The architecture of anxiety
Spall 004: Blasts, bunkers, and evacuation plans
Seen from above, the site of a nuclear detonation does not look like a wound so much as a signature, a blackened bloom branching out in delicate, finger-like striations across the landscape. As though something enormous had signed its name in the flesh of the earth. A diagram of violence laid bare: the circular blast zone, the radial fractures, the scorched and ghosted peripheries—all of it captured in a single instant of rupture.
This is spall at its most elemental. Not the slow exfoliation of rock or the crumble of concrete under strain, but the immediate unmaking of matter. A pressure system pushed beyond its limits, geological or geopolitical, until something gives. What once seemed solid reveals itself as porous, contingent, breakable.
During the Cold War, planners and engineers worked feverishly to model these ruptures. They calculated blast radii, mapped evacuation routes, drew concentric rings of devastation across city centres. But even in the most clinical renderings, something uncanny remained: a lingering sense that no diagram, no contingency, could fully account for the event itself.
In 1979, a satellite orbiting the South Atlantic recorded an unusual event. A flash, then darkness, then a second, longer flare. Scientists recognized the pattern immediately: the “double flash,” an unmistakable signature of a nuclear detonation. And yet, no nation claimed responsibility. No confirmation ever came. In that sliver of darkness between bursts, the world had changed—but the event went officially unacknowledged. First rupture, then revelation. And then silence.
I grew up in the 1980s. The colours were bright, the malls full, and the cartoons loud. Beneath it all, I was terrified.
By the time Top Gun came out, I carried a persistent, unspoken nuclear anxiety. I’d wake in cold sweats from dreams that began with a siren and ended in a flash. If there was unrest in the Middle East—or even a mention of escalation—I braced for World War III. My friends never talked about it. My parents never seemed worried. But I still felt it in my chest: the quiet certainty that something irreversible could happen at any moment.
Years later, reading Douglas Coupland’s Generation X, I recognized something I hadn’t known could be named. The novel follows three people in suspended adulthood—ironic, adrift, disaffected—and there it was. The same dread. The same internalized fear of instant erasure. They spoke in deadpan voices, but what I heard was an echo. A generation moving through optimism with a hairline fracture running beneath it. Nuclear anxiety like a low level hum that never entirely faded.
We remember the ’80s for pastel, neon, high gloss. A wonderland of surfaces. But beneath every bright colour, the threat of fallout lingered. It’s no surprise, then, that cities of that era embedded their own quiet redundancies. Not shelters with flags, but voids, reinforcements, unacknowledged designs. The anxiety was ambient. And so was the architecture.
Not every shelter was marked. If the 1950s and '60s were defined by imminent threat and explicit shelter infrastructure, by the time I was a kid, many of the signs had faded and the rooms repurposed. In the decades after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the anxiety of annihilation became a kind of background radiation, but the structures remained: hollowed-out government sub-basements, overbuilt stairwells, evacuation maps yellowing in disused corridors.
These were spall from that era, residues of an infrastructure meant to survive a world that had, for an instant, outstripped its own ability to endure. Cities became palimpsests of precaution, inscribed not with the expectation of survival, but with the grim calculus that something could be salvaged or at least endured.
Many of these traces remain today, often in plain view, unnoticed until seen anew. Fragments of a future once anticipated, but not (yet) fulfilled.
Sometimes the residues are almost polite. A weathered Fallout Shelter sign bolted to the side of a civic building, yellow and black fading to rust, a memory of urgency mistaken for a relic or oversight. Once it was a public signal, a promise of shelter, of survivability. Now it hangs without context, ignored by the traffic below.
But the architecture of dread seeped into the foundation long ago. Every extra inch of rebar, every overbuilt junction, a tacit admission that collapse was not only possible, but expected. Even empty places carry this residue—spaces left behind not by destruction, but by design.
At Toronto’s Lawrence Subway Station, there’s a structure known, unofficially, as “the attic.” A strange name, especially underground. It sits above the train platform but below the street—a reinforced cavity, sealed and ventilated, hovering between function and absence.
The depth of the station is deliberate. As the line descends toward York Mills and the low-lying terrain of Hogg’s Hollow, a valley carved by the Don River, Lawrence had to be built deep to accommodate the grade. Excavating a void above, they say, was cheaper than filling it.
But ventilated cavities are rarely acts of thrift. Lawrence’s attic feels less like an omission and more like a remainder, an emptiness with its own architectural character. Constructed in 1973, it bears the mark of Cold War precaution: hardened, inaccessible, and quietly removed from public space.
