the valencies of Neo-Classical

I have been avoiding giving any attention to the last days of Trump. Jody Maxmin, however, directed me to an executive order this last weekend concerning classical architecture. Here’s the report in the New York Times: Trump Makes Classical Style the Default for Federal Buildings An executive order stopped short of banning modernist architecture, but…

Futures Literacy: how to decolonize the future

December 8 – 12 2020. Tamara (Carleton) and I were at the UNESCO Futures Literacy Summit [Link] representing our research group – Foresight at Stanford [Link]. We are standing for design foresight and what we are now calling creative pragmatics (in our forthcoming book – [Link]). Competencies, tools and techniques, mindsets not for predicting the…

ataraxia 1

Ataraxia (Epicurus) – a state of being in balance and one with lifeworld, between what is conventionally distinguished as nature and culture. Ataraxia is fraught with the same tension that pervades the self-gathered serenity of gardens, namely the tension between order and entropy … … anxiety is not so much overcome as transfigured by the…

three synchronicities – different voices

Synchronicity – meaningful coincidence, where things align or connect without there being any proximate or apparent cause. A critical technique to open space for different voices – [Link]. One In a recent online lecture for Stanford Dan-el Padilla Peralta, a Classics professor at Princeton, told of a conference he was attending in Florida on the…

Reconstructing Classics – voice

Part 2 of a review of Confronting Classics, by Mary Beard [Link]. Some tactics for challenging the orthodox monologue of academic Classical Studies and opening space to hear other voices. What is Classical Studies about? Mary Beard argues that Classics is not about ancient Greece and Rome at all, but about what happens in the…