Urban Metropolis

            To drive through the open rolling countryside of cement and brick at seven forty five in the morning and suddenly be caught in half-mile-long lines of commuters waiting to get through the traffic-lighted intersections is a puzzling experience. But lift your gaze to the horizon; then you realize that those distant shoeboxes (Clay) are commuter destinations. On the streets you are alone. The forests of buildings reaching for the sun like the redwoods of northern California. This is the wilderness of all wildernesses. So primitive. So unforgiving. Remember to breath and you will be fine. But do not underestimate the willingness of the man that walks beside you. We are all urbanists caught up in the stimulating mixture of art and culture. The urban condition is everywhere and none of us are immune from the physical and cultural influences of the city.
             Urban life has become a product we consume as much as latest offering from Sony Pictures, Abercrombie & Fitch or American Eagle. We consume the city. In The Architecture of the City, one can say that the city itself is "the collective memory of its people" (79), and like memory it is associated with objects and places. The city is the "locus of the collective memory" (79). This relationship between the locus and the people then becomes the city's predominant image, both of architecture and of landscape, and as certain artifacts become part of its memory, new ones emerge. "Int this entirely positive sense great ideas flow through the history of the city and give shape to it" (80).
             California Spanish-tile-covered postmodern buildings. Pink bronze reflective glass. Unintended intimacies: town houses built right up next to the elevated freeway. A simply enticing office castle with an enormous archway cut right through the middle of it; eight stories, count them, eight stories high covered in blue reflective glass. The Marriott. Unfinished cement walls.