A shelter without signage. A contingency without acknowledgment.
In this, it mirrors so much of the atomic legacy embedded in cities. Not plans, but spatial premonitions. Architecture that doesn’t just account for collapse, but rehearses it. And like the fallout shelter signs that still cling to civic buildings, the Lawrence attic is part of a quiet inheritance—a void made ordinary, waiting above our heads, unnoticed and unresolved.
It isn’t alone. Across the urban landscape, voids like this persist: spaces shaped by utility but haunted by dreadful possibility. Underground parking garages with reinforced ceilings. School basements with concrete-blocked windows and century-old water drums. Government buildings with windowless corridors and retrofitted ventilation shafts.
Official explanations abound—codes, budgets, historical layering. But once you begin to notice them, they don’t feel like accidents. They feel like memory, poured into concrete. A latent design language shaped by fear.
Even Toronto’s own transit system once acknowledged this, quietly. In the early 1960s, parts of the subway were retrofitted—or at least designated—as fallout shelters. Maps were distributed. Emergency signage discussed. It was less a promise of protection than a ritual of preparedness, an infrastructural myth meant to reassure more than to rescue.
When the flash comes, some will be sheltered, and others won’t.
The suburbs promised safety. A lawn, a fence, a carport. A tricycle left in the grass. But beneath that mid-century stillness, something else took root. In some of those yards—tucked behind hydrangeas, buried beneath poured patios—were the cold, concrete mouths of private fallout shelters. Entrances disguised as garden sheds. Ventilation pipes masked as trellises.
Civil Defense campaigns told citizens to duck, cover, and prepare. But the paternalism had limits. A basic family shelter could cost over $2,000, more than 15% of the average household income. Survival was encouraged, but not provided.
What followed was a paradox. Preparedness was cast as a patriotic duty, but the infrastructure became privatized. Guides recommended building blast doors beside your barbecue. Blueprints circulated in Popular Mechanics. Survival was marketed like a lawn mower or a deep freeze.
The shelter became an accessory to prosperity. A bunker beneath your rambler. You could build one yourself, they said. Just follow the blueprints and bury the fear beneath the patio.
Fast forward, and the form has evolved but not disappeared. The wealthy now commission reinforced compounds with biometric locks, subterranean greenhouses, and wine cellars. New Zealand has become a favoured destination. The aesthetics are sleek, the impulse unchanged. Fear, outsourced to architecture.
Late-stage capitalism and nuclear anxiety are not strange bedfellows. They are the same theology—each devoted to rupture, each worshipping ingenuity over interdependence. In the absence of public faith, contingency becomes a market.
Think of this less as a glitch in the system, but as the system itself. A world in which threat is ambient, solidarity is eroded, and salvation is sold by the square foot. The shelter no longer signals paranoia per se. It reflects belief in exclusion. In continuity for some.
If the fallout shelter imagined a single event, today’s infrastructure of anxiety anticipates none. Or rather, too many to count.
We no longer fear annihilation as a moment. We fear accumulation: microplastics, misinformation, autoimmune disorders, extreme weather, financial collapse, permanent connectivity. And now, a new spectre: artificial intelligence, draped in the promise of productivity and ease, but trailing an afterimage of displacement and unknowability. The Cold War offered the nightmare of a countdown. Modern life delivers only pressure—vague, persistent, unresolved.
Our dread has dissolved into the everyday. It flickers not in sirens, but in screenlight, alerts cascading across our phones, reminders of a nation always on the edge of something: flood, fire, missing children, chemical spills. The Emergency Alert System no longer signals the end. It just interrupts dinner. A digital knock, cold and toneless.
And we adapt. We track our sleep. We monitor the air. We trade privacy for safety, distraction for continuity. Cities are redesigned to be “resilient,” but the word now means yielding, not resisting. It's no longer about bracing against the blast so much as absorbing ongoing threats from all over.
For anyone but the ultra rich, the new shelters are not bunkers. They're conditions: a second home, a way to leave the city, a backup generator. Cold War architecture prepared for the unthinkable. Contemporary design, on the other hand, urges us to think the survivable—constantly. Wellness becomes preparedness. Contingency becomes lifestyle. Anxieties proliferate, but rarely resolve.
And still, the logic holds. Something might be coming. Or it's already arrived, and we're only now recognizing its shape. The fracture is no longer accompanied by a blinding flash. It's metastasized, becoming a register distributed across habit, architecture, and thought.
If the nuclear age signed its name in the earth, the present leaves no such signature. Only circuits, networks, rituals, and tides that rise without ceremony.
