One mindset on this is "these people are crazy." My own mindset is "why don't Americans do things like this any more?" A different way of looking at the world, I suppose.

I have several books by Syd Mead with pictures of the future I used to gaze at when I was younger. I always assumed that this was the future of Western Civilization, but of course, there are no guarantees in history.

The WTC is still, for all intents and purposes, a hole in the ground after a period of time exceeding the original construction time. If someone proposed a Golden Gate Bridge, Hoover Dam, or interstate highway system today, it would die on the Powerpoint slides under heaps of litigation and regulations. Apparently we no longer build "wonders of the world" here.

Syd Mead's more recent works are paintings of Qatar.

So it goes.