enjoyment, which of course are quite important to keep as part of our lives.

For Cruddas, the emergence of techno-utopian and post-work thinking amongst Labours left wing factions coincided with a period of intellectual bankruptcy on the Labour right. This was a time when [that side of the Party] had nothing to say and hadnt had anything to say since Blair and Brown had gone, he told Spotlight. They were devoid of energy, and it looked like the energy and vitality was on the left.

A generation of activists had come of age during the direct action, anti-austerity struggles of #Occupy and UK Uncut, and had made headlines during the student protests and occupations of 2010. Some of the oldest of their cohort had been involved in Camps for Climate Action, alter-globalisation movements and anti-G8 and G20 protests, and when Corbyn became leader, many joined the Labour Party. But unlike in previous waves of the UK lefts resurgence, workplace struggles had taken a back seat. There was no equivalent of Arthur Scargill, Red Robbo or Jimmy Reid on the picket lines for the new urban service workers or the underemployed precariat. The industries that they represented as shop stewards or union bureaucrats had dissappeared, and this newer left wing emerged at a time when trade union membership and militancy remained at historic lows following the defeats of the Thatcher era. The stage was set for a left that was detached from the labour movement, and one that saw the world of work as something not to be transformed or to be decommodified, but to be liberated from via breakneck automation. The philosophy, Cruddas says, is underpinned by a crude technological determinism, which holds that the inexorable rise of AI and automation technologies will inevitably lead to an overcoming of capitalism and a new post-capitalist future.

Post-workerism, according to Pitts, prematurely serves up the fruits of struggles that havent yet been waged or won. The imposition of technology in the workplace in the past has tended to dovetail with workers militancy, struggles for higher wages, or with bargaining around productivity with strong trade unions coordinating industrial relations, he says. That infrastructure of gains, of struggle, of militancy, isnt necessarily so much in evidence. We have a kind of economy that doesnt make that possible since the role of unions has been eroded. This is a contradiction that post-work advocates are aware of and account for, but not one that has been resolved through a groundswell of grassroots action around implementing a shorter working week, or on introducing labour-saving technology into workplaces. When Corbyn led Labour, the strategy had been informed by what Pitts calls a populist left electoral turn the automated, post-work revolution would be implemented top-down by a rebuilt, Corbynite state following a general election victory. But that model of social and political change has come a cropper, he says, following the 2019 defeat and Keir Starmers ascendancy to the leadership of the Party.

A year into the Starmer era, the post-work left have settled into a period of waning influence but remain as a definite intellectual strand and even inter-Party, factional presence, organising around groups such as Forward Momentum. Theyre subtly trying to present themselves as innovative political strategists for Labour post-Corbyn, Cruddas says. The Dagenham MP and former Policy Coordinator under Ed Miliband has written extensively on the need for his Party to reconnect with its working class roots. His recent book, The Dignity of Labour, earned praise from the current leadership. Post-work leftists, according to Cruddas, jettison the working class as the agent of left politics they double down on what they say is the new base of the left the urban, educated, networked youth and in political strategy that translates into doubling down on the cities, the new heartlands, the university towns, and saying the red wall voters are nativist and reactionary, and that they dont have a future in left politics.

Debates on the evolving nature of class, and on who the Labour Party should be for in an age of increasingly automated, hi-tech, cognitive-cultural, advanced capitalism, rage on. The Labour Partys key demographic has undoubtedly become younger, more metropolitan, more educated, and more scarce in areas where traditional industries and the organised working class once dominated. The post-work left can promote a focus on the new heartlands with confidence that a one-two punch of technology and demography is on their side, Cruddas tells me, and that the red wall can be safely abandoned, its voters dismissed as asset-rich pensioners or hopeless reactionaries. Im of a certain age and background where I find that a bit uncomfortable, he laments.I think were in a terrible state.

This article originally appeared in our policy report on The Future of Work: AI and automation. To read the full report click here.

