Now that she can venture further afield, Genie and I pass this building on our evening walks. Perhaps dusk light is to ogling buildings as beer goggles are to ogling people. But there’s a lot to love about this building at any time of the day. It’s a place where they make a living out of making physical objects, for one. And the place is covered in these excellent signs as well.

American Metal Crafters sign. Enhance it!

“American Metal Crafters • Metal Boxes • First Aid Cab. • Specialties.” Doesn’t matter what you need. They can make it, see? (“And the book itself is but a tissue of signs.”) Ah, yes. There’s so much signification going on in these signs. So much strength, simplicity and value. A semiotician’s dream.

Shipping and receiving. Enhance it!

Hey web designer, that’s not a drop shadow, this… You get the idea. To think of the effort that we collectively put into making things feel this way—textures in visual design, physicality in interface design, pre-worn jeans, mud on the SUV (huh?). Here it is all effortless, functional, un-reflexive. From a point in space and time when such things came naturally. And we are never going back.

So, I trust I’ve won you over. Great effin’ building.

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• Next stop: modernity

My first trip to an Athenian diner was with Elena a few days after we met. We were both living in New Haven and she had a car so she could drive us there. When I asked her how far away it was she said, and I will never forget it, “it’s farther than you can even imagine.” She was referring to 1426 Whalley Avenue, but late at night in a then-unfamiliar part of the city it could have been anywhere as far as I knew. E just called it Athenian, but I later came to understand that it was Athenian I: the first member of a regional diner quartet.

To an out-of-his-element Australian there’s nothing like the American diner. It’s one of this country’s best and most important institutions. It’s at Athenian that I finally learned how to order food in America. Know how your eggs will be cooked, know your toast options, know your salad dressings, and most importantly, ask for coffee. You only need to ask once and it will keep getting refilled as long as your arse is parked in that booth. This amazing social technology has not reached my homeland, as far as I know.

So imagine my delight when we upped and moved from New Haven to Middletown, only to discover that Athenian II is right here in Our Town. (I had dined at Athenian III in Milford a few times, on Christmas shopping excursions to the mall in years gone by, without ever knowing where II was.) Now I’m sure that others will disagree with me on this, and so be it: New Haven has The Pantry, Middletown has O’Rourke’s, up the road is the excellent Cromwell Diner, but to me the best diner in central Connecticut is Athenian. Because it’s my local, because the staff are so friendly, and because of the chrome and pink neon.

The day that I took the photo of the dessert bar I was flying solo, ordering my favourite (a Greek salad, coffee), and reading a book. It was a little hard to concentrate on the words because two old timers were sitting at the counter, one a self-identified Republican, the other a self-identified Democrat. They were jabbing each other (and the Republican guy briefly scored some cheap shots against one of the waitresses who quickly tore him a new one) and I couldn’t help but overhear their conversation, punctuated as it was by long pauses and outlandish proclamations.

“We’re all Americans, we all hate the Taliban.”

“I don’t hate anyone. I don’t bother them, they don’t bother me.”

“You Democrats like the Taliban?”

“Hey, you saying that because I’m a Democrat I’m un-American?”

“This is a blue state, buddy.”

…back and forth, et cetera.

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As we plunge further into crises, of economics, democracy, environment and war, and the future appears less and less about infinite progress, I’m increasingly struck by the ways that we used to imagine the world of today would actually turn out.

View from the Twentieth Century

Take Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, page through some science textbooks from the 1950s, walk the passenger tunnels at Union Station in New Haven (pictured here), circle Eero Saarinen’s Ezra Stiles and Morse Colleges, or Paul Rudolph’s brutalist Art and Architecture building on Yale campus, explore Wesleyan’s CFA complex in Middletown, or stroll past the entrance to this hotel on St. Kilda Road in Melbourne.

We used to project where we were headed with Modernity in the way we built the city environment. There’s a dream of a better future, on a different scale, that seeps in as you spend time with these objects, images and places. There is a sense of optimism and the hope of a more cooperative sociality. I’m not sure that we do this anymore.

Entering the station building

A different future

In these ways we used to be more modern. In other ways, it was always a dream, an aspiration that was never achieved. Was it supposed to be? Maybe not. Looking ahead one thing seems certain: the Twentieth Century’s imaginings of Tomorrow will never come to pass, and the future is going to turn out to be a lot different than anyone predicted.

On the other hand, I don’t know from architecture. Never studied it. Of course, when has such a limitation ever prevented me from expressing a strong opinion? Perhaps you disagree…

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