(Baguio City) Everyone's talking mid-century modern again these days, even at the furniture section of Target: sleek, functional; spindle-legged chairs, slim-profiled tables. Our friends in the suburbs love their bright yellow Eames chair (not a copy). We talk about you, Daniel: Chicago architect sent to the country where I grew up— in the early 1900s, long before the Prairie style of cantilevered roofs and low-spread houses, long before you saw the high vaulted ceilings of Chicago's Union Station completed, because of your untimely death. There's a park named after you in those hills. Your plan was for a swath of green to cut through the middle: one side for commercial and the other for residential spaces. The aggregate of lines on blueprints was meant to resemble the layout of your great cities in the west: wide, curved boulevards tracing the edge of river or bay, streets in a grid whose numbers progressed upward from zero, as if before them there was nothing. But there was something before nothing: we were already there, Daniel, before the straight edge and the drafting pen began to push our citrus groves and pine forests to the margins, before our unruly excess threatened the new economies shown by your gods in your dreams .
Purveyors of fine poetry since 2003.