Fata Morgana and the sky that folds
Spall 003: Mirages, UAP, and the architecture of illusion
It happens in spring.
The lake contracts, reshapes itself. Shoreline sixty kilometres distant, hidden below any natural eyeline, rises up to flank the horizon. Looking south from Toronto, the distortion poses first as clarity—as if the day were simply sharp enough to reveal the edge of upstate New York. From the other side, the city towers over the horizon, suddenly closer than should be possible.
Sometimes it holds for an hour or two, projecting a stable duplicate of the shore and skyline, but occasionally the texture frays. Landmarks repeat and waver. Geometries skew. A solid coast seems to melt upward into the sky. You're not seeing across the lake. You're seeing the other side bent into view, an impossible folding of distance and perspective, conjured by nothing more than a gradient of air and water.
In its simplest form, this is a superior mirage. But when the gradient sharpens into a duct, the image begins to multiply and ripple. Distance distorts. Lines double. A skyline fractures and repeats, as if the atmosphere were attempting to reassemble reality from memory. This is what's known as Fata Morgana—a spectacle so elaborate it fractures the ordinary seams of vision.
Named for the sorceress Morgan le Fay from Arthurian legend, who was said to conjure castles from mist to lure sailors to ruin, the phenomenon is not pure invention so much as a set of circumstances that renders the real strange.
What appears stable—the lake, the land, the boundaries between here and elsewhere—shudders, refracts, and reassembles itself. Only to vanish again as quietly as it came. Fata Morgana is not a hallucination. It's an optical fracture, produced by the collision of thermal layers, light bent along density gradients where hot and cold air shear apart. For a little while, the visible world folds and lifts on invisible scaffolds of pressure and heat.
The mechanics of a superior mirage unveil a structural misalignment between what is and where it seems to be. In that sense, a it doesn't erase reality so much as reveal the tension embedded in its construction.
In the centuries before science fixed the world into grids and latitudes, the sea remained an unstable surface, one that fractured reality as easily as it bent the horizon. To those who moved across it, the line between earth and sky could never be fully trusted.
The Strait of Messina, where the enchantress Morgan le Fay was said to weave illusions across the water, became the locus of these disturbances. Cities shimmered into existence above the waves, unreachable, evaporating at the approach. What the eye seized, the mind explained with sorcery: a glimpse into a world just beyond reach, conjured and then withdrawn.
The closer one sailed, the farther the promised shore retreated. Illusion was not just spectacle. It was danger.
Out of these waters also rose the spectral figures of nautical dread—the Flying Dutchman, doomed to sail forever just beyond safe harbour, a glowing ship glimpsed and then gone, its presence an omen of death. Accounts varied: some saw it in full sail, others described only a mast, lit with unnatural light, suspended above the waves. To mistake such an apparition for a nearby ship or even landfall could cause confusion leading to disaster.
The ocean, in these accounts, became not just a surface but a device, warping sight, steering fate, luring the living toward ruin.
Not every floating ship is a mirage, though. Often, it’s the result of a false horizon—an effect born from sea fog, humidity, or the sharp divide between calm and choppy water. The eye searches for continuity and fills in the missing base of the vessel with an assumed ocean surface. But even this simpler illusion reveals something deeper: we don’t just see the world, we narrate it in real time. What appears solid may be stitched together from fragments—light, air, and expectation conspiring to render the improbable into something we accept without pause.
Even on land, such illusions found purchase. For centuries, mapmakers struggled to fix the edges of the world, only to find the world answering back in riddles. Charts from the 16th to 19th centuries are crowded with phantom islands—Frisland, Hy-Brasil, St. Brendan’s Isle—geographies that hovered in and out of record depending on the visibility, the weather, or the confidence of a captain.
Some were likely born of mirage. Others were duplications of real islands, displaced by miscalculation or poor instruments. But all of them shared one condition: they were seen. By the 1800s, this tendency to name the uncertain had shifted from open ocean to inland lakes. Apparitions no longer belonged solely to the age of sail—they had become domestic.
In Lake Superior, cartographers charted places like Isle Phelipeaux and Isle Pontchartrain, landmasses that appeared on maps for decades, influencing treaties and territorial claims. Yet, when surveyors ventured to confirm their existence in the 1820s, they were nowhere to be found. The geography was smaller now, but the illusions had only grown closer.
In 1894, along the shores of Lake Ontario, these old fractures in perception opened once again. Newspapers in Rochester recorded the appearance of Toronto suddenly rendered in immaculate detail with buildings, church spires, streets lifted and suspended above the lake. "A City in the Sky," they called it.
