"Home: The Blueprint of Our Lives," introduction by John Edwards, would sound horribly schmaltzy, if designer Michael Bierut hadn't made such beautiful hay out of it-- humanizing the suburbs by, totally counter-intuitively, talking about how modern they are. Like this:
In an expression of wishful thinking not atypical of northern Ohio, every street in our neighborhood was named after a town in Florida: Tamarack, Tamiami, Sarasota. The houses came in two models: ranch and split level. We lived in a split level. The house to our left was a ranch. The house to our right was another split level. It was identical to ours. The house across the street was a split level too, but with the floor plans reversed. Going in that house was always a disorienting, Bizarro World experience. Differentiating each house was its dominant architectural feature: the decorative element on the garage door. We had a star; our neighbors had moons, windows, abstract shapes. Picking this element must have been a moment of truth for the new homeowners, an opportunity to make a "statement," but I don't remember anyone ever ascribing any significance to these insignia. Like the whole neighborhood, they just seemed to appear overnight.
Everyone on our street lived in what would later be called a snout house, that garage-centric building type so reviled today that certain municipalities have outlawed them. My mom didn't care much about urban planning principles; she liked being able to get the groceries from her car to the kitchen without braving the Cleveland winter. It just seemed modern, like the way our dinette area was three steps up from our wood-panelled den, the television fully watchable over the decorative wrought-iron railing. (During breakfast at least: it was off at dinnertime.)
The most basic premise of this blog is that we're writing about places in the non-place of the web; its most basic conceit is that doing that somehow makes the web less of a non-place and more of a place. Because we're human. (After all.) 