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Automatons of the world unite! - New Statesman

THE MONOLITHIC VILLA in the foothills of the Atlas Mountains an hour south of Marrakesh, Morocco, designed by Karl Fournier and Olivier Marty of the Paris-based architectural firm Studio KO as a French clients holiday house, embodies contemporary Brutalism tinged by the Bauhaus. Shorn of ornament and minimally furnished, the fortresslike vacation home is all jutting red sandstone angles and expanses of glass, opening onto the cinnabar-hued landscape. But turn a corner and there looms what the architects refer to simply as the Wall, a two-story-high concrete cliff decorated with more than a dozen bas-relief circles in an array of sizes, some with abstract daisies at their centers. In so stark a context, it may be hard to understand why the duo, Fournier, 51, and Marty, 46, added such embellishments until Marty offers a one-word explanation: Olgiati.

Although they have never met him, its unsurprising that the pair would want to include a homage to the 63-year-old Swiss architect, who practices in his tiny hometown, Flims, an Alpine enclave two hours from Zurich. Little known beyond the design avant-garde, Valerio Olgiati is a cult figure of the digital age, revered by the cognoscenti: His 25 or so conceptual, meticulously crafted structures, as well as his computer renderings of those never (or at least not yet)erected, have become legendary for their idea-driven purity and shocking forms. That his portfolio is so limited unlike major firms where there are hundreds on staff and dozens of in-progress projects,he has a team of 10, which includes his architect wife, Tamara only heightens his influence. He is regarded as a bulwark of incorruptibility in a world of starchitects who stamp their names on billionaire-friendly residential towers and Instagrammable but ultimately gimmicky buildings. Relying upon a theoretical framework and his own volcanic charisma he has a reputation for reducing students to tears, and has never shied from expressing contempt for peers who he believes have sold out his Howard Roarkian devotion stands out as a rebuke to an architecturally milquetoast, commercially driven era.

For most of us, architecture is a profession of compromise, says the British architect David Chipperfield, 67, who recently finished a tower overlooking New Yorks Bryant Park. We are service people, turned on and off by the client, not so terribly different from window washers. But Valerio is different. He believes in the physical substance of architecture, not the impression that something should not just look interesting but be interesting. That makes him incredibly important to our field.

Last year, mid-lockdown, the musician Kanye West, whose passion for contemporary design is well documented, took his jet to Zurich for a day, then drove to Flims to dine with Olgiati in a local restaurant. The meeting landed the architect a commission for both a Los Angeles apartment for the recently separated West and a quixotic megaproject that would render literal the underground nature of the architects appeal: an artists colony built beneath Wests Wyoming ranch (which is reportedly 4,500 acres), as vast as the subterranean cities of Turkeys Cappadocia, with up to 200 dwellings, as well as studio spaces and a performance venue.

Olgiatis buildings are as hard to categorize as they are to fully comprehend. His most notable structures are made mostly of tinted reinforced concrete; they seem initially forbidding but, because of his sense of proportion and his clever placement of light sources, can feel surprisingly intimate within. Consider, for example, the 2007 music studio that Fournier and Marty referenced: Built for the classical composer Linard Bardill in the traditional Swiss town of Scharans, the project came with stringent zoning restraints the structure had to not only occupy the exact footprint of an existing barn but also maintain its original silhouette. The architect, who never sketches, conceived of a sort of ghost barn, a windowless 3,000-square-foot concrete shell colored dark red. Afterward, he cut a giant oval into the roof, turning most of the interior into a courtyard; the studio space itself is behind a convex sweep of glass that follows the ceilings arc. A pure minimalist might have stopped there, but Olgiati instead adorned the tanklike exterior and some of the indoor space with nearly 300 hand-poured concrete medallions, for an effect both harsh and transcendent.

The School at Paspels, completed in 1998, is a bunkerlike structure intended for primary school students, built into a steep hillside in rural Switzerland. The three-story pale concrete exterior is rigidly rectangular, punctuated only by a few elongated, symmetrical frameless window openings. Inside, the four larch-wood-lined classrooms are set about four degrees off kilter from each other; moving through the building, you sense the slight distortion, as though the structure itself were in motion. In 2010, for an auditorium at Plantahof Agricultural School, Olgiati constructed a towering gray concrete wedge that evokes a prehistoric monument or a slice of an asteroid sheared off on its journey toward Earth. Illuminated through a pair of long windows near the base, the interior has the theatrical elegance of a dimly lit cathedral. Then theres the 2019 open-air Pearling Path Visitors Center on Muharraq in the Dubai archipelago, a building intended to enshrine the centuries-old pearl-diving industry in the Persian Gulf. Its a vast forest of 32-foot-tall columns topped with a thin concrete canopy perforated by pentagon-shaped cutouts, pointing in myriad directions; as the sun crests, it casts slashing shadows through the openings.

