In 1997, I visited America’s First City of Architecture for the first time, to meet my future in-laws before I married their daughter. Visiting Chicago during a warm spring, I felt like Ferris Bueller; in one single day we went to a White Sox game, visited the Art Institute, checked out the modern public art downtown and capped off my own personal Day Off with a nightcap at Buddy Guy’s Southside blues club. I was and continue to be amazed at the rich architectural history in Chicago. Following the 1871 Great Chicago Fire, leading architects from the Midwest flocked to Chicago to rebuild and become the “City that Can”. From Sullivan and Adler’s Auditorium Building (1889) to Sullivan’s Carson Pirie Scott and Co. (1904), the modern Monadnock Building (Burham & Root, 1891), some of America’s greatest buildings were being built as well as a new and unique residential architecture genre that rose from the flat Prairie landscape – the Prairie School, led by Walter Burley Griffin, George Elmslie, Marion Mahony, William Purcell and of course, arguably one of America’s greatest artists, Frank Lloyd Wright. (more…)

A woman switches on a tiny wireless chip that has been surgically implanted behind her ear, which then synchs up with the Web wherever she is in the world. The simple thought of logging on to the Internet triggers the system to turn on and connect to the Web. She could be on a bus or at the beach and from all outward appearances she’s just staring off into space. But she sees a three dimensional artificial world before her that she can manipulate any way she chooses by mere thought alone.

By looking at the trends of today we can begin to develop a image of what the Web of the future will look like. I believe the Web will improve and grow in a way that will dwarf its present existence and will improve and enrich everyone’s lives way beyond what we can imagine today. The Net will become as integrated into everyone’s everyday lives as much as, and even more so, than the television or phone (in developed nations first, then everywhere). Television, communications and the Internet will merge.

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“In this digital age, the custodians of published works are at the center of a global copyright controversy that casts them as villains simply for doing their job: letting people borrow books for free.”

(ZDNet quoted by “Publisher’s Lunch on July 13, 2001)

It is amazing that the traditional archivists of human knowledge – the libraries – failed so spectacularly to ride the tiger of the Internet, that epitome and apex of knowledge creation and distribution. At first, libraries, the inertial repositories of printed matter, were overwhelmed by the rapid pace of technology and by the ephemeral and anarchic content it spawned. They were reduced to providing access to dull card catalogues and unimaginative collections of web links. The more daring added online exhibits and digitized collections. A typical library web site is still comprised of static representations of the library’s physical assets and a few quasi-interactive services.

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