Where Will You Walk?

This entry is for all of you who attended graduate school.

All those dollars, all those hours slaving away on some arbitrary project ultimately to be judged by some random person who, mostly by your own admission, holds intellectual prowess over you and your ideas. I will never forget a professor telling me he could 'teach me how to think'. Really? Wouldn't I love to finally learn how to think after all these years! Thanks for the generosity and the patronization. Academia is often a bizarre place. And then you graduate to find the world outside those walls doesn't much care what you produced late some Saturday night during winter vacation based on an obscure theory devised by a Marxist Frenchmen in the 1960's on the streets of Paris(RIP Henri Lefebvre, hearts to you). I did spend a semester studying architecture in Tokyo in what was a decent educational experience. During that time I worked on a little project serially documenting the crosswalks of Tokyo as occupiable ground plane delineated by simple paint. The project didn't garner much interest in the classroom, but I had a great time doing it, trying to represent an often overlooked, albeit undeniably vibrant, urban space.





















































































































































































Here I am, 3 years later, spending countless hours a day staring at CAD drawings of the crosswalks of Harlem. It may be the first time in my professional life where my graduate experience is influencing and even animating my work. In many ways the crosswalks in my Harlem project seem more complex and beautiful than those of Tokyo because of the overhead transit infrastructure. However, they don't have the sheer volume of people creating a mini-city every 12 minutes for 40-seconds.

This has led me to a curiosity of the greater Manhattan crosswalks and an evening spent with a landscape architect's best friend - Google Earth - in search of the coolest crosswalks in Manhattan. My search came up completely empty. Even Times Square isn't all that intriguing. But what is cool about the crosswalks of New York is both their regularity and relentlessness. They comprise a shockingly large percentage of the public urban landscape. I could expand this study by finding a total square footage of crosswalks in Manhattan. That would be fascinating............Maybe another day!

For now, I pieced together an image of Park Avenue from it's southern terminus at Union Square to where it more or less ends on the ground at East 97th - 83 blocks of crosswalks. Blogger won't let me post the entire image since it's 400 inches long. Here they are tiled side by side, progressively from north to south: