On my attraction to a pile drill:

1. Construction is the beginning of architecture. It is a birth and a fusing. Our cities, “flat massive things(s) already,” embark on a constant palimpsestuous turnover. They churn and shudder. We watch the hard foundations and tinkering scaffolds clatter up and down while the dust is in the air like gauze. 

   
   

2. I visit in a dream. It was night and dark in the dust-bowl construction site below the city lights. Ghost machinery and gentle hills and deep ravines. A desolate miniature, a small square within a larger square. The smooth paint of the pile drill felt like a candy coating under my thumb. Tapping lightly produced a dull thud and the last thing I remember before I woke up was being surprised, as I expected to hear a bell’s cheerful sound.

   
   

3. “What then was life? It was warmth, the warmth generated by a form-preserving instability, a fever of matter, which accompanied the process of ceaseless decay and repair of albumen molecules that were too impossibly complicated, too impossibly ingenious in structure...It was a secret and ardent stirring in the frozen chastity of the universal; it was a stolen and voluptuous impurity of sucking and secreting; an exhalation of carbonic acid gas and material impurities of mysterious origin and composition...which became form, beauty, a lofty image, and yet all the time the essence of sensuality and desire...”

   
   

4. “The most pleasing civic object would be erotic hope.” In construction, we can do anything. In architecture, maybe hope only erodes after completion. Maybe utopia is true for a wavering moment. There is always hope in process, in anticipation, in expectation.

   
   

5. I visit again, in the daytime. Muck has accumulated on the ground and water in puddles is still on the sidewalk. Squelching and exhalation and thud, each a bird song through the wire fence. In order to drill deep and quickly, a pill drill requires liquid and must expel the resulting mud at certain points to continue its descent. 

   
   

6. The drill has an interior glow like a glacier. I want to reach through the foliage of fence to see if there’s a warmth below the yellow paint like I suspect. I want to make my hand small and my arm long. I want to remove my shoes. The pile drill begins to whirr and the rain washes the muck down the drains and the dust out of the air. 

-  Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture by Lisa Robertson
-  The Ecchoing Green by William Blake
-  The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
-  Robertson