Witnesses spoke of familiar structures transported nearly clear across the lake, their angles slightly softened by the hot August air hovering above the cool water. Even seasoned mariners found themselves uncertain given the clarity of the skyline before them. Boats traveling across the lake appeared to reach shore and then disappear, floating into the mirage and under the curvature of the earth.
In Buffalo, the story grew larger still: a vision of Toronto, they said, cast above the horizon, its streets and steeples floating in improbable clarity. But its geography betrayed the myth. Facing southwest onto Lake Erie, it could not have caught Toronto’s image across the escarpment and unseen land. Still, the shimmer was real. A fragment rose, a lift of some nearer shore, bent and magnified, and into it, the mind inscribed a city.
Just decades later, another mirage may have played a fatal role in one of the most mythologized disasters of the 20th century. In the early hours of April 15, 1912, lookout Frederick Fleet strained into the distance from the crow’s nest of the RMS Titanic, scanning a horizon blurred by cold and moonless skies. What he saw—or didn’t—may have been shaped as much by the air as by the ocean.
We all know the standard account. When Fleet spotted an iceberg ahead, he rang the warning bell. The ship turned, but not enough. Minutes later, an iceberg scraped down the Titanic's starboard side, allowing water to spill into five of its sixteen watertight compartments, eventually spilling over the bulkheads and dooming the ship.
It would be two and a half hours before the ship broke apart, and longer before morning light brought delayed rescue and the full weight of history to the scene. But in the version told by historian Tim Maltin, something else was in place that night: a superior mirage.
By this account, a strong thermal inversion had settled over the region—warm air suspended above colder air, refracting light down toward the surface of the sea. The theory holds that the mirage created a false horizon that obscured and distorted the iceberg, making it hard to apprehend despite the fact that it was otherwise a clear night.
More than a century on, it's difficult to imagine that such a colossal event might hinge on an optical illusion. But this is the quiet tyranny of perception. In every telling, the Titanic is a parable of hubris: the unsinkable ship sunk by nature. But perhaps nature didn't intervene violently. It merely toyed with vision, allowing the ship to meet its fate by seeing too late. Not mis-judgment so much as mis-seeing.
This was not the only potential perceptual failure, either. The SS Californian, stopped in the ice field just a few miles away, failed to come to Titanic’s aid. Its wireless operator had gone to bed. Its captain, seeing flares on the horizon, decided they were not distress signals. Some now speculate that the mechanics of the mirage were in play, displacing Titanic's position and masking the height and urgency of her signals. Rescue might have been possible. But again, reality was bent just enough to fail us.
By the time the sun rose, the sea was flat, the horizon clear, and the air warm for April. The Carpathia arrived to recover the living and count the dead. Nothing of the distortion remained. No one could point to the air and say it had lied. But it might have. And in that possibility, the shimmer lurks, a fragment that unsteadies the whole.
If the sea once gave rise to ghost ships and phantom coastlines, the sky inherited its illusions. In the decades following the Second World War, the heavens became a canvas for suspicion. Lights moved strangely. Discs shimmered and hovered. Reports filed in from lonely highways, radar rooms, missile silos. For a time, it was difficult to say what was more pervasive—the sightings, or the efforts to explain them away.
Project Blue Book. Weather balloons. Atmospheric flare. Venus.
These were not always lies. Most sightings—then and now—are misperceptions. A planet refracted. A meteor seen at the wrong angle. A flock of birds banking in sunlight. The air above us bends and scatters light in ways we barely comprehend, and so we fill in what we think we see. The result is rarely spacecraft, but an error that feels profound.
Even today, in an era of high-resolution optics and sanctioned disclosures, the footage we return to most remains grainy. Infrared. Shaky. Taken from fighter jets or dash cams, confirmed only in its uncertainty. The explanations are often mundane, but the experience is not. The mirage, here, is psychological, etched into popular memory not by its content, but by the force of its ambiguity.
The X-Files had it half-right: the truth is out there, but so is everything else, be it weather, wishful thinking, or stray pixels. Still, we search the sky, as if trying to confirm a suspicion older than the satellites. We want to believe what we see but can we really trust our eyes?
Increasingly, we live amid algorithmic mirages. Deepfakes blur truth with increasing precision: synthetic voices mimic the dead, faces shift with eerie believability, entire scenes unfold with no referent in the world. These, too, are mirages, generated not by atmospheric conditions but by data patterns, machine learning, the refraction of truth through intention and tool.
Spall, in the original geological sense, was about pressure—something cracking, coming loose, revealing the fault. The modern mirage works similarly. It’s the visual residue of too much information, too much speed, and not enough grip. We are flooded with images, yet anchored by fewer shared certainties. What we see no longer settles—it's provisional, refracted, open to endless reinterpretation if we care to. More often, though, we don’t.
What unites all of these phenomena, from lakeshore illusions to Titanic distortions, from UFO misreadings to deepfaked confessions, is not merely deception, but delay. We're slow to register, slow to respond. We don’t need to be fully fooled. We only need to hesitate.
In that pause, the fracture grows. But so too does the wonder. The world doubles, shifts, casts shadows where none should fall. And for a moment—just long enough to notice—we glimpse the fault lines beneath the surface, and the strange light that leaks through. It's not our eyes that's deceived us. It's our faith that we apprehend the real. Later, we 'll flinch, we'll fix, we'll explain. But the moment has already altered us.
The mirage doesn't vanish—it’s folded into memory.
The temperature of night
Spall 002: Light, memory, and the infrastructure of feeling
I grew up in a duplex apartment. While short of a bird’s-eye view, the living room window offered just enough elevation that the nearest streetlamp stood nearly level. As such, it occupies an outsized presence in my earliest memories. Fashioned in the “acorn” style common across Toronto from the post-war period through the 1990s, its incandescent bulb cast an almost cinematic white light—just warm enough to ensure that nostalgia came pre-packaged with my first voyeuristic forays to the street below.
It feels, in retrospect, like the nights of my entire youth were set to that light. Brimming with a hint of mist in late June, when humidity thickened the air and I’d scan the yards across the street for signs of life. Blanched and glowing after a first snow, the world turned white on white, as though I’d been placed inside a snow globe. On summer evenings, it served as a kind of curfew beacon, drawing us home from the park in a slow drift. Its tone didn’t just illuminate the night—it textured it.
That texture, of course, was never incidental. The temperature of night is a highly regulated affair in cities the world over. Like a cinematographer choosing film stock, public works departments selected lighting sources ranging from mercury vapor (bluish-white) to metal halide (cooler still) to high-pressure sodium (orange)—each casting its own aesthetic and atmosphere.
The various lighting segments of a city are most clearly visible from space. From 400 kilometres above, the Toronto region resolves into a luminous patchwork—its infrastructure etched in light rather than stone. The outline of the old city still asserts itself, marked by a cooler, more neutral glow, while the surrounding suburbs burn orange with HPS. Concessional grid lines glimmer in east-west bands, while north-south corridors form a finer weave of incandescent thread.
Rail yards and expressways impose their own geometry, while ravines, cemeteries and airports interrupt the pattern with darkness—absences that are legible only because of the light that surrounds them. It is a palimpsest not of text, but of temperature. An archive of decisions made, revised, and layered atop one another across decades, revealed only when seen from a distance.
But not all night was designed from below.
They came in the early hours, unbidden, over the darkened skies of the American South. Sometime after midnight on November 13th, 1833, the heavens began to unravel. What began as a scattered series of streaks, arcs of light barely brighter than a star, soon multiplied, intensified, and refused to stop. Eyewitness accounts from Georgia to Maine describe a sky not peppered but awash with motion: meteors numbering not in dozens or hundreds, but tens of thousands per hour. A deluge of light. A sky turned porous.
The most reliable records speak of complete disorientation. Slaves and farmers, ministers and children, woke to the sound of their animals crying out, or to their bedrooms flooded with sudden light. Some prayed, some ran, many wept. In an era shaped by religious fervour, the response was not one of awe but cataclysm. Diaries from Alabama describe neighbours rushing into the woods, convinced the Last Judgment had arrived. There were those who burned belongings. Others simply watched and waited for the sky to consume the earth.
Newspapers from the following days tried to make sense of it. One editor compared the storm to “the sudden opening of celestial gates,” while another wrote simply: “The stars fell like rain.” In truth, it had been the Leonids—a cyclical meteor shower originating from the debris trail of comet Tempel-Tuttle. But while the astronomical mechanics were later understood, the experiential residue lingered. The spectacle became mythic almost instantly, folded into sermons and seances, local lore and American prophetic tradition. Even now, the 1833 storm is widely regarded as the most intense meteor event in recorded history.
For a single night, they sky itself ceased to behave. What should have been a canvas for quiet, for withdrawal, instead became the stage for a violent and spectacular grammar of light. This was no gradual change, no engineered transition from one bulb type to another. It was a rupture that temporarily rewrote the rules of darkness, and in doing so, revealed just how contingent those rules had always been.
The arrival of gaslight in the nineteenth century redefined the experