Last year I was alerted to a book entitled Constant’s New Babylon: the Hyper-Architecture of Desire edited by Mark Wigley, 1998. I have recently returned to the notes I made from it when mulling over apathy of life and the reasons for this. Constant Nieuwenhuis argued that today we no longer seek to see the world differently; in our cyborg age we move mechanically through life, “radicality, conviction and audacity are rare”. He developed a new architectural model 1959-1974, deconstructing city maps to re-articulate space according to its ‘liveliness’. Constant refused the label of utopia, for him this plan had to be a plausible reality or the project was futile. The ideal was for new man, better society, social space and a new way of living in a community, in a society. He said, “Art is one of the best means of access to an authentic relation with reality. Unlike science or ethics, art does not establish what reality must be, but what it could be.” Perhaps Constant’s Babylon was the precursor to Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics, an art form that exists to bring people together into communication and discussion. Our notion of place, home, origin and context has shifted somewhat since Constant’s designs into a fluctuating, multi-layered reality within an explosively technological age. Perhaps, ironically enough, we do need something of the Constant to save ourselves from schizophrenia!