After the new year, I will again be teaching the course I call Place and Power in the City, and one of the things I am thinking about as I start to get ready for it is the way that built environment creates, in the most literal way, “facts on the ground.” That is, whatever …
Category: 2018
November 11, 2018: Seen and Unseen
I’m going to acknowledge up front that my theme this time may be a little bit tenuous. I’m talking broadly about awareness as much as literal sight, but a number of the things I’ve been thinking about do have to do directly with the visual realm. “On the Nose”, by Chris Ip, describes the work …
October 10, 2018: Keeping It Real
Like, I think, most of us, I’ve found the news from the last several weeks…troubling. I thought writing about some things I’ve enjoyed recently might lighten my mood a bit. I don’t have a real theme this time around; there’s no particular connection among these things, so this is more like the recommendations posts as …
May 26, 2018: Plastic Fantastic Ekphrastic
In “We Made Plastic. Now We’re Drowning in It”, Laura Parker’s recent cover story for National Geographic, the fundamental point— we make and throw away a lot of plastic, and this very bad— is not surprising; what she (and the photos, by Randy Olson) does most effectively is convey the scale. Because plastic wasn’t invented …
March 31, 2018: Behind the Scenes
I’ve just finished teaching a new class about cities, and one of the things that the experience made me think about was how the built environment of urban spaces is the outcome of a long process (or series of processes) that is itself basically invisible. That is to say, you can see what the city …