change your worldview!
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QUANTUM CITY SAMPLE CHAPTER: INTRODUCTION

"Some mornings I wake up with my head full of rhythms, and rhythms of
rhythms, and rhythms of rhythms of rhythms. And to have to speak English
is like having to put on a straitjacket."
(Leroy Little Bear ‘Sa’ke’j’ Henderson)

"The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression
for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but
to make all other modes of thought impossible."
(George Orwell)

I first visited Oxford in 1993, as a tourist with a camera looking for the postcard beauty of a legendary culture of education. I found it in the intriguing orderliness of the place, the gothic grandeur of its formal buildings and the romantic serenity of its landscapes.

When I returned there four years later as a master’s student, I felt doubly betrayed. In spite of all the intellectual drama that played itself within the quad walls, a few months within my sojourn I was confronted with the spatial sterility of the place.

Sterility is a shocking word, I admit. We are more willing to qualify Modern functionalist settings with it than places like Oxford. But I assure you, the realization probably shocked me far more than it does you. I had come from Beirut, from all its post-war Mediterranean chaos, where I had been trained as an architect. I had been trained to think of physical order as the ultimate goal of our profession. I had come to the disciplined context of Oxford to be promoted into an urban designer. Against all my expectations, the values I carried as a template in my mind were suddenly put to the test. In order to frame this appropriately for you, I have to take you back and forth between several settings in space and time, so that you can most accurately perceive the arc of the experience that put this book in your hands today...

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READ OTHER TEXTS> BY THE AUTHOR
READ ABOUT THE AUTHOR> A SHORT BIO OF AYSSAR ARIDA

 

 

 

 

 

 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


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