Elizabeth Farrelly

Sean Godsell is a surprise. I'm expecting a rising rock star of an architect, a Melbourne Bjarke Ingels, with more success than he knows how to use.

Photo © Oli Scarf/Getty Images After the Deluge How have past Olympic cities measured up for reuse, post-Games? Barcelona Now Athens Now Beijing Now Atlanta Now When the Sydney Olympic bid was initiated in 1990, the then director of the New South Wales Department of Planning said that although the former abattoir site in outer Sydney's Homebush neighborhood was indeterminably toxic and miles from, well, anywhere, it was available, easy, and cheap. There was no attempt to locate Sydney's Olympic Park to achieve strategic benefits for the city. This expediency resulted in a site that remains excruciatingly difficult to reuse.

'You once wrote that Modernists couldn't do front doors, so I've tried to prove you wrong,' says architect Ian Moore, as he pivots the massive milk-glass front door to admit me from the street.

Now, however, Gaia, the Greek earth goddess, is offering us a chance. Gaia has brought us to the brink of crisis. Climate change, and all of its moving parts—from litter to light bulbs to deforestation—is more than a crisis of survival. It’s a crisis of significance, where we must grasp the essential connectedness of everything and reinvest in our source of meaning, or die. Photos © Alex S. Maclean Cul-de-sac housing under construction in Houston, 1999 (aerial photo, top). Leveling hills for a new housing development, Castro Valley, California, 1997 (aerial photo, above). In the past 40 years—since the baby

The noun want used to mean need. Want was life or death stuff, as in “the baby wants feeding.” Now, want has flipped 180 degrees to imply an arbitrary and even whimsical desire, unfettered by need, significance, or logic. At the same time, and perhaps even because our wanting has become so willful, human beings have grown insatiable. The more we get, it seems, the more we want, as though desire itself is the thing we cannot forgo. As though, even cocooned by layers of brimming superfluity, we must want or perish. Welcome to Blubberland. Photo © Alex S. Maclean