Typology as Exploration
Handball Walls, New York, 2009
I heard about the conceptual designer of the classic video game The Legend of Zelda, Shigeru Miyamoto, and his approach to exploring. As a series of leisurely walks, Miyamoto tended to wander through the streets of a new city with no praticular goal except discovery. And what is the best way to discover something new? Go where you have never been.
I have been exploring places that I have never been for that past couple of months and, while I have been to Brooklyn before, this summer was the first time I had time to explore the way that Miyamoto would. Mostly by bike or on foot, I spent a good chunk of the summer taking exploratory concentric walks around my home base in Williamsburg. The resulting typology was my simplest answer to an overwhelming place.
I think that what struck me was the percieved lack of relative variation compared to the surprising lack of similarity.
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