Walk through a built environment by any route. Count how many steps it takes to
clear each building along the route. You may count your own steps or someone
else's steps. Either way, start counting steps when your body aligns with the
closest edge of the building and end off counting as your first extremity
clears the building's furthest edge. Each building will be a line of text and
the number of steps to cross its mass will be the number of syllables in that
line. The text, be it poetic or prosaic or a mixture of both, must describe the
building and its immediate surroundings. Include moving elements in the text
including yourself as you take the steps.
The process of describing a place will, in this way, be filtered through its
own mass and presence, producing a text with a size a shape to match, a
rhythmic and structural forms will show through.
V1: counting my steps:
Route: From Pizza Fresca to the edge of the bank, going east
Eight buildings
Step count: 5, 6, 5, 11, 11, 18, 18, 25
So:
One Block, At Pace
White stained façade
A restaurant, two more
Salt crunches beside
Others: all-black backpack, puff jacket shopping
Trying to remember the steps taken past
Five, six, five, five; no; stop, five, six, five, eleven, eleven, no, five, six
Petering off into the distance at the parking lot where there's a break
Pale blue fencing cordons off a construction site behind where there once was a bar-hotel-bar grouping
V2: another person's pace
Scope: from the new res to the main intersection
Four buildings
Steps: 7, 10, 11, 22
So:
Half-Block, Another Pace
The computer shop: open
It's still open but no one is browsing
The figure past two eating in the window
The streetcar approaches as announced by the two green lights beside the route number placard
