I’ve been walking a lot lately. Just to get the physical and mental kinks out. There are a lot of them to unravel, believe me. But as long as there’s stuff to look at, I’m happily drugged into a state of blissful curiosity. I can’t look at the world enough.
Milan, like most cities, I imagine, is totally different in the winter than it is in the summer. But the gray and the bare and the stripped clean have their own magnetism. Skeletal shapes. Uncompromising lines. Trees that look more like ink drawings than they do like plants. The parks are full of cropped leafless bushes waiting for Spring, and they gave me my latest inspiration. Weirdly (or maybe not so weirdly), it all took me to warm places in my head, because I ended up, apparently, in Miami:
But this is how I got there:
And all of a sudden, boom, I’ve traveled from a bleak city park to the African savanna or thereabouts. It’s fun—this leaping about without limits or passports.
[If you liked this post, you might also like “Urban Pattern #1.”]
Interestingly, any intermediate step in that evolution of the final design is “good” enough, or complete enough, to be a finished design product itself.