Urban Material.

When I step into an urban center, my attention is immediately and irrevocably on the banalities of that space, on the city itself, the city As A Thing, as a union of its component parts.

I see only the material structure of it: literally, the asphalt, and the rocks and coins and cigarette-butts melted into it. I walk down a street and perceive only the sewer-grates, and the newspapers and flyers and filthy toys washed to them. I walk under a bridge and all I see are the flaking layers of green-gray paint on the steel, the size of the bolt-heads, the oil-slick puddles around the pylons. I walk on a sidewalk and all I think about is the sandy and gum-laced grit of its surface, or the steel on its curb; the connection between it and the street, or between it and the steps to this building or the next. I put my hand on a building and feel only the brick, edges worn from years of fingertips and without purchase. I put my hand on a railing and feel it, cold and immediate, and my mind's eye flashes to the stripped bolts holding it into the concrete abutment, the sonic clang I can produce in it, the physicality of it: length, diameter, weight, shear-points. I sit on a bench and count the slats, measure their concavity, picture the rain forming a puddle in the seat, or the snow a mountain. I push a door open and read it for clues to its construction: the spacing of the hinges, the mass and pivot of the counter balance, or its age as a function of the metal's luster at the press-point. I knock on a wooden shutter and watch as the wood fibers break free, float to the sidewalk, become lost in the dirt; I try to estimate how many more knocks would disintegrate the shutter, or how the fibers might disintegrate into the ground, or if they're swept up in a wind, to tear up a person's eye, or get sucked into an HVAC intake and caught in a filter, eventually thrown out, to decompose geologically in the landfill forty kilometers away, the pine that grew them completing the natural cycle -- birth, growth, life, death, decomposition despite all urbanized efforts to the contrary.

Cities are uniquely human enterprises that express this uniquely human ambivalence: they're created in this grand-form way, impermeable and impervious, the infrastructure that catalyzes the human experiment -- but in that very execution they're abused, destroyed, weathered by not just time but hands, feet, drills, vehicles, massive weight, shifting disposition, markets and money... their composition and component-parts bear the scars of this weathering.

Cities testify a permanence at a macro-scale that's contradicted and contraindicated at the micro-scale; in their Urban Material lies the evidence of man's lofty goals grounded and chiseled and knocked away by the realities of man's commonality and common living. I find that contradiction fascinating. I find that evidence overwhelming.

This is my attempt to document a perception of cities in these terms.