F*^# the apathy

Marshall McLuhan, 1967:“The city no longer exists, except as a cultural
ghost for tourists.”1
Yes, yes, I know; it’s a familiar trope—death of God, death of
the subject, death of the author, death of the drive-in, end of history,
exhaustion of science, whatever. But he turned out to be right—
though a few decades ahead of his time, as usual.

This is the opinion of William J Mitchell in " Prologue: Urban Requiem"
He is proposing in this short but packed blurb that we are experiencing the death of the city (and by association architecture). But I'd have to disagree. See, I don't think we ever killed God or the subject, the author or history. I think what we've done is stopped caring. He talks about how all of these tiny intangible particles called bits are wrecking our society but I don't think that they are to blame. I can't describe my burning hatred for the non-chalant attitude that people have towards good design. It seems lately I'm lucky to get a "that's pretty cool" out of my professors and classmates when showing them some new awesome chair or speaker or building. The last of which we are supposed to be excited to see. It seems that we have slowly been exterminating not God, history, authors, drive-ins, or science, but enthusiasm. I can only assume that bits have acted as a catalyst in our endeavors to wipe excitement from our collective face. We killed the campfire and the water wells. We said they weren't important, and in a logistically driven but lazy and shallow approach dismissed them from our cities. Now we communicate with thousands of people who we term friends on our faceyspaces and tweetbooks. But like we don't really know the people on our friends lists, we also don't really know our world or buildings. I saw a new commercial for a phone that claims that we need a phone to rescue us from our phones. Frankly, it was one of the most depressing commercials I have ever seen. Hundreds of people who had fallen of thier bikes or wrecked thier cars into lightpoles, sitting, lying and shambling blindly about while thier eyes remained glued to thier phone screens.

What I'm trying to get at, is this. Either we have to give a shit, or suffer everyones apathy to our architecture. We have to make our building transformative, interfacable, technologic. We have to give people a reason to look up.