What unifies these disparate structures, other than their unforgiving material, is Olgiatis professional philosophy, which he espouses at international lectures and through classes at the Academy of Architecture Mendrisio near the Swiss-Italian border. Says the British ur-minimalist John Pawson, known for residences that evoke a Zen state of nothingness: With me, all I can do is show the work, but Valerio has the big idea.

OLGIATI CALLS THAT idea non-referentiality. Historical context is dead, he believes: Architecture should be an end unto itself instead of a reflection of its era, local culture or any sort of concocted narrative. People think its crazy to believe you can make something truly new, but thats because they lack talent and imagination; they are stuck, he says. To him, vernacular references get in the way of making truly great buildings. Besides, he argues, such constructs are often tortured and artificial or made up after the fact with a self-righteousness he finds repugnant.

Its a midsummer afternoon, and Olgiati, who is tall and fit, with white hair, and wearing a black, Japanese-designed outfit, sips a double espresso at a long steel table, one of the few things not made of concrete at Villa Alm, the vacation house he and Tamara, who declined to give her age, share on a hill in the Alentejo region of Portugal, two hours southeast of Lisbon. They spend as much as half the year at the house, which was finished in 2014 and is perhaps his most potent showcase.

From a distance, amid gnarled cork trees and a few low-slung farmhouses, its form evokes a massive open gray cardboard box. But inside, up a 110-foot set of concrete stairs theres no railingthe cartonlike sides reveal themselves as the walls of a courtyard, planted with tall, spiny succulents and other desert plants. The open-sided cube, which looks out on the garden through glass sliding walls, is entirely in shade, a refuge from the relentless sun. Although all the surfaces and structural elements are concrete, including furniture of Olgiatis own design, the stark effect is softened by velvet sofa cushions as gray as nearly everything else in the room. (Linen velvet, he clarifies. Just the right texture and amount of relaxation.) As darkness descends hes served both lunch and dinner, including a saffron risotto with green beans, during a 12-hour conversation that has careened from Le Corbusier (His buildings have no soul) to issues of race in America (Why cant you people figure this out?) to his disdain for the Pritzker Prize (Its become just about who is culturally acceptable, not about the architecture at all) an Isamu Noguchi lantern throws patterns onto the walls. No one expects it to be intimate in here with the concrete, he says. You see? Theyre completely wrong.

The subject to which he keeps returning is contemporary architects unwillingness to cast off commercial concerns and cultural pandering. Its a worldview that likely has its origins in his Flims childhood, as the son of Rudolf Olgiati, a well-regarded Modernist architect who, perhaps incongruously, collected Swiss folkloric artifacts. (His sons first major project, started soon after Rudolfs death in 1995, was the Yellow House, a renovation of a traditional three-story 17th-century residence owned by the local church in the center of Flims that now houses Rudolfs collection. The younger Olgiati removed the daffodil-colored clapboard and covered its prismlike form with textured masonry that he painted spectral white.)

But his most formative period was the two years he spent in Los Angeles in the early 1990s, having followed an American girlfriend there. (Their subsequent marriage fell apart, sending him back to Switzerland he and Tamara now occupy the same 350-year-old Flims house he grew up in, which he updated in 2017 after an earlier reimagining by his father.) Frank Gehry and Morphosis, the collective led by Thom Mayne, were then experimenting with wild geometry, found objects and innovative materials, which made the city a locus of contemporary design. With no contacts, Olgiati had to leave California before gaining a professional foothold, which he still regrets, even though his career flourished only after he returned to his more conservative home country. In Switzerland, he says, you win the poker game when you have the best cards. There, you win because you play the best game. I liked the bluffing, the bravado. I would have stayed if I could have.

