Joel McHale in The Great Indoors (2016–2017) No Bad Ideas
Ep5
Human Resources forbids Jack from giving his staff any feedback at all after he crushes Clark with a brutally honest performance review. Also, Emma and Mason call out Brooke for being politically incorrect when they try to help her hire a diverse intern.
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I would love to see buildings used as a natural aesthetic. Not as in a post-apocalyptic wasteland where nature has taken over, but rather one where the buildings ARE nature.
Parallel universe where humanity is incredibly advanced in biology and genetics to the point where conventional construction has been phased out in favor of organic construction. Massive, conventionally looking buildings grown out of seeds alongside massive amounts of sun, fertilizer, gravel and stuff. Way slower than conventional construction but incredibly cheap.
Then The Incident™ happens and humanity flees elsewhere, leaving ample remains including these buildings and massive seed storages. Eventually these seeds, through crossbreeding, an overzealous genetic engineer or some other sensible explanation, end up developing the ability to reproduce. Developing mutations to help them spread faster and adapt to all kinds of conditions and surrounding materials, yet still containing massive DNA-based information from their original creators.
Millions of years later, human explorers come back only to find that the Earth has been completely taken over by invasive building-based flora. It being reduced to nothing but an ecumenopolis of concrete, steel and asphalt. Each construction retaining a passing resemblance to its original form, yet having developed all kinds of unique features as part of the ongoing evolutive struggle.
Mid-size residential buildings, so close to each other it's hard to tell each member apart, most apartments containing 1 to 4 bedrooms, 1 to 3 bathrooms and a kitchen, among others. Basic furniture can be found, rarely retaining functionality. Their circulatory system eventually evolved to make use of their plumbing, making sinks and toilets functional, albeit in a way that is completely impractical for human habitation.
Roads are extremely sturdy and can grow anywhere, a weed where actual weeds can sometimes grow into. They take over any land that is unsuitable for other constructions, filling massive areas with asphalt while still retaining standard lane width (2.7 to 4.6 m) with minor differentiation based on species. Transportation through them is completely unhindered as their digestion can take years even for simple organic substances.
Skyscrapers span from the bottom of most oceans to the surface, never close together. Their sturdy construction likely allowed them to migrate to the oceans early, adapting to greater and greater depths yet always reaching to the surface for light. Their lack of natural predators is balanced out with their extremely slow growth, often taking thousands of years to grow even on relatively shallow seas.
There’s something to being able to see the places we regularly experience as something alive and with its own reason to be rather than made purely as to serve our own needs. Perhaps this could be written as always being like this and we just ended up making use of it, creating hunter-gatherer societies living in places that, from a distance, look like your standard apartment building.
I just wish I could visit the great indoors rather than the regular indoors.
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I realize this is a weird question for a Sunday morning, but does anybody have particularly incisive articles about the tension between architectural preservation and the need (because I do think it's a need!) for new buildings, new spaces, and revising the landscape of a city?
I'm watching a piece on Richard Nickel, who is almost single-handedly responsible for photographing the work of Louis Sullivan and other architects of the Chicago Prairie School, prior to their demolition in the 60s. It's a great piece, and I love Nickel's photographs, but as someone who knows only the Chicago that sprang up in the wake of Nickel's, I can't help but wonder if there's more than simple aesthetics at play here.
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