The Optimism Of Squares

They built the future out of rectangles and believed it. Glass, steel, a kidney-shaped pool no one swam in. The brochure promised a kitchen that would think for you, and for a while the kitchen tried. Color was a kind of confidence then, applied in flat panels, as if the world could be assembled from a catalog and would hold. It mostly held. The atom was going to be friendly. The car had fins because the car was going somewhere. None of it was true and all of it was beautiful, which may be the only honest definition of a design.