Imagine growing up in a place where every stage of your life was framed by the best architecture of its day. You start out in an experimental elementary school, learning on a multi-level landscape of open-plan terraces connected by slides, before moving to a junior school where little towers of classrooms are linked by brightly coloured sloping tunnels. You spend your high school years in a heroic piece of brutalism, attend university in a sleek glass temple and go to church in a space-age tipi.
Your libraries, banks and even the local discount store are all the work of notable architects, and if your house is ever set ablaze, firefighters will come from a famous fire station, designed by a Pritzker prize winner. If you end up in jail, rest assured you will be incarcerated in a work of high postmodernism. And you may even die in a Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired hospital, then have your ashes scattered in the shadow of an Eero Saarinen-designed chapel.
