Places Journal

Where the old order, the Fordist order, thought of itself as rooted in the hard stuff of manufacturing and the grit of labor, the new order, or so it tells itself, doesn’t make goods but rather experiences, lifestyles, identities, images. Companies are now routinely referred to as simply “brands”; Even restaurants, apparently, are now merely “conce

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Twyla Tharp’s box reveals the true value of a simple container: it is easy to use, easy to understand, easy to create, and easy to maintain. It can be moved from place to place without losing its contents. A container requires no effort to identify, to share with others, and to put in storage when it’s no longer needed. We don’t need complex, sophi

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Our idea of progress is so bound up with the idea of putting something new in the world that it can feel counterintuitive to equate progress with destruction, removal, and remediation. But this seeming contradiction actually points to a deeper contradiction: of destruction (e.g., of ecosystems) framed as construction (e.g., of dams). Nineteenth-cen... See more