The most important thing he learned in the United States, he adds, was that the world had permanently changed, and architecture needed to follow. Ours, he believes, is a globally mashed-up era with no meaningful shared references or objective truth. And so buildings, he says, must stand on their own. Even abstraction is too derivative because, by definition, it has a figurative source. (People ask me all the time what the medallions are on the Bardill studio, and they get upset when I tell them that I dont know, he says.) Olgiati admires Modernist masters like Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Frank Lloyd Wright, as well as the contemporary Japanese minimalist Tadao Ando, but takes his own inspiration, for example, from the monolithic rock pile structures of the Aztecs, for which historians cannot find an antecedent. By contrast, Machu Picchu, the 15th-century Inca citadel in Peru, is an abstract reinterpretation of the surrounding mountains. Fantastic, he says, but derivative.

Granted, designing entirely without reference is impossible, he concedes. After all, unlike art, architecture has to follow physical laws to shelter people and not collapse usually entailing walls, floors and roofs. He acknowledges that these tend to evoke earlier structures or motifs, at least to others. But working toward greater non-referentiality is his constant goal. (In keeping with his theory, he says he doesnt know exactly where such an impulse came from.) I build the building for myself, because I am the benchmark, he says. This is not arrogance. How else would I measure something?

These days, his hopes are buoyed by West, whose aesthetic ambitions are as limitless as his budget. Olgiati says West is the best client hes ever had, unfailingly gracious and generous, and they speak on the phone, email or Zoom often West calls at all hours from the bedroom, the studio, the bathroom. While he was working on his album Donda, he sent the architect one of its tracks, a mournful vocal at that point backed only by piano, seeking feedback. He says I am Picasso, and his job is to buy land so that I can create, Olgiati says. I have never had anyone who appreciates so much what I do. Wests underground village, which he hopes to finish within the next few years, will be accessible from the scraggly prairie by a ramp descending into the ground, leading to a third-of-a-mile-long arcade. The dozens of communal dwellings, which feed into the central spaces, will have circular bedrooms mostly taken up with mattresses, and walls of pink and blue marble to be illuminated by light shafts from vast windows onto the surface. He doesnt want to buy furniture, he wants me to make it all from concrete, the architect says. (West declined to comment.)

If Olgiati harbors doubts that the subterranean utopia will ever be realized, he doesnt let on. Instead, he relishes the precise planning. Like the design aficionados and architects who seem to live vicariously through him, you find yourself wanting to believe such a thing can happen, that as amenity-laden condo towers and giant faux-Modernist mansions pock the land, Olgiati will indeed build his Atlantis deep in the ground and that it will be pure and strange and uncompromised. Yes, it sounds a bit far-fetched, but I wouldnt be surprised if they managed it, says Chipperfield. And wouldnt it be amazing?

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An Architect Whos Known for Aesthetic Purity and Counts Kanye West as a Client - The New York Times

Josh Hamilton as Lance Hornsby in The Walking Dead Season 11

Theres a scene in The Walking Deads latest episode, Out of the Ashes, that really got me thinking about a different show.

Eugene and his compatriots have finally been allowed to enter the Commonwealth and go through a brief orientation process where they watch the guy in the picture aboveLance Hornsbytalk about the wonders of this newfound Utopia.

After orientation, the group splits up. Eugene is walking with his new love interest, Stephanie, who actually does appear interested in him rather than just a honeypot designed to lure in strangers. Theyre walking along the clean, perfect streets of the town eating ice cream cones. It makes me think of The Good Place, a comedy about several not-so-good people who find themselves in The Good Placea paradise with a dark underbelly theyre yet to discover (I highly recommend the show, especially its first season).

This is, I suspect, not so different from the Commonwealth, which appears to be rather perfect at first blush, but which we know has its own darkness lurking underneath. Yumiko finds her brother and while he insists its not too good to be true, he does add a qualifier: So long as you follow the rules.

Our heroes muck it all up, of course. Instead of taking their time to get settled and build up trust, they immediately hatch a (very poorly conceived) plan to radio back to Alexandria. Princess tries to distract Mercer which probably makes matters worse, and before you know it everyone except for Yumiko (who was processed separately and is having a nice conversation with her brother) is under arrest and facing exile.

