City

Differ materially
Calculate accordingly
Experience particulars

The subject is an observer and an object is a thing observed within a relational field. Given that object manifestations are in constant fluctuation, identification and classification requires conceptual interpretation. Thus, the essential nature of objects can never be directly experienced but only inferred in light of current context.

“The more clearly you understand yourself and your emotions, the more you become a lover of what is.” – Baruch Spinoza

Stir emotions
Penetrate into
Possible futures

An urban space evolves just outside the hotel window, as night falls on New Orleans in a symphony of dancing lights. Moving through time, any large city formation involves some indelible spatial investments.

“The strength of this theory lies in its satisfactoriness.” – K.W. Wild

Requisite physical system
Organizational facility
Enterprise operation

Much of the developed world is formed around ossified infrastructure. It is expensive to maintain and improve extensive existing infrastructure. The city creates its own inertia, as infrastructure generates more infrastructures that are similar. What currently subsists limits adaptability to progress.

“Cities are more than the sum of their infrastructure. They transcend brick and mortar, concrete and steel. They’re the vessels into which human knowledge is poured.” – Rick Yancey

Beyond this fragmentation
Individual interaction
Mediations and rectifications

A large reflective architectural structure in the city helps us to grasp recursive qualitative distinctions. The search for causes in a complex circumstance always has a reaction on the task of description.

“Above all we must recognize the fact that new experience says no to old experience, otherwise we are quite evidently not up against a new experience at all.” – Gaston Bachelard

Object appearance
Nature of depiction
Abstract nominalism

The human disposition inclined to assemble objects or ideas into categories is exacerbated in the manufactured urban environment. Ambulating around the city offers awareness into the fundamental structure of reality, at least in terms of universals and particulars as appearance modalities.

“The myth of physical objects is epistemologically superior to most in that it has proved more efficacious than other myths as a device for working a manageable structure into the flux of experience.” – Willard Van Orman Quine

Static movement
Elegance of form
Balanced equilibrium

In sensuous immediacy, elegant relationships are an irreducible characteristic of appearances, significant in their aesthetic surface. When found, graceful movement warrants celebration in its disclosure.

“Your attention is so sacred that if you truly look for beauty and grace, you will find it in everything.” – Kamand Kojouri

Fresh leaves
Dappled shadows
Urban ebullience

Seasonal oscillation adds pulchritudinous variety to the urban scene. Spring’s arrival stimulates a mental attitude reflecting general optimism and a positive forecast.

“Spring work is going on with joyful enthusiasm.” – John Muir

Combined experience
Interesting angles
Metropolitan detail

The city is full of angular juxtapositions, each with their own curiosity. And curiosity migrates on a protracted walkabout.

“You take delight not in a city’s seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours.” – Italo Calvino

Immediate knowledge
Organized complexity
Visual order

The backside of a sidewalk sign blends into the multifaceted urban geometric appearance presented by the morning sunshine.

“Organic change involves both growth and decline, while planned change is more asymmetric, frequently embodying growth but rarely dealing with decline.” – Michael Batty

Near horizon
Anticipated response
Transient’s pause

Stark and imposing, the city looms as a mechanistic organism in the late afternoon sun. For humans, organization is more important than the indefinite entities that coalesce into matter.

“All cities are mad: but the madness is gallant. All cities are beautiful, but the beauty is grim.” – Christopher Morley