My morning walks to work are a lot less stimulating these days, now that I don’t crest the whole of Capitol Hill to get there; it’s a shorter jaunt, but much more sedate, given the neighborhood. I see the same things over and over, with barely a soul around, save for the constant mill of nannies and maintenance workers, tending to the properties of the rich while they go for a run or shuffle through their remaining retirement years. I see the same things over and over, so I notice the passing of time more acutely, when banal scenes suddenly push against the pane of my consciousness by some activation or another, and I press their imprints to memory.
It’s good training of the eye. A kind of fusion with the familiar. “One might imagine individuals would strive for freedom…but more often they do the opposite — individuals long for fusion, long to be possessed.” Merging with the landscape; “the questioning lonely I” [or eye] “dissolves into the we.”
“I see architecture not as a form that contains space, but as an experience, a passage,” writes Maya Lin. “The difference one feels walking into a room painted red, or a room that is painted yellow or blue, fascinates me.”
If architecture is path, light, and asymmetry, as she insists, then taking photos is a form of placemaking. The spaces we pass through are here and gone in an instant, but in that instant, they can become for ever.