Geologic City: a Field Guide to the GeoArchitecture of New York takes you to 20 sites where you can sense the geologic pulse of New York City. With the field guide in hand, residents and visitors are able to interact with both unfamiliar and iconic New York architecture and infrastructure in unexpected ways: by sensing for themselves the forces and flows of geologic material that give form to the built environment of the City.
The City s architecture and infrastructure depends upon extractions of geologic materials that took millennia to form. Yet, we have virtually no cultural awareness of this reality. Some people argue that this is because humans are cognitively incapable of imagining deep time. We disagree. With this field guide, we offer a speculative tool that humans can use to project their imaginations into deep time as they move through the City. We believe that as works made in response to geologic time become more common, human capacities to design, imagine, and live in relation to deep time will expand.
Geologic City invites you to experience some of the ways we humans are assembling with the geologic to make the City and to imagine what the City's non-human geologic actors are making of us.