Select All Squares: When the Machine Asked Me to Prove I Was Human

A box reading “I am not a robot” stops an architect on an ordinary morning, because he has spent his life trying not to live inside a box. As the machine asks him to select the squares containing buildings, he sees more in each image than it does: a glass façade that may be no architecture at all, a distant dome holding Baghdad, Damascus, Cairo, Córdoba and Istanbul, a window as architecture's confession that people need light, a bridge as a decision not to let the river have the last word. He fails the test, and the failure opens into a portrait of Brooklyn Heights, its brownstone steps and the Brooklyn Bridge at sunset like a prayer made of steel, and of the Damascus he carried to New York in the way he looks at light and stone. He speaks of the institute he founded to teach the children of New York to read Islamic art, the arabesque and Arabic calligraphy as a complete language, treating heritage as a future still unfinished. When the machine finally asks him to select every square containing humanity, he selects them all, the empty white square included, because architecture taught him that emptiness is never empty.