Modern apartment buildings, too, lift us away from the world. But unlike music across rooftops, their verticalness mostly serves to confine. An apartment building atomizes its residents; converting a collective of people into units, each one ensconced safely away, behind precise lines and sharp corners, cushioned from unpredictable people and untamable earth. Modern life seeks to atomize us across every vector, and here I find myself wondering how I will find ways to live in an apartment in a way that feels organic: weird, serendipitous, enmeshed with others, with a sense of time and history. I’m wondering what it means to construct meaningful relational rhythms in a world that is increasingly architected to prevent them.