Streets of New York

Wandering the nameless and grid-like streets of New York you feel like a particle trapped in some kind of computersystem. The streets being streams of data rushing relentlessly through the motherboard. On the way to midtown the houses become ever larger and you seem to be more and more irrelevant, a lost particle in a perfectly structured system. After some time you reach the square shaped central park which looks like the green chip on the motherboard. The last refuge of mother nature on the island of Manhattan gives you a break and you may reflect upon the differences to European cities. By comparison they seem more naturally grown, shaped by history and necessity with dwindling roads and overgrown parks, more human and less grid like. They are designed as well of course, but their artificiality seems to be hidden behind history, individuality and to be more human in size. But if the buildings seem to touch the sky and the roads are endless grids everything may be possible in the end and that’s the secret of the so called American dream: To escape the motherboard, to be more than a nameless particle, you need to find a way through the grid and climb the sky.