I was sitting in the Oakland Airport a couple of months ago, in a Chili's, when something struck me.
This Chili's had a wall of Southwestern-style window shutters along its back flank, which were completely unnecessary. The windows had no function other than to create a certain sense of place. The shutters were once invented for a specific purpose, to move up and down to block light, whereas now they were simply recreated and placed flush up against a solid steel wall, to elicit a certain feeling. Kind of odd, but not unaccounted for.
All around us are these curious recreations of the past, these themed façades erected to evoke a certain feeling, a mining for positive emotions or associations, which becomes all the more necessary as the hyper-modern and the industrial are all but stripped of feeling and warmth.
