We talk about architecture, cities, and stories behind high-end brands in a brand-new way.
Welcome to Zenith Massif. I’m Lu. You can think of us as your concierge for new perspectives—the stories and adventures hidden in plain sight, and the kind of unrefined taste that doubles as an investment.
Something most people don't know about the human eye: the retina is installed backwards.
The photoreceptors — the cells that actually detect light — face the back of the eye rather than the front. Light entering the eye has to pass through several layers of neurons and capillaries before reaching them, traveling in the wrong direction through the mechanism it's meant to activate. Scientific American has described the arrangement as equivalent to putting a microphone in backwards and using the wired end to capture sound. The octopus and the squid solved this 400 million years ago; their photoreceptors face the light directly. Vertebrate eyes — ours — did not solve it. An engineer who submitted this design would be sent back to revise it.
3 Aug 2026
The good glasses: A Statement You Wear on Your Face
Something most people don't know about the human eye: the retina is installed backwards.
The photoreceptors — the cells that actually detect light — face the back of the eye rather than the front. Light entering the eye has to pass through several layers of neurons and capillaries before reaching them, traveling in the wrong direction through the mechanism it's meant to activate. Scientific American has described the arrangement as equivalent to putting a microphone in backwards and using the wired end to capture sound. The octopus and the squid solved this 400 million years ago; their photoreceptors face the light directly. Vertebrate eyes — ours — did not solve it. An engineer who submitted this design would be sent back to revise it.
29 Jul 2026
GEHRY & ZAHA: TITANS OF CURVES
Last December, Frank Gehry died at home in Santa Monica, ninety-six.
When I saw the news, I sat with it for a moment, then opened my laptop and looked for a long time at one photograph — Gehry standing in front of the Guggenheim Bilbao in 1997, just finished, the building behind him like a docked spacecraft, the titanium flashing silver in the sun. He looked like a man who had just completed something very difficult and discovered it was entirely worth it.
I was his student first, and later worked in his office. He said something I've kept ever since: always do it for humanity.
This one is about two people. Frank Gehry and Zaha Hadid. The two most alike figures of the same era. A Canadian Jew who grew up in Los Angeles and found the soul of architecture in a crumpled piece of cardboard, and an Iraqi woman who grew up in Baghdad and drew, with a brush, spaces no one believed could be built. Their careers crossed in the same decades, in a mutual respect that never once tipped into imitation.
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