So this section is on a weird architecture idea I had that I made on a scrap of paper and then distributed to a couple of people in San Francisco by just putting it in their mailbox. I was hoping to reach people that were good enough to have a place to live and not a fucked up drug addict or crazy (at least having a house or a car says you haven't been abducted or are dying or crazy - or at least it makes it less likely). In any case I don't want to draw out the picture so I'll just write out what the idea is today.

One of the bizarre things about the United States in particular is that there isn't all that much in the way of public spaces that are free and you don't have to pay for. It's one of those weird urban planning things that's an artifact of the automobile and suburban culture. It's worse in the cities where space is at a premium. They've done some interesting things with converting disused railway in Chicago and New York City to be an elevated park, which is an idea that's similar to the promenade in San Francisco that's been around since the 1970s, but I had another thought. What if you made what amounts to a multilevel public park by turning what amounts to a parking garage into a multilevel garden. You would have to raise all of the ceilings so that each level would be about the height of two parking garage levels and then you could put in plants. I'm rather fond of Egyptian revival architecture and find most modern architecture styles rather sterile and boring - I thank Frank Lloyd Wright for that. There also has been advances in researching concrete architecture that is incredibly durable, which may make concrete buildings easier to build. I think it would be incredibly cool to make buildings with gargoyles and friezes that could involve artists that are part of the community to design public parks that were 20 stories tall, and had perhaps a dozen levels of various heights with plants, levels for graffiti and wall art, a skate park level, a gymnasium level, and so on. If you put this in a middle of a city it could be a replacement for a public square. You could also hold markets in the park on various days, which would replace the necessity of having to rent out expensive and potentially onerous space in a public mall.

So here's the idea that I had. I was going to recreate it using p5.js or an image prompt generator but I decided to just free hand it even though my hands are killing me. The park I had thought of would have a central light that would look like the sun with a hanging mobile of planets. The staircase for the first several floors is partly modeled off the staircase of the Museum of Art in Chicago. There would be pillars around the outside of the staircase that would shine constellations on the walls representing the 12 signs of the zodiac, which would show up because there would be no other light source in the first several floors other than the central lamp. And each of the gates on the inside would be painted to represent the four seasons. The lower floors would have an Egyptian Renaissance style with the upper floors being surrounded by a trellis and open to the air with flowers along the outside and a park on the top. The entrance would be at the four corners of the tower and look like the mouths of demons. There's a large amount of room for art in the building and I had thought it would be cool if each of the four towers represented a different country in the four wars currently (Ukraine, Russia, Israel, Palestine) with each column having gargoyles that were country specific. I don't know that I like this so much because it feels like the homework assignment that earned that kid a B+ for the Vietnam memorial and I wanted the idea to be more forward thinking in terms of making public parks than about war. The lack of public space generally sprang from this idea more or less.

I'm fascinated with the idea of follies and there are some modern ones that you wouldn't necessarily know about like the Portland Gas Works.

If they could find a way to just turn a bunch of abandoned buildings throughout the city into parks that would be wonderful. Like the foreclosed mall or the Whitcomb building.