polis: a collective blog about cities worldwide

Doors in/to Cities: Berkeley

by Ivan Valin



You might assume that a house is taken over by nature gradually--from the cracks and edges inward, the places we trample the least. (Alan Weisman describes something like this in The World Without Us) But this house, one I pass on the way to the market some days, shows an apparently sudden, if somewhat violent instance of nature's reoccupation. It's as if the vine (a ficus?) knew that the clearest statement of victory and the most efficient use of its strangulating energy would be to go straight for the the threshold, the heart, the utmost demarcation of inside and out.

Credits: Photo by Ivan Valin.