BUILDINGS AND STRUCTURES
I live and work in a small city on the plains, efficiently organized by its loops and arterials. The intended result is homogenous zones of public and private. Nothing touches anything else, like the compartmentalized food on a plastic cafeteria lunch plate. Downtown opens for business each morning and closes down at night. Black people live north, white people live south.
There is energy here, in the Midwestern can-do mode. Like every place, it is perpetually becoming, in a constant process of self-erasure and reinvention. But most interesting to me are the fraying margins, where boosterism gives way to nighttime melancholy and defeat.
It’s the weedy lot that resists development; the brick-fronted Quonset hut that refuses to give way. It’s where the old economy of machine shops and fabricators continues to produce a trickle of goods in the sea of big retail and providers of service. Or where vigorous, resourceful immigrant operators run a few months of tamale-making before going on to something better.
Here we are reminded that all things are not possible, that redemption and renewal are not guaranteed. Failure and ruin tug at us insistently, impeding the forward march of the city.
