index
One single box
One vessel to contain everything. A universal object. It is the ultimate Modernist vision. One box for all our needs. One box and one wire. . . . Clearly the role of design is increasingly one of inventing environments dedicated to high-pressured, choreographed selling. Sometimes these are actual store environments, and sometimes these environments exist in virtual space, within the box that is supposed to be bringing us all our information. . . . One box shopping. It makes me wonder whether that other box, the big box by the highway, is so big because it too is on the verge of extinction. Maybe Wal-Mart is doing the dirty work, destabilizing traditional downtowns, softening us up for the one box future. Jacobs 1993, 66
Yet the one box on the wire does not enclose so firmly; despite their efforts it can open out, be protean. Reality imposes beyond the box, because there are rhythms, motions, interruptions, discontinuities, and the multiplication of perspectives -- shapes of time as well as of space, as and in the place of the box.