I think I’ve chosen the worst time to come.
To leave an African heat wave to enter another New Yorker. I do not know which of the two sensations can be described as more devastating.
However, what one is able to see immediately, thank you to the high temperatures, and after sailing in the tangle of steel and glass that Manhattan is, (from the skyscrapers to the smartphones with the bitten apple) is why Koolhaas understood in that way the New York City. I think it’s never been easier to find out. While the boiling oxygen penetrates throughout the body, hundreds of tourists seek to satisfy their consumerist spirit while finding a thermodynamic oasis.
The alliance between the american culture, the one that affirms without complexes that «the bigger, the better» and the frantic search of more, provokes a constant reconstruction of the image of the city, representative of the today situation: the huge interior landscapes collapse tourists’ lifes, seeking for the last ‘chance’; the internet of the things overlaps tons of fluxes and data of parallel lifes, without leaving any trace; the commercial surfaces overflowing dozens of people crossing its corridors, carrying an infinite series of products, in which the brand of the same occupies less space than others made as the absence of sugars or antibiotics. Who cares what he eats, as long as it has been happy during its life.
By the way, I can feel how the spirit is disturbed by the constant thinking activity. Manhattan always seems to be the continuous creation next to its apogee. It is true that we are no longer impressed by the same things that made it great during the 20th century, but the revolution is now focused on other scales, and it is still promising and surprising. However, the most classic optimists will always breathe together when around the corner and discover a new landscape of pine green plywood planks, which in the while set flood the streets with the department of buildings’ posts, interrupting the apparent serenity of the Manhattan’s grid.
I am sure that New York is the ‘hot pot’ that so many of us here are looking for.
We will keep discovering.
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