The ground of the city, the thin concrete crust that is squeaking and rumbling underfoot is an outdoor floor. It strains to heal over a bulging molten mess of essential and abandoned pipes and wires buried in dirt that is probably not actual dirt anymore.
The ground stores the city’s software in a kind of braille—the tactile heavy information of modulating surfaces that are constantly contacting the body. These surfaces together with a blast to other senses follow the rhythms of a grid. But ironically the white Enlightenment insanity that created such a frequency of individual properties in New York City chops the Cartesian order into a finer dice and returns it to a chaotic state. What might appear to be a grid from above, takes on the disposition of a mixing chamber when closer to the surface. In the end, the lexical messages coming from these surfaces are much less important than their underlying temperament or disposition which must be read using another language.
The crust is brittle because of what it tries to continuously seal off from below but also because it is the difficult joint between the outdoor property of the city and indoor properties of individuals. Like a mouth, it is inside and outside. It’s where tempers surface, punches land, fluids are exchanged, and glass is broken.