Curiously, Hornsby steps in and argues for their release, Stephanie at his side. Shes being charged as a citizen while the others are refugees, but it does appear at least like she was genuinely helping them. Then again, it could all be part of a larger ruse on the Commonwealths part to lull our heroes into a false sense of security.

Stephanie only helped so that they could all get arrested. Hornsbys intervention is just part of the con. Once he has their trust, they spill the beans on their compatriots and the Commonwealth moves into actionthough what action and why remains to be seen.

Cailey Fleming as Judith, Anabelle Holloway as Gracie, Kien Michael Spiller as Hershel, Antony Azor ... [+] as RJ - The Walking Dead _ Season 11, Episode 5 - Photo Credit: Josh Stringer/AMC

This is just one of four stories that comprise Season 11, Episode 5 of The Walking Dead. The others involve:

Something is off about this season. A lot can happen in an episode and it can still feel weirdly boring and slow. Its like, if you could pluck just the good bits from each episode you could sew them back together into a couple very good episodes.

Instead, we get lots of filler and awkward moments like when Jerry recognizes one of the Hilltop zombies and is like Thats Tony! like were supposed to know who Tony is let alone care.

Maybe it wasnt even Tony, maybe he said some other random bit characters name like it means something. Please, writers of The Walking Dead, in order to get us to care when somebody dies you must spend time establishing who they are first.

This applies to all of Maggies poor, unfortunate souls as well. Oh know, not Agatha, I friggin loved Agatha she was the best. I am so sad that she is gone. Woe is me.

As for Judiths teens, I like to imagine that at this point most kids and teens would be pretty hardcore, raised in a dangerous and deadly and traumatizing world. Theyd be a little screwed up, sure, but theyd be tough like Judith. Why is she so tough but these other kids who grew up in the same circumstances are playing zombie bite dodge and being clowns?

Also, Im getting Lost extra vibes at Alexandria where we constantly encounter new people we dont recognize and who dont matter and who simply serve to prove that if we dont know this many characters in a zombie apocalypse show, maybe its time to slim the cast down a bit.

The whole thing is just a little dull when you come right down to it. A little dull, a little uneven, and shockingly slow-paced for the final season of The Walking Dead.

Then, too, I have questions about the Commonwealth. Those ice cream cones Eugene and Stephanie were eatingthe creature comforts as he calls them. What kind of manufacturing and agriculture do these people have? Its not easy to produce all the components necessary to make these. Sugar alone would be a pretty big undertaking, let alone the dairy and so on and so forth. Is that really where the Commonwealth is diverting its resources? Hmmmm.

Am I wrong? Did I miss something brilliant about this episode that someone else noticed? Let me know!

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The Walking Dead Season 11, Episode 5 Review: The Good Place - Forbes

There is an old saying that if you find yourself in a hole, the best course of action is to stop digging. If only Australia understood this wisdom. Abandoning the French submarine project, the government has decided to double down and design a new nuclear-powered sub with technology and assistance from the United States and the United Kingdom. To continue the homespun metaphors, Australia has decided to go from the frying pan into the fire.

Many of the questions that previously cast doubt on the wisdom of the French boat deal and design remain unanswered in regard to its replacement. Just why does Australia require a submarine that has the range to operate in the South and East China Seas? What strategic need is met by these submarines? Can a relatively weak nation such as Australia realistically aspire to a three-ocean defence force? The best answer we have is the need to maintain the rules-based order, but certainly there are other ways to achieve this end instead of embracing the most technologically challenging warship ever created. One is reminded of the TV show Utopia and the episode which skewers a Defence plan to build a force to protect Australian trade routes from its own trading partner. Slightly off-topic, yes, but telling.

It will be at least a decade before a single boat is in service, even if everything goes to plan.

Worryingly, the operational theatre in which these boats are meant to sail, the waters off Chinas coast, are relatively shallow and sit in the shadow of a considerable anti-submarine warfare (ASW) capacity. At present, the Peoples Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) is reputed to be weak in ASW, but it is improving. By the time Australias boats arrive, in ten or 20 years, its capacity could be pretty robust. As it is, any Australian submarine that attempts to do something in these waters, such as launch a tomahawk missile, will reveal its position and shortly thereafter be destroyed. By, say, 2034, the PLANs ASW capability may well have reached the point that even attempting to penetrate these waters would require suicidal courage.

