Text to Accompany A00743
Text to Accompany A00743_0617A, as seen above.
Almost three weeks before it ended, the smoke was rising as high as the two pavilions atop the tower. With it came a graininess, a pixelation that caused the tumultuous silent city below to appear as merely an image. Seeing through the haze from the pavilions was like resting in a painted bowl, the distant upsloping walls spoonclattered and elements of the fresco metropolis flaked away or saturated with milk infused mildew and moldering fragments of stew fixins. For weeks, during it all, the subways and tunnels beneath the tower remained accessible so that those daylit cloud-seeders did not emerge into the unprotected city, but only at their homes on its outskirts or the pavilions in the sky. With the procession like that into a domed panorama, they began to understand the lives, issues, and forms below like inscriptions on a dimensionless painting. As seen where they all stood at the windows of the pavilions in the last days of it, the smoke grew fine, fewer forms could be seen in the streets below through the clouds. These were clouds once again and not the smoke of miscommunicants. That evening as they descended from the pavilions towards the subterranean decks and tunnels, they changed their operation of late to chance a view of the front doors. The sun that once streamed over the lower buildings before it all began was dampened. The weeks spent in the core of the tower and at its crown left them unknowledgeable about the shanty fortresses that had filled the narrowed streets, pressing against the glass atrium of the tower, and as was discovered in the coming weeks, encroaching on the façade’s openness to the sky up to heights that blocked the panoramic views of lower echelon tower users who were soon asked to use alternate core transportation when making movements down through the structure. This was requested by tower facilities management in order to ‘clarify which elevation zones required “reorientation”‘.
