The Pacific Northwest remains, for me, a mythic homeland. Unlike in other urban settings, where I often strive to find the mythic, in Seattle, Portland, and smaller cities along the coast, here, yes. So wondering, about the modernist project in Shenzhen. Does mass architecture elevate the soul? Or does that imaginative leap happen when an architect or investor takes pen to paper and calls the future into being? And can such a feeling constitute social science or is better suited to literature? Meanwhile, the rest of us scuttle through Gotham.

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