Lincoln Square

I visited Lincoln Square, a large park not quite a mile due east of the capitol, on a Thursday around lunchtime. I immediately encountered two young architects from Portugal who are "building a sentence," one word in each of a dozen cities, as they make their way across the US to a conference in New Mexico. Washington was their second stop. They planned to "plant" the word "expectation" in Lincoln Square. When I met them, they were cutting out letters from pieces of newspaper to use as a stencil. They planned to lay the paper on the ground and sow grass seed or flower seed in the cutout areas so that the word would grow over the next few weeks. They told me they had planted the word "absence" during their first stop, in New York. These were not necessarily the first two words in the sentence, however. The sentence will become clearer as they travel across the country. The first photo shows them checking their stencils. This is a link to their website that gives details about their project: http://www.planob.com/eng/planob.html

I had to cut short my first visit to Lincoln Square, so I returned on Saturday. I was amazed at how many dog owners and dogs were playing in the park. Unfortunately, this does not bode well for the architects' "expectation." There were several dogs running and rolling and scratching right where they had planted their seed. There seemed to be two major groups in the park, the dog people and parents with their children, either using the playground or riding bikes. The second photo shows an overview of the crowd at the park.

Aside from the dog folks and the kid folks, there were very few others in the park. The third photo portrays a very quiet young person who sat alone the entire time I was in the square.