Model City [2]

It was like going to see “The Unbuilt City,” an exhibition of architectural plans and models for transforming your city—grids, towers, monumental ministries, vast plazas—that ultimately came to nothing.

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It was like wandering through the exhibit looking at futuristic drawings that figure the erasure of the nineteenth-century four-story architecture you love, and feeling pleased the plans came to nothing.

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It was like taking note of a resistance in yourself to the futuristic, the futuresque, the future—while not denying a certain nostalgia for antiquated visions of the world of tomorrow.

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It was like looking at the futuristic models and thinking about the unbearableness of the present and realizing there are two kinds of people: those who can’t wait for the future, and those who can’t wait for the past.

                                                                                                                                 -Donna Stonecipher