We can't always be at the Spanish Stairs
A letter after a loop by the sea.
I have a dusty memory from a book or a professor that architecture was primarily a conversation between the ground and the sky. I'll have to look up the reference to share. I left architecting a long time ago and forgot many of the trappings of the profession, but this one has always persisted.
Back then the column was the connection, ground to sky, fluting in the end. The cathedral reached to the sky almost so much that the ground was lost in all that light. The strip mall sadly forgot the sky was up there at all. The skyscraper remembered, and used it to store money.
We leave behind all these shells like anxious coral never happy where we land. We build and move on and forget. The shapes that we make are little memories, recordings, marks of our movements and some are clearly more beautiful than others.
In between these forms we walk, and I think, professor, that those were always the conversations that mattered. Our forms moving over the earth and beneath the sky were the words that we tried to capture in materials. Have you watched a dancer move across a stage? Have you seen a one-touch strike from a real striker that happens almost before the thought can be made to strike? You ever see a man glide through a casino? What about the body that stops the taxi? Hey, I'm walking here! There is Uncle with a bent back watching the sunset and the woman smoking a cigarette on heels ignoring him.
All of us little coral floating through the sea having a chat between gravity and the stars. I will tell you professor, it is a lot to think about. We probably skipped over most of this on the way to practicalities and other details. As you know, there are still stairs in the world that take the lead and push the small of your back, dancing you past fountains. But those are in Italy, and we can't always be there. So, try this instead: walk as if your body is a conversation between the ground and the space above. It changes the way you get from point A to point B. Try not to trip.