reblogged: On Building the Unreal, a Memory

My grandparents, the tired, the poor and the hungry of an Old, imploding Europe, immigrated to America between the 1880’s and the early 1920’s. Arriving on its shores with little more than the clothes on their backs and the energy of getting to work to re-build their lives, crafts and tradesmen, they literally started constructed the inner cities, then the suburbs, of their adopted country’s eastern seaboard.

What? & How? to build to build & organize the young cities and unbuilt territories of America, was based on their mental images, those of the land they left behind. An instinctive memory of the thousands of years of culture and architecture constructed by their ancestors’, a ghost-image that somehow they felt capable of reproducing, that would permit them to thrive in their new home. [continue>Metaverse Territories]