27 March 2026 – You’ve already met a few of my obsessions — e.g. winter moss, H-frame hydro poles, crows, even (briefly, as a new Vancouverite) umbrella stands. Here is one more. I tend to deconstruct construction sites.

It does make me laugh.

Not just the pun. Especially the thought that, all these decades later, I arguably have something in common with Jacques Derrida et al. — those hyper-intellectuals who created such a storm in the 1960s/70s world of philosophical, literary and political analysis. At the time, it made my head ache, and their scholarly version of it still does.

But, hear me out. I can make a case for claiming that when I see a construction site, my instinctive reaction satisfies the basic definition of “deconstruction.”

May I quote the Cambridge Dictionary? Thank you. To deconstruct is to “break something down into its separate parts in order to understand its meaning, especially when this is different from how it was previously understood.”

My usual reaction is not to see construction sites as collections of machinery doing important things, or as the rampant capitalist destruction of the environment, or as a personal inconvenience — three examples of ways they are commonly understood.

Without conscious intent, I slide into seeing them differently. When I look at them, they deconstruct into patterns of colours and shapes and the giddy interactions that set those patterns dancing.

For example, this bike lane enhancement project rolling out along East 1st Avenue, just west of Quebec Street:

I stand at the barrier and bounce around with all those shapes! all those colours!

Horizontal & vertical & up close & far away & bright orange & screaming yellow & deep blue & rectangles & triangles & right angles & curves… Even that lovely block of negative-space blue sky, ‘way down there to the west.

Or, half a block to the east, this sewer repair project right at East 1st and Quebec.

I align my camera with a gap in the fence and (not literally) fall into one corner of the groundwork.

Triangular cone & vertical pole & mesh fence & rectangular slabs & tubes & black & orange & yellow & some gritty pavement while we’re at it.

Later I’m in the alley between Quebec and Main streets, immediately south of the construction that will one day — late 2027, if all goes reasonably well — turn into the Mount Pleasant Station for the extension to the Millennium Subway Line, now boring its tortuous way westward to Arbutus.

I take a long shot, and — I give you fair warning — I commit the basic, bonehead camera-idiot error. Parallax!

Parallax to the max, and I don’t care. I didn’t know how to prevent it, and I quite enjoy the effect: an impressionistic if not literal truth, a Mad Hatter’s Tea Party moment, with the buildings on the right leaning forward to peer into the construction site on the left, and the crane apparently about to whack that building on its head and teach it to behave itself.

Still, if you can stop laughing at my technical blunders, I invite you to enjoy all those shapes, all those textures, all the colours. The whole dance, and the energy of that dance.

I look up, to the left.

Intersections, textures, colours, shapes. More negative-space sky.

I look up, to the right.

Ohhh, there’s a whole corps de ballet dancing around that hydro pole.

Ground level again. Phew.

The calm authority of a single vertical pole…

parked, and it doesn’t care, right next to a very bad-tempered no-parking sign on the fence.

I orient to the pole, give my head a little shake, feel my feet firm on the ground, and rein in my deconstructionist fantasies. Adieu, l’analyse derridiste… Then, staggering only slightly, I leave the alley.