NZ visual diary - entry 6

Upstairs / Downstairs

I took this photograph while on a bicycling holiday in Cambridge (New Zealand), a North Island city in the Waikato region about two hours south of Auckland. The city has proclaimed itself the 'Home of Cycling.' My wife and I spent a long weekend last year in Cambridge to consider the veracity of the claim. The city is indeed a fabulous place for cycling.

The inspiration for taking this particular photograph speaks to my profound debt of gratitude to Karl Raitz, a dear friend and former colleague at the University of Kentucky. Karl and I spent several years wandering the streets of city-centre Lexington contemplating the possibility that we might collaborate on a mobile app: a walking tour of Lexington's commercial building architecture. A pre-eminent historical and cultural geographer, as well as architectural historian, Karl taught me how to conduct a visual sweep of a building, from bottom to top, from front to rear.

The Cambridge commercial building depicted above speaks to his insights about the visual presentation of buildings, in this instance the movement in time as one conducts a vertical sweep of the building's facade - what I allude to with the photograph's title: 'Upstairs/Downstairs.'

On inspection, one may observe that the building's two levels are cemented in disparate centuries - the upper level in the early 20th Century of professional commerce, the law offices of Calvert Chambers.

The upstairs is an historical expression,

both frozen in time and ravaged by time,

borne of proud intention and design / aged by careless neglect and disuse.

It is an architectural artifact whose face bears wearily the weathered crown of past glory,

whose lower limbs twist disjointedly to the rhythms of contemporary commerce,

its provenance unknown.