LEED Certified Starbucks in energy conscious Denver, CO
Yesterday we worried the franchise would desaturate our culture and overpower the identities of small towns, their cultures and subcultures.
Burj Kalifa, world’s highest inhabitable tower, Dubai
Today, the world’s highest tower built for the Emirates by designers of one of the longest standing triumphs for world’s largest tower, the Sears Tower, Skidmore Owings and Merrill, rather than westernize the Emirates, supports its identity. We have global technological leader, Samsung, as prime general contractor ensuring the latest in construction technology world wide is represented here. The United States’ largest general contractor, Turner Construction, supports the buildings’ structure and insures its inner workings. We are approaching a phase in our culture where the franchise or conglomerate no longer celebrates the corporation, larger power, or essentially collective triumphs, but instead becomes a venue for the smaller identity.
We are creating more satellites that are equally local and corporate, national and international. With more of these hubs, we hope to see smaller franchises of larger chains, physically smaller copies of our largest grocers serving 6 city block locals with precisely the customers’ orders and the larger locations’ prices. The effect would be—where people are willing to pay for an exotic commodity such as single origin organically farmed coffee, we can see it appear at one McDonald’s franchises. We are voting our values to the center, the global or national corporation, and receiving results for our own persons today. Tomorrow’s corporations will be more than partly our failures or successes.
Kingdom Tower, Skidmore Owings & Merrill
Tomorrow, we hope to have such triumphs as the Burj Khalifa copied in the former Soviet and presently Islamic countries, Azarbajian and Kazakhstan, and something similar to the Dubai tower to appear in global power, Saudi Arabia. We hope that these reversed loops of corporate flow and hubs between local, national, and international stadiums are not a dead end, but a rich medium for progress.
Almaty Twin Towers, Norman Foster, Kazakhstan
How will this attitude towards pluralism in metropolis influence the Caucasus and Caspian, Saudi Arabia, and how will this influence our own cross cultural/subcultural relationships in urban, suburban environments and the local, national and international venues?
Mojave roads, used possibly for milllenia for 600 mile passage between Colorado River and Pacific ocean, still used recreationally today.
Part of the answer lies in what we forget historically and locally. The United States has 600 years of European history poorly represented and millennia precolonial. This history exists for each small town, for each large geographic region, and for the nation as a whole in multiple senses. As each aspect of our lives regains a stadium, the future should excite us. Perhaps we can think of property in more terms than geographic location and space on a 3d map, in the sense of, how completely is our voice represented?
kosta toskovic 