The drawn-out timeline is not in Australias favour. Eighteen months of consultation will precede a decision on requirements. Then there will be a design phase as Australia creates an entirely new class of boats. Workers will need to be trained and a nuclear industry built. It will be at least a decade before a single boat is in service, even if everything goes to plan, and there are plenty of points at which the plan can go off track. To meet this need, an off-the-shelf foreign built option would be safer and faster, but that option is off the table.

Australia currently has an air force that is optimised to act as a wing of the US Air Force. An answer needs to be given on whether a similar decision has been taken for the Royal Australian Navy (RAN). Realistically, the only way an Australian boat could operate in these waters if the countrywere at war would be as a unit of a US Navy task force. In effect, two second-order decisions have been taken by Australia and it is not clear whether this has been understood by the government or the public. First, the RANs nuclear fleet will have to sail under the air cover provided by a US carrier task force if it is to survive. Second, if the United States is at war with China, so is Australia, since the Australian Defence Force will be integrated into the US force. Without any discussion by the Australian parliament or review by the Australian public, Australia will find itself as a minnow in a war between two nuclear-armed great powers.

A nuclear submarine is of no use in a conflict driven by climate tensions.

By insisting on the need for a long-range boat, Australia has turned its back on other, more promising options with which to meet its security needs. Have no doubt, I believe Australia needs submarines. It just doesnt need ones that are designed to operate at such distances.

The island chain to Australias north is pierced by several maritime choke points, principally the Lombok and Sunda Straits. Further north is the Makassar Strait. A fleet of smaller conventional subs could easily guard these waters. Moreover, coming on line are a host of uncrewed underwater vehicles as well as propelled mines. These are deployable from aircraft, small boats and even submarines. In fact, Australia could build a small submarine whose mission is to command and control a fleet of uncrewed vessels. The command boat would be relatively undetectable due to its small size, while the uncrewed platforms take the risks. The nuclear sub programs great cost, whatever that ultimately may be, will soak up the monies that could have gone to this less risky option that embraces novel solutions.

A nuclear sub only addresses one of Australias future security threats and, unfortunately, a less dangerous one. Climate change has been rightly described as an existential threat that risks destabilising nations across the Asia Pacific. A nuclear submarine is of no use in a conflict driven by climate tensions. Why is Australia determined to invest in a weapon system that only meets one aspect of its security needs? As I have written recently, Australia needs to take a different approach to the consideration of its security, one that meets the tensions that will result from the rebalance of power that is underway in the Indo-Pacific and that addresses climate change. To consider only a part of the defence requirement is even more short-sighted than buying nuclear subs.

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When you're in a hole, stop digging: Australia and the nuke sub deal - The Interpreter

There is a legend of the seventh century Irumbai temple near Auroville which tells of a Siddhar (an enlightened sage) who re-ties the anklet of a dancer in whom he sees the form of Shiva himself. The locals mock him, and Kaduveli Siddhar is furious. He utters a curse that breaks the temple lingam in three and commences a ceaseless drought. The frightened villagers beg for mercy, the Siddhar relents, the lingam is partially rejoined, but the curse can be lifted only with the arrival of some people from a far-off land, he says, at some far-off time.

Many today say those people must have been the early Aurovillians.

There is another, better-known legend of Auroville which tells of a fair-skinned seer from a far-off land who comes to Pondicherry (now Puducherry) and finds a rishi in whom she sees the form of Krishna himself. Other fair-skinned people follow, drawn by her magnetism, locals join, and her vision of human purpose and unity compels them to build a city from the red earth of a drought-ridden land, transforming it into a forest. They work with what they have, not always having enough, and, like the villagers in the old story, not always able to understand the whys of anything: why a woman is paralysed or a child drowns, or why the miracles they envision do not occur.

But they make Auroville the place it now is.

