Urban life has become a product we consume as much as latest offering from Sony Pictures, Abercrombie & Fitch or American Eagle. We consume the city. In The Architecture of the City, one can say that the city itself is “the collective memory of its people” (79), and like memory it is associated with objects and places. The city is the “locus of the collective memory”

Nearly ten miles past any signs of inhabitation, you unexpectedly come across an exit for 339th Avenue. A standard green interstate sign indicating a narrow, paved, right-of-way that quickly recedes to the horizon and vanishes marks the exit. It is an arrogant claim on the outskirts of this metropolis, staked out in defiance of all probability, waiting for the inevitable expansion of the city to catch up.

(79). This relationship between the locus and the people then becomes the city's predominant image, both of architecture and of landscape, and as certain artifacts become part of its memory, new ones emerge. “Int this entirely positive sense great ideas flow through the history of the city and give shape to it” (80).

“Descending into traffic that is bumper to bumper in both directions, one swirls through tangles of lawn and parking, punctuated by office slabs whose designers have taken the curious guarantee of never placing windows in anything other than horizontal reflective strips” (Sudjic). Detours mark the yellow dust of heavy construction that seems a permanent feature of the landscape. This is, after all, an ever-expanding cascade of business and growth. Tasteful signs mark corporations named Imtrex, Avantor, and Synovus. Then the mark of that mind-boggling enormity that reads MALL NEXT FOUR LEFTS.

California Spanish-tile-covered postmodern buildings. Pink bronze reflective glass. Unintended intimacies: town houses built right up next to the elevated freeway. A simply enticing office castle with an enormous archway cut right through the middle of it; eight stories, count them, eight stories high covered in blue reflective glass. The Marriott. Unfinished cement walls. A Mercedes

Some topics in this essay:
Fridays Saturdays, , CENTER” Garreau, Ford Ranger, Architecture City, California Spanish-tile-covered, Westin Hotel, LEFTS Commerce, JC Penny, Sudjic Detours, urban life, elevated freeway, reflective glass, eight stories,