Suburbia

By Isaac • Jun 9 2025 • 5 min read

As I sit here in Bonhoeffer's Cafe in Nashua, New Hampshire, writing this, life has settled back to its usual rhythm - but something feels different as if the return to the comforts and normalcy of the US has come at the cost of something deeper that has disallowed me ever to be the same. The coffee tastes the same in blandness, the food is just as artificial, the hum of conversation is familiar, and the people rush in and out to get to their jobs as always. But I have completely changed.

Since returning from Italy, I have felt a dissonance cutting through the ordinary. Everything is wide and predictable, and the idea of suburbia echoes in all of the buildings. When I go to restaurants, everything is about turnover, and sometimes, the restaurant is laid out not to have to deal with you anymore after you pick up food. Starting to drive again has been weird, and when walking, I rarely have acknowledged anyone like I did when I did in I was in Italy. And most strikingly, there have been no piazzas to talk to anyone and no public social life. If I were a tourist in the US, there would have been no interaction with locals like I was able to experience in the middle of Italian towns.

I knew Italy was different. In fact, Professor Felluga told us about some preliminary differences, such as eating habits, table manners, and more, but I didn't anticipate how much they would change me. The differences were drastic but subtle - I didn't realize I was used to them until afterward. In my introduction blog, I mentioned how I was eager to dive into Italy's food culture, and while it did not hit me at first, eventually, I realized how much I had changed.

At first, the longer meal just felt slow. I was constantly checking my phone, falling asleep due to jetlag, and just staring at the people around me while trying to muster the energy to converse. But somewhere in the middle of my meal with my favorite Italian family, I had changed. My presence had completely shifted, and I was completely immersed within. Our conversations started flowing and unfolding with no interruptions. No one cared about the time. In fact, I never even thought to check until it was time to go.

Me and my Italian Family

When I came back, however, the contrast was jarring. I was handed the check quickly. I finished lunch in under ten minutes, so I didn't work past my work break. My friends and I didn't have many genuine conversations without being completely intentional about it. It wasn't just a different eating culture - it was a completely different philosophy of living that I had absorbed without realizing.

But it wasn't just the food - it was also my surroundings. I had to come back to the cookie-cutter housing, the overturning of old areas into new developments, and the sterile uniformity and assimilation that seem to define the American environment. In Italy, every single alley and street told me a story. Every ceiling fresco, bridge, and crack in the wall had a story - a complete collaboration between time, culture, and craft. It wasn't just history preserved, which is already not very incorporated in the US; it was history lived in. As Alain de Botton writes, "There was only one way to possess beauty properly, and that was by understanding it, by making oneself conscious of the factors (psychological and visual) responsible for it" (216). Italy demanded that type of attention from me. The beauty wasn't just passive or ornamental - it required full and complete presence. By walking methodically, listening carefully, and asking questions, I began to understand how the space around me was to be understood. I wasn't there to point and look and laugh. I was studying abroad to be with the space and allow it to shape my emotions and thoughts. And in that engagement, forces were changing my values with place and time.

These observations helped me realize how the idea of space has fundamentally changed. As Michel Foucault states, "the site has been substituted for an extension which itself had replaced emplacement." (23). This shift likely explains why so many American spaces feel so detached. Auburn neighborhoods are designed as grids and not communities. Goods and services are optimized for flow and efficiency. There is perhaps no space at all for relationships. Public spaces are built for transactions. There is no emplacement, no rooting in memory or experience. There is no extension either - no symbolic or representational mapping. Instead, we weave through systems of proximity without ever truly arriving, and something deeply human was lost.

I was deeply contrasted to this American experience in Italy. In my first blog post, I wrote about waiting to understand how invention is shaped by context, for example, how Leonardo Da Vinci's genius didn't emerge in a vacuum. In class, I learned that Venice, especially, was a place of religious refuge and intellectual exchange in his time to create and trigger the Renaissance, as well as the Medici family in Florence, which funded students such as Michelangelo, allowing them to develop without religious dominance. I got to live it out and witness it fully. I walked the same streets, dwelt in the same buildings, and stood in the same plazas to grasp the space, cultural momentum, and historical timing that emerged to shape innovation. One example that stood out to me the most was in Venice, where the evolutions of clocks can be seen easily. Seeing 24-hour Copernican clocks in Palazzo Doge and Piazza San Marco revealed not just technological advancement but also how people understood time, space, and their role in the universe. The clocks were expressions of power and politics in the city, showing a place where the worldview changed from a system under divine mystery to one that viewed humans in a rational, ordered system. In my time in Italy, I really began to understand how time shaped invention, but also how time changed history. I grew away from thinking about engineering, but I saw that people and their surroundings shape cultural responses.

La Torre Dell' Orologio sits facing the ocean in Piazza San Marco

I have changed as an engineer because of this. I no longer design something that works efficiently, but I can also ask what kind of human experience it creates. My ideas of creativity have changed, and I can understand the process as deeply embedded in my roots. Even my relationship with the places around me has changed. I see myself wanting to preserve and understand the American history that I have been rooted in and be more a part of that culture. As an Asian American, I also want to innovate and express my Chinese heritage.

I have also developed a new appreciation for what it means to live in the postmodern age. I considered postmodern as an irrelevant term to me before the trip, especially as an Engineer. But now I understand that we as a society are in the middle of a huge change, one where narratives are breaking down, and certainty is no longer the default. Everything is now being questioned, and progress itself is being reinterpreted. I got to see this firsthand. In spaces like the Polish Pavilion, I got to experience a world with no singular narrative. In Piazza Gae Aulenti, I saw architecture embodying the postmodern condition of sites and interfaces.

The Spire Reigning Over the City

The trip has completely transformed me and how I view the world around me - its rhythms, its culture, and its assumptions. I've learned that invention is never neutral. I've learned the power of controlling and creating meaning with time. I've learned that not everyone is like Americans. I want to be more intentional now than I have ever wanted to be - to understand the world around me. Italy hasn't just changed how I think. It has changed how I want to live.

Signing Off from the most Beautiful Place in the World