Trask Avenue

We breathe life into buildings so they can serve us. They rise among a flurry of spellbinding expectations, speculations of glory. Their unveilings are accompanied with excessive self-congratulatory celebration by their creators. Speeches are given, ribbons cut. For a brief, glorious period new buildings are treated reverently and tenderly, like a baby. We “oooo” and “ahhh”, say all the right things, and fawn with appreciation. Yet the tides continue to ebb and flow, the sun continues to rise and set until one day our attention is diverted elsewhere. Once that happens, once buildings evolve to full maturity and we turn in another direction, a shameful journey to oblivion begins.

Buildings march through the years holding our secrets and protecting our lies. (Indeed, if these walls could talk!) We eat, sleep, work, entertain and love within their comforting embrace. They bear witness to our most glorious moments and our darkest realities. After a time someone determines their usefulness has diminished. Then they are relentlessly slashed, gutted and reconfigured without mercy. All the while they accept this fate willingly, appearing to subserviently cater to our selfish whims, aiding and abetting our egocentric purposes without complaint. Finally, when we’ve squeezed out all we can, when our desires are fully sated, we toss them aside for a new vision to satisfy the same basic need. We ignore their long-standing role as steady confidant and carelessly abandon them like one would an old newspaper.

You see, we don’t understand their power. With their private sanctuaries buildings offer an illusion of escape – escape from other people, escape from Mother Nature’s wrath, escape from the societal pressure to conform. They offer this illusion while tethering us like a pet. We consider ourselves their masters, yet they effortlessly seduce us with aesthetic pleasures. We work hard to tend to their physical needs, but never at their behest. We restlessly sit in their bedrooms and offices gazing out their windows dreaming of a different and better existence. However, lurking in the shadows of all those dreams another building calmly waits.

Naturally, when the opportunity comes to break free we do so gleefully, desperate to leave behind what we no longer perceive as necessary, despite all the contradictory evidence. The exhilaration brought about by this change fades quickly. Inevitably, somewhere down the line, we will once again find ourselves in another bedroom, another office, dreaming of another great escape. And once again we will remain blind to the beauty which quietly holds us.

We breathe life into buildings so they can serve us, but in truth it’s the other way around.