Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the relationship between the thinking, feeling, moving body and a city’s industrial architecture, namely the huge suspension bridges that dominate downtown New York. People’s movement across bridges, reveals them to be interesting sites of thought, sensation and experience that often generate complex streams of interior dialogue, emotional reverie and imagination ranging from the trivial to the tragic.

Paper long abstract:

"Always and ever differently the bridge escorts the lingering and hastening ways of men to and from, so that they may get to other banks and in the end, as mortals, to the other side"

(Heidegger: Building, Dwelling, Thinking 1951)

This paper explores the relationship between the thinking, feeling, moving body and a city's industrial architecture, namely the huge suspension bridges that dominate downtown New York. Towering 300 feet into the air and spanning 7000 feet across, the Brooklyn, Manhattan and Williamsburg suspension bridges established a new sense of scale and materiality against which citizens could compare the size and finitude of the human body.

People's movement across bridges, reveals them to be interesting sites of thought, sensation and experience that often generate complex streams of interior dialogue, emotional reverie and imagination ranging from the trivial to the tragic. For when walking across a bridge people are no longer attached to the land or fully a part of the city but are instead suspended beneath the sky and above the water, "making strange" people's perceptions of scale, sense of being on the ground and subjecting them to various delirious effects, such as the sensation of vertigo, of flying and falling. The material derives from a practice based, research project, New York Stories for which I recorded more than a hundred interior dialogues of strangers randomly encountered as they moved around the city.