Raise the Hammer

Hello Jason,

Thank you!

I think in most instances, humans mimic the environment they finds themselves in.

There in lay Bill Stirckland's simple belief and his monumental success!!

Hamilton stopped being a learning city after successive fatal blows were struck at its architecture over the last fifty odd years (as highlighted in the downtown image above).

Loosing so much of a city's memory is bound to take a significant toll on its people. Loss of historical associations is in many ways worse than the loss of a local economy. It makes people regress, it takes their pride away. Often it replaces it with false pride and parochialism - resulting in our small-mindedness and even smaller turf wars - which have no big picture in sight.

The big pictures that existed was decimated. Who are we? Is the question people ask, when left on a blank - flat surface. Not finding an answer, they loose patience.

Even when the economic cycle turns around, human behavior rarely does. What is lost with the mindless destruction of memories is peoples ability to 'care' - and from that grows loss of curiosity, and the loss of ability to learn - from and of the past.

That is how we are - where we are on most days in Hamilton.

The failure of our educational institutions to recognize this is missed on most.

Their failure to engage with the city is not.

We have become a non-learning city in spite of the strong presence of our university and college.

From structural sciences to moral sciences to medical sciences - ten thousand years of technical authority based on research and knowledge could have been easily deployed by both - to put up a formidable challenge to prevent the destruction of our collective memory in the core. But in spite of both bragging world fame in engineering and the sciences and innovation - not one challenged the madness that allowed our city to become a non-learning city.

It is this kind of carelessness that casts the mould for our environment in Hamilton - in which successive generations have been formed to not care - not give a damn!

Edited by Architecture for Humanity, Design Like You Give a Damn is a compendium of innovative projects from around the world that demonstrate the power of design to improve lives. - It is also a call to action to anyone committed to building a better world.

This magnificent book shows us ways of thinking and getting inspired to reconnect with our broken memories - from which we may find ways of seeing, and doing that we have forgotten.

-- Hamilton schools should make this book a mandatory read, if we want to break the cycle of not giving a damn about our environment that feeds us our thoughts - which feeds our environment.

Cheers,

Mahesh