Month: November 2015

When I feel down, I feel like looking at FLW architecture. It relaxes me and excites me about the future. Maybe at some point we’ll stop being stupid and we’ll look into ways of making people happy by building great, affordable houses.

I love the mystery. You look at this and you wonder what is going on. It’s not playing on weirdness a la Gehry, it’s just low key different and pure. No bullshit. Straight lines and a couple ornaments that’s it.

That was a drawing for a huge house for very rich people. Deemed too mysterious they cancelled it and built a huge, tacky, Italian style house. I look at that drawing and I imagine people living there and how special this would feel, surrounded by nature, kind of not being able to actually visualize the entire house, just moving from room to room.

This shit looks cozy as fuck, I’m sorry but I’d kill a turkey with my bare hands to be able to have Thanksgiving in this living room. FLW had a massive sense of aesthetic. I imagine laughing and being warm in this, just feeling fine.

That one looks like a sanctuary/bunker, ready to tackle any kind of zombie invasion while you’re sipping some nice coffee and working on your computer. Our houses today are boring as hell.

Dat corner glass son. I’m not sure it’s legal anymore but damn it looks just perfect. Who wouldn’t want his home studio to have a view like that. Off the grid house surrounded by nature, that’s all I want and I suspect probably all we need.

I immediately think about prefab that one, maybe even 3D print it. FLW designs and modern construction would work so well. He was wrong on a lot of stuff but what a vision. That design is from 1938. Still looking ultra sharp.

Unbuilt. The sphere was supposed to be the living room. We’re so not used to spherical rooms but the induced relaxation is probably hardwired in our brains because we all come from a rounded belly, that’s how we started. I bet projecting movies on the wall while laying down on a comfy sofa would be kind of the ultimate Netflix & Chill.

I think I saw four different Harold owning a FLW house, maybe I should be the fifth. Maybe I’ll never be able to have one. At least there are some rentals through the US so I shall see.

“Well I’m kind of glad to be the fuck away from all this” At some point I thought that, on that Friday 13th. After texting family and friends. I can’t even imagine what I would witness in Paris as a dude who could be considered one of them but isn’t.

I have seen enough in thirty years. I have seen how white people in France never liked arabs pretty much ever, how arabs grew sick of it, how they made white people even more not liking them etc. Being an outsider I have the privilege to have people speak their minds on this from both sides. It’s a trip to be accepted by white people and arabs, listening to them trash each other. Maybe around 1998-2000 when France was unified around a soccer ball, maybe at that time some progress could have been made ethnicity wise. Maybe France could have started to create a real Republic where we unify on the fact that we are stronger together and that diversity allows us to be smart in a way a monoculture can’t, not because of some antic artifacts like religion and secular BS. But it didn’t happen, 9/11 and fear did. France went hard with laws against muslims that were knee jerk reactions and unfair. It’s a spiral that ended with 90s born French citizens who pretty much have nothing to do with Islam, committing suicide in the worst way possible.

It’s not about Syria. At all. That’s a scapegoat for politics and international affairs. But everyone buys it, it’s so much easier than focus on what France and only France knows and needs to tackle since forever: its weird ass racism hidden in plain sight.

There’s a say in my country, “arab’s work”. It means shitty ass job. Doing some arab’s work means you’re doing the worst kind of work. You would think that this say would have gotten out of fashion through immigration, it didn’t. Way too many white people in France believe this, I’m not exaggerating. Then I will always remember that mid day news about that highly educated arab who couldn’t find a job in France because of his name and had found one in the UK. And it’s like, shit happens. Like it’s not a HUGE issue that needs to be fixed because what kind of fucking hope can you have if the best of the best is judged, stigmatized and stuck in a spiral of unemployment and incomprehension in the country he is born in. It’s just asking for anger/desperation to grow as much as it can for all the people who are not even in this favorable situation. And it did. Radical religious assholes only have to scoop them up. Those kids are craving for respect and purpose and they get that in spades with religion, it’s not rocket science.

France is this great place that encourages you to the “joie de vivre” and independence of thoughts but hasn’t been able to materialize that unless you’re white, drink wine and tolerate Jesus. France is this country that was absolutely right in not wanting to attack Iraq after 9/11 but bombed Syria 24 hours after local terrorism happened.

France can lead the West in hypocrisy, It’s painful to see. You were supposed to be better than that.