It may seem a bit eccentric to cross the Atlantic by plane merely to take a walk. At least it would have seemed odd to me before and even during a recent excursion to England. But afterward, it also made sense, in a quirky way. On my transoceanic return flight, with plenty of time to reflect on what the previous week meant, I had something of a revelation. It came to me that I had gone to London because I wanted to breathe by stretching my legs; I had wanted to think on foot.

...

“The Pleasures of Merely Circulating,” [audio by Robert Pinsky, or the Bo Diddley / Sid Vicious version] one of Wallace Stevens’s faux–nursery rhyme poems, begins with the sound of a round:

The garden flew round with the angel,
The angel flew round with the clouds,
And the clouds flew round and the clouds flew round
And the clouds flew round with the clouds.

What sounds like sheer tedium, in rhythm, rhymes, and repeated words, Stevens calls “pleasures.” As I remarked at the start of this essay, pedestrian life gives access to greater-than-pedestrian experiences. The ordinariness of the daily round opens us to discoveries of self and of world. The garden moves with the angel, the angel with the clouds, and finally the clouds dissolve into one another. Stevens has begun what looks like a list, something linear, which then turns in upon itself, undoing our expectation of something greater. From garden to angels to clouds: we are waiting for something else to follow “clouds,” but it’s clouds all the way in a gentle, nebulous intensity. They are like us. Always on the move, always flying “round” like the clouds, we are never lost because we are going nowhere.

I'm reminded of Louis Kahn:

In his plan for midtown Philadelphia he attempted to press the forms of Piranesi's Rome of 1762 into the service of the modern city. In this, expressways were thought as "rivers" and the traffic-light controlled streets as "canals." Kahn was conscious of the profound antipathy between the automobile and the city and of the fatal link between consumerism, the suburban shopping center and the decline of the urban core. He proposed a "dock" solution (1956) comprising a 6-story cylindrical silo housing 1,500 cars and surrounded on its perimeter by 18-story blocks that was deprived of elements at a human scale.

Toward A Plan for Midtown Philadelphia

Architecture is also the street. There is no order to the movement on streets. Streets look alike, reflecting little of the activities they serve -- Carcasson... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]