The first story is immortalised in the reliefs on the walls of the Irumbai temple and in the little booklets the priests will give you if you ask; Akash Kapur makes fleeting reference to it in his new book, Better To Have Gone, a memoir of growing up in the universal township and experimental community called Auroville, just north of Pondicherry. Its the second story that preoccupies himnot as legend, as I have told it, but as an assemblage of the biographical tales of a handful of early Aurovillians: of the charming and brilliant John, trapped and propped by his elite American life; vivacious Diane from small-town East Flanders, determined to escape her controlling mother; the strong-willed French survivor of Nazi concentration camps who becomes Satprem, and several secondary characters entering and exiting this pageant as it unfolds.

Better To Have Gone Auroville, Love, Death And The Quest For Utopia: By Akash Kapur, Simon & Schuster, 368 pages, 699.

Through the minutiae of their stories emerges a narrative history of Auroville which runs roughly as follows. Seekers of various stripes are drawn in the 1950s-60s to Pondicherry, where the Sri Aurobindo Ashram is in the hands of the Mother, a Frenchwoman born Mirra Alfassa, the spiritual collaborator of the revolutionary freedom fighter and yogi Sri Aurobindo. The place is already a community of sadhaks (roughly, spiritual practitioners), both Indian and not. The Mother has an idea of a city of the future, a place of freedom, experimentation and never-ceasing progress where human unity can manifest and where each individual is a willing servitor of the Divine Consciousness. This city, which she calls Auroville, is founded in 1968, with a call to all men of goodwill and pledges of support from governments and agencies around the world.

Then commence the human travails, the actual work of translating lofty aspirations into material practice. This is the focus of Kapurs writing and in the lives and strivings of the early Aurovillians lies this books first premise: There is no dreamy mythology of Auroville, the quest for perfection is inherently imperfect; there are no goddesses and gods, only people who are dreamers, searchers, rebels, each trying to fill a distinctive gap in their soul. It is through each of their quests, thrown and shaped by the actual circumstances of their lives, that Auroville comes into being.

There is another quest here, and that is Kapurs own. Both he and his wife, Auralice, are children of Aurovilles formative years, having grown up through the tumult of early community building, as the Matrimandir, a monument to the Divine Mother at the centre of Auroville, is being built. Diane is Auralices mother, John eventually becomes her adoptive father. Both die within hours of each other. What was it that drew these people here? What brought them to their deaths? Better To Have Gone offers a reckoning.

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Kapur reaches into letters, archival records and the dark labyrinths of personal memory to investigate. There is no mystery here, as we eventually discover, maybe at best a tragic love story or a rending family drama, certainly a childs (that is, Auralices) poignant coming to terms with the incomprehensibility of her parents life choices and the weights those laid on her. Poised at this personal fulcrum, Kapurs project is one of sense-makingand not the way Aurovillians and many Indians as well do it, seeking explanations for the why of things in abstract divine will and purpose. Explanations based on divine providence and faith wont do for Kapur; he has had a surfeit of those, they are part of the burden to release. Instead, he veers towards rationalist, almost historiographic methods. Enlightenment rationalism is thus the second premise of this bookor at least Kapur wants it to be. He wants to rail that faith is somehow the opposite of reason, that it doesnt make sense, that it can wreak havoc.

So, he turns to experiences more readily comprehensible. Aurovilles early years play in his words as on those scratched and grainy family films we all so love watching, even if this is no idyllic time. Life involves contending with snakes, parasites, the lack of equipment (using bus schedules as timers for bread in the bakery), the need for money as much as the desire to eschew money exchange (the origins of Aurovilles so-called cashless economy), wary and sometimes violent local villagers, and a harsh, brutally hot environment. At times one has the sense of witnessing the progressive insanities of a pioneer, to borrow Margaret Atwoods poetic wordsbut Auroville is hardly the monolithic settler colony historian Jessica Namakkal unfailingly insists it must be. The community wrests with challenges that are at once physical, material, ideological and spiritual.

Aurovillians see their labours as attempt(s) to materialize spiritual consciousness, and Kapurs rationalism strains and gives way sometimes, but the frames keep clashing. How does Auroville work? Johns American father wants to know, programmatically, pragmatically, at the same time as Diane feels complete in the silence of the Matrimandirs construction site and the simple lives, sacrifices and spiritual leanings of this nascent community endear local villagers to the Auroville idea.

With all this as background, it is difficult to think of Auroville as utopia by any measure but Kapur feels compelled to raise this spectre. Utopia is a place thats perfect and that doesnt exist, he says with conviction, and then, hesitantly: I guess it would be more appropriate to say that Auroville is an aspiring utopia. Loose definitions circulate: Thomas Mores utopia, Soviet-era imaginaries, our common desires for fresh starts and alternative lives. It is never clear how or when any of these notions attach themselves to Aurovillethey do not figure in common Aurovillian parlance, and appear neither in the Mothers own descriptions, nor in the Auroville charter. The Mother once remarked that utopia was the basis on which they (reporters, observers) tell you, You wont succeed (Agenda vol.9, 6 April 1968). Nonetheless, it becomes Kapurs proverbial straw man, to be set up and knocked down.

The Mother, too, features in Kapurs dramatis personae alongside the others. There is a certain blank, staccato rhythm to Kapurs writing and his presentation of facts: Diane cries, the Mother cranes her neck, John is shattered. The tense is present and continuous, happening as we watch; there is very little to suggest that the Mothers envisionings are any more or less important than the interpretations and experiences of all those who carry it forward. At times Kapur erupts, asserting passionately that Human beingsindividuals, familiesare mere sideshows in the quest for a perfect world; they are sacrificed at the altar of ideals. But he never really tells us what Aurovilles ideals are. He reproduces the Auroville charter without comment, and says nothing of the specific notions of freedom, unity, and progress that Aurovillian endeavours equally embody. No comment either on the importance of India to the formation of Auroville, except as clichd eastern salve to broken western materialism. As for the people who are willingly and even wilfully sacrificing themselvestheir actions bewilder the rationalist in Kapur. His only recourse is to make their sideshows central.

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Really, he says, Auroville has emerged from the rubble of the Second World War. It will later have its own cultural revolution (referring to the 1970s conflict over self-governance that shook relations between Auroville and entities associated with the Sri Aurobindo Ashram). Via such sleights of hand does Kapur place Auroville amidst an odd jumble of responses to post-war despondency and other social uprisings, alongside the Japanese Yamagishi movement, the ill-fated Jamestown settlement, Israeli kibbutzim and Maos revolution. Aurovilles primary distinction is merely that it outlives most others.

For all the filial affection Kapur clearly has for this place of his birth and growth, these are damning moves. They open the door to a reading of Auroville as a bizarre utopian cult (Zo Hellers 5 July article in The New Yorker is proof) and they undermine the values that the very Aurovillians Kapur writes about so deeply espouse. It makes little difference that he comes around, from a preoccupation with the inexplicability of Aurovilles deaths to a rebirthing of sorts, after a meditation in the inner chamber of the Matrimandir, no less, but the path he opens for personal sense-making is one that deliberately sidesteps the Mothers vision of Auroville, only cursorily considers even Aurovillian enactments of that vision, and focuses overwhelmingly on how people imperfectly materialised itas though that is the only reality worth reporting.

To frame a story as legend, as with the Siddhars tale or the lore of Auroville, is to recognise just how fantastic it is: amazing, a touch incredible, but always containing an explanation of the present and opening energetically to the possibilities of the future. To frame a story as utopia-that-isnt is to establish an underbelly shot through with the worst forms of callousness and cruelty. This second is Kapurs goal and the books chief failing. Saying Auroville isnt a utopia is, after all, very different from saying it was never meant to be one.

I am reminded of why it is that traditional Tamilians will never speak ill of the places of their own birth: Its a question of loyalty and of risk. At 79, Johns father writes a letter to his son: I admire you on your pilgrimage, he says, and in a blessing that gives the book its title, May it have a good endingbetter to have gone on it than to have stayed here quietly. It takes a lifetime of a fathers love to arrive at this point of comprehension. Who else would make such an effort?

Deepa S. Reddy is a cultural anthropologist and researcher with the University of Houston-Clear Lake, US. She lives and works from Puducherry and Auroville.

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Sifting myths from facts in the experiment called Auroville - Mint Lounge