alienation

 

When we were kids, we used to stack stones on top of each other and dare gravity to intervene. The goal was simple: build the tallest tower, keep it standing, and don’t be the one who knocks it down first. Whoever made it collapse early lost.

When cities grow upward, it’s often presented as progress: efficiency, modernity, a smart answer to limited land. But there is a moment when vertical living stops being a solution and becomes a kind of pressure. In the silhouettes of towers, there is a strange heaviness, like solid shadows swallowing the horizon. The sky becomes a blank space above them, not a promise, but an absence. And somewhere inside those stacked floors, people try to compress their lives into clean, measured rectangles; fifty or a hundred square meters, suspended in the air.

Technology moves alongside this growth, speeding everything up: construction becomes faster, materials become better, buildings become smarter. Yet the direction of that intelligence often feels narrow. It doesn’t ask what kind of life the human body actually needs such as sunlight that reaches the skin, ground that can be touched, seasons that can be felt, a pace that allows breathing. It asks what can be sold, what can be optimized, what can be repeated.

Maybe the deepest loss isn’t even architectural. It’s relational. As we move further from the soil, from production, from the sources of what we consume, we also move further from ourselves. We become residents of a system rather than makers of a life. We stop recognizing how food grows, how things are built, how time passes without screens. The city keeps stacking spaces higher and higher, while the ground becomes something we only step on to leave again. And somewhere between the childhood thrill of stacking stones and the adult reality of living in stacked concrete, there is a question that doesn’t go away: are we still building places for humans, or only structures that serve growth?