Comedians speak the truth. Politicians provide the comedy. One million lost, to an unseen invader; communities and economies threatened, nature vengefully reclaiming former loss. Belief in densification and mega cities of hyper-urbanization, so readily accepted as an inevitable march on modernity, questioned, if not to its survival, to its significance.

About art and human purpose, filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky said “The more we know, the less we know. Getting deeper, our horizon becomes narrower.”

And what of our purpose? I.T. enabling such ease of sharing, the constant improvement of the knowable to impact people and cities, to erase the errors of the past and conceive sustainable, renewable places for people, of the future, the way we were taught to think.

Something else happened. The past decades brought our emerging world something different; overqualified hoards sprinting along the same highway, with the sameness of ideas ever codified and narrow, but boy, don’t the renderings sell? How do we unlearn?

Scale matters. The measure of a conversation and its respect; 50 centimeters of intimate human space. A talk, to act human, emergence out of chaotic discourse, renewed with ideas illuminating future days. A laptop screen, and get the camera eye-level and no backlight; all networked, wired, wireless, real and unreal, heaped upon us, to bring clarity in a year of unbelievable fiction.

We had learned to learn through the gift of flight. Cities, all cities, as accessible as a walk to the next neighborhood. No longer. Such is the loss in 2020 to be captive in one place, yet unable to rediscover the lost, underappreciated journey of back alleys and meandering life-ways, our experiences sanitized; the cafes and laboratories of our ideation lost to “Closed” signs, and with it, the inability to satiate the pangs of desire for the clutter of our most wonderful neighborhoods.

We adapt, discover anew, our past and dormant senses, find other inspiration. Spring listening to Bill Evans on his journey fifty years ago to Paris, the Village Vanguard, Stockholm. Melting into Charlie Haden or the Concerto de Arnajuez, the Paul Desmond, Chet Baker version; soothing, meticulous, flowing, connecting past, present and replenishing vitality lost, a reminder, to all of us visualists, to conceive deeper, frame improvisation, until our small contributions drives people to notice, and unearth layers upon layers, as intentioned, but evolved organically.

Vertical cities, yes. The life within, considered, programmed and captured fleetingly to accentuate adaptation, that we have forgotten that the mission is to shelter, and beauty can be found in more than artifacts, to the life clustered in, around and between. Call it architecture if you want; it is city making, person by person, space by space, with Palladian formalism giving way to a Minecraft process of vast flexibility and speed to create, destroy and remake quickly, and unlearn what we know too well; to imagine without fear.

This world truly is upside down. To live in the most inside out of cities, Hong Kong, where life and teeming mess drips onto the most democratic space, the streets. Existence here is the inhumanity of too many steaming months, elbowing crowds, soaring stress, injected with the turmoil of protests one year, Covid 19 the next, but pulled into the response, the strength of citizenship that this city of 7.4 million people learned from its past, acting instinctively for personal and societal safety.

We are changed. No falling back to the past; onto the perplexing complications of what lies ahead, with people visibly connected to each other, to make a story so unreal, so imaginative, that it is real.