Stony Urban Surfaces: A Built Environment at the Intersection of Architectural and Landscape Sociology

In recent years, the presenter has been engaging in a writing project based on the concept of the “textural gaze” - where such a gaze focuses on the shape, feel, intensity, rhythm and elemental processes associated with surface-textures One of the empirical case studies is Sydney Sandstone, the characteristic lithic form of the Sydney region in Australia. The stone formed some 270-million years ago and is present in everything from the region’s geology and topography through to Aboriginal rock carvings, British colonial architecture and, because it was so prevalent, features in most forms of urban infrastructure. Although, many sandstone buildings were knocked down during the heyday of international modernism, stone never disappeared as an urban surface and is seen by poets, psychogeographers, heritage experts and urban planners with providing Sydney with a distinctive urban and landscape feel. “Postcard” and wealthy Sydney are predicated on the materialities and aesthetics of the stone; and even Australia’s elite universities are called “the sandstones” due to the stone’s role in early university Gothic architecture. The stone cuts across the human and nonhuman, the aesthetic and the functional, in ways that unsettle distinctions between architecture, landscape, infrastructure, geological time and the temporalities of colonization/modernity. Elemental forces also contribute by discolouring urban surfaces in a fascinating entanglement of what Plessner terms the “organic” and the “inorganic”; as well as what Mostafavi and Leatherbarrow term the “weathering” of built things. I use Sydney sandstone and its urban-aesthetic associations to pose the question of whether – from the vantagepoint of materiality and meaning - architectural and landscape sociology are really as distinct as we sometimes think?