Spall

The aquarium of sound

Hums, thresholds, and the work of hearing

Traffic streams through the Don Valley producing a high frequency wash that filters through the surrounding city. Photo by mikeinlondon.

The peak of spring arrives first through the eye and the nose. Daffodils and tulips push up through the thaw, followed by the brief, improbable pink of cherry blossoms and magnolia suspended over streets and yards, all of it carried on the smell of wet soil and fresh grass shoots by a humidity that hangs in the air with an

The colour of safety

Form, function, and #f5a500

A fleet of standardized North American school buses, each coated in the federally designated National School Bus Glossy Yellow.

October 3, 1927. In the soft light of early dawn, a boy stands at the edge of a dirt road somewhere outside Des Moines, Iowa. He wears wool knickers and a jacket two sizes too large, the kind that's passed down until it disintegrates. Surrounded by yellowing fields, he waits for a vehicle to emerge from the corridors of drying corn.

The shape of dread

From the tetrapod to the lattice

Tetrapods in curing phase, cast on-site in steel molds. Each unit weighs several tonnes and is shaped for interlock, maximizing dissipation of wave energy.

The world is made of shapes. Most serve without asking for attention. They fit our hands, our bodies, our sense of what belongs. Some are tools of comfort, some of harm, but many speak, in their way, our language of form.

And then there are the shapes that don’t. Some feel wrong the moment we

The architecture of anxiety

Blasts, bunkers, and evacuation plans

The Trinity Test, July 16, 1945. The blast that began the nuclear age, written directly into the earth. Photo via the White Sands Missile Range Museum.

Seen from above, the site of a nuclear detonation looks something like an alien signature, a blackened bloom branching out in delicate, finger-like striations across the landscape. The circular blast zone, the radial fractures, the scorched and ghosted peripheries, all of it captured in a single instant of rupture.

This is spall at its

Fata Morgana and the sky that folds

Mirages, UAP, and the architecture of illusion

Fata Morgana mirage. — A superior mirage over open water distorts a cargo vessel into the sky—proof that even steel and mass are subject to the whims of light and air. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

It happens in spring.

The lake contracts, reshapes itself. Shoreline sixty kilometres distant, hidden below any natural eyeline, rises up to flank the horizon. Looking south from Toronto, the distortion poses first as clarity—as if the day were simply sharp enough to reveal the edge of upstate

The temperature of night

Light, memory, and the infrastructure of feeling

An orbital view of Toronto reveals a patchwork of colour temperatures—sodium, mercury, LED—layered across the city. Photo by Oleg Kononenko, ISS.

I grew up in a duplex apartment. While short of a bird’s-eye view, the living room window offered just enough elevation that the nearest streetlamp stood nearly level. As such, it occupies an outsized presence in my earliest memories. Fashioned in the “acorn” style common across Toronto from the post-war period through the 1990s, its incandescent

First, there were fractures

A brief genealogy of extraction and accumulation

River Landscape with Mining Scene, 1611. — *River Landscape with Iron Mining Scene* (1611), Marten van Valckenborch. Hovering above the Meuse valley, the painting depicts the architectural and environmental logic of mining districts like Saxony’s Erzgebirge—forested hillsides, water-powered forges, and the quiet residue of excavation.

In the mining regions of 17th-century Saxony, where timbered adits webbed the hillsides and extraction was measured by mule-load, a new entry begins to appear in the margins of guild records and yield ledgers: “spall.” It was not a commodity