Giving Space, Sculpting Time
<p>It’s no secret that living in New York or any other large city often gives rise to a powerful sense of temporal dislocation. It comes with the territory of rapid change that has long defined modernity. Charles Baudelaire put his finger on it long ago in a celebrated poem called “The Swan”:</p> <blockquote><p>The Old Paris is no more (the form of a city<br /> changes faster, Alas! than a mortal’s heart)</p></blockquote> <p>What is interesting in these lines, however, is not the sense of nostalgia and loss they at first seem to affirm, though I’m old enough today to know this feeling firsthand. Rather, it’s that Baudelaire doesn’t speak of Paris’s “soul” or “spirit,” a common idiom in the nineteenth-century, nor of its “identity.” Clearly thinking of Baron Haussmann’s boulevards and the large-scale urbanism they announced, he speaks of the “form of a city,” a slightly awkward and highly specific phrase, that is, about the changing profile of the city’s streetscape and built environment…</p>
Authors: Saul Anton
Artists: Guillaume Leblon
Part of: TextWork
ISSN: 27269949