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June 22, 2006
Summer Read
Best new book for the summer reading season, Sense of the City: An Alternative Approach to Urbanism, published by CCA. An excellent collection of writings, photographs, and historical emphemera on the wholly understudied aspects of sensory city. Chapters include: Nocturnal City, Seasonal City, Sound of the City, Surface of the City, and Air of the City. Fantastic historical antedotes abound, such as New York's very own Society of the Suppression of Unnecessary Noise (SSUN), founded in 1906, by Mrs. Isaac Rice. The section I found most particularly interesting was Surface of the City. "A well-paved asphalt road is the greatest missionary of civilization at our disposal to-day" - Pedro Juan Manuel Larranaga 1926.
Surfaces in New York are a fascinating part of how different areas of the city are intuited sensorially. The sleek pitted slabs of granite, peppered with illuminated vault lights, and roughhewn cobblestone streets, all define SoHo's sensorial sophistication. The clanging of New York's ubiquitous steel sidewalk doors, the stickyness of a crosswalk on a hot New York summer day. Imagine the rural appeal of dirt roads in the West Village. Its mesmerizing to think about the variety of ways texture and surface are expressed throughout the city, and how they come to play upon our expectations. Some photographs of surface texture taken around NYC, all of which we feel with our feet.
Posted by jmarston at June 22, 2006 12:00 PM