Book of the Moment

One of the Village Voice's 27 Favorite Books of the Year, Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture by Lisa Robertson is "a lyrical document of a decade or so of recent transformations in the city of Vancouver, B.C. Public fountains, pleasure-grounds, bridges, gardens, office towers, suburbs, shrubs, restaurants, and motion are among its subjects...The book also serves as a practical guide for the navigation and appreciation of contemporary cities."


Book cover w/author reading in background.

An excerpt:

Yet our city is persistently soft. We see it like a raw encampment at the edge of the rocks, a camp for a navy vying to return to a place that has disappeared. So the camp is a permanent transience, the buildings or shelters like tents - of steel, chipboard, stucco, glass, cement, paper, and various claddings— - rising and falling in the glittering rhythm which is null rhythm, which is the flux of modern careers. At the centre of the tent encampment, the density of the temporary in a tantrum of action; on peripheries over silent grass of playing fields the fizzy mauveness of seed-fringe hovering. Our favourite on-ramp curving sveltely round to the cement bridge, left side overhung with a small-leafed tree that sprays the roof of our car with its particular vibrato shade. Curved velveteen of asphalt as we merge with the bridge-traffic, the inlet, the filmic afternoon. The city is a florescence of surface.