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A review by jwsg
On Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes by Alexandra Horowitz
3.0
In Horowitz's book, On Looking, Horowitz walks around her NYC neighbourhood with 11 different individuals with very different ways of looking at the world: a typographer, a geologist, Horowitz's toddler son, a blind person, a sound engineer, a dog, illustrator Maira Kalman, a field naturalist, a wildlife scientist, a staff member from the Project for Public Spaces and a doctor. Horowitz notes that "at a basic level...paying attention is simply making a selection among all the stimuli bombarding you at any one moment". But paying attention necessarily requires filtering, to then deliberately be inattentive to other things in your environment. We each have our own ways of filtering and looking at the world - based on our backgrounds, education and training, etc. (In some ways, it's a little like how the solutions we propose to problems are very much shaped by our training/background; how a neurologist might diagnose a persistent headache as a sign that something is going on with the brain, while a TCM practitioner might say that your body is out of balance and prescribe some blend of herbs and acupuncture to rebalance the body, or a chiropractor might suggest that some misalignment of the spine might account for the pains.)
Horowitz tries to shift her frame of reference by taking walks with other individuals, and in those few hours, trying to see the world through their lenses. With the typographer, she notices the riot of fonts in the landscape, with her toddler son, the fascination of previously overlooked details like the hiss of steam from ventilation shafts and the multitude of triangles on the handrails of the stairs. In a heavily urbanised environment like NYC, it takes walks with the geologist, the field naturalist and the wildlife scientist to point out all the signs of Nature in the city, if we just care to look. From Kalman, Horowitz learns that you can get inspiration if you just open yourself to the potential of random objects - a couch sitting forlornly on the sidewalk, bags of trash waiting for the garbage truck to arrive. From the sound engineer and the blind person, Horowitz is reminded that we experience the environment through senses other than sight - that our experience of the city is shaped as much by its sounds and smells as it is by its sights.
When I read William Whyte's The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces or Jan Gehl's Life Between Buildings: Using Public Space, they made me look at urban spaces in a completely different way. Likewise, reading Simon Garfield's Just My Type made me pay closer attention to the fonts surrounding me. There's a little bit of that in On Looking - where it's made me more conscious about what I'm paying attention to - and what I'm inattentive to - in my environment, and how I might look at the city using different lenses. That's what made the book for me. What I found frustrating though (which makes this a three star, rather than a four star rating) is that while On Looking is split into several short, standalone chapters, I found Horowitz's writing a little tedious to plough through at times.
Horowitz tries to shift her frame of reference by taking walks with other individuals, and in those few hours, trying to see the world through their lenses. With the typographer, she notices the riot of fonts in the landscape, with her toddler son, the fascination of previously overlooked details like the hiss of steam from ventilation shafts and the multitude of triangles on the handrails of the stairs. In a heavily urbanised environment like NYC, it takes walks with the geologist, the field naturalist and the wildlife scientist to point out all the signs of Nature in the city, if we just care to look. From Kalman, Horowitz learns that you can get inspiration if you just open yourself to the potential of random objects - a couch sitting forlornly on the sidewalk, bags of trash waiting for the garbage truck to arrive. From the sound engineer and the blind person, Horowitz is reminded that we experience the environment through senses other than sight - that our experience of the city is shaped as much by its sounds and smells as it is by its sights.
When I read William Whyte's The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces or Jan Gehl's Life Between Buildings: Using Public Space, they made me look at urban spaces in a completely different way. Likewise, reading Simon Garfield's Just My Type made me pay closer attention to the fonts surrounding me. There's a little bit of that in On Looking - where it's made me more conscious about what I'm paying attention to - and what I'm inattentive to - in my environment, and how I might look at the city using different lenses. That's what made the book for me. What I found frustrating though (which makes this a three star, rather than a four star rating) is that while On Looking is split into several short, standalone chapters, I found Horowitz's writing a little tedious to plough through at times.