Tunnel of dust

Here in New York, mostly on the Lower East Side and certain blocks of the West Village, it is in vogue to wear clothing of random sizes and mismatched affect. The idea is that you are funky, although it is actually about nudity—advertising the raw body’s supreme unneed for the compensations of fashion.

At first I called this style “I just found these clothes on the side of the road.” But as I walked down Seventh Avenue late last night, alone, the city thronging and singing, I thought about how there are, indeed, always clothes on the side of the road, and their destiny is not the figure of a rich twenty-five-year-old. In Manhattan, in Brooklyn, on I-95, on highway feeders and scenic routes, on small-town streets and in business parks and cul-de-sac turnarounds: frequent encounters, in public space, with discarded objects made for the human form is an experience unique to our time alive in the universe.

Some will be picked up and used again. Most will go straight to a landfill. Pants and socks, underwear and blouses. Basketball shorts. Crumpled blazers. A child’s T-shirt, slaked with soil.

In my first semester of architecture school I drew a curve. Long and wiggling, ducking in and out of itself. It was a wall. I was happy. 

When I showed it to my teacher she laughed. How did you construct that, she asked. I just drew it, I said. She laughed again. You can’t do that—you can’t just draw a curve. You have to build it from other stuff, circles and arcs and describable geometry. She showed me a project all architecture teachers love, a cheeky primer on how to draw a croissant using tangents, radii, etc. Ignoring the primer, which made my mind and eyes bleed, I tried to explain that I fundamentally didn’t understand why someone, including me, could not simply draw a curve.

She was gracious, a patient and usually careful educator. But decades of swimming in the sweet chlorine of architecture had rotted part of her brain, and she could not respond with precision. It’s not done, she said. Now take your curve and r-r-r-r-rationalize it. No, you may not “just draw” a curve. You just CAN’T!

Five years later, there are curves in a project I am trying to get built, a little park in New York City. I didn’t make the curves, someone else did, and they are rational. And now I know why: it’s cheaper and faster. She could have just said that, but it would have been crass.

Fear of money really slows things down. I would have liked to learn how to draw a cheap curve that could be created with off-the-shelf products or a simple fabrication process. Instead, proudly thinking that I was rejecting an exercise in fetishistic formalism and the tawdry imprint of Europe (see: croissant), I spent the rest of that semester drawing curves that only Lauren Sánchez could afford. Lauren, if you are reading this, my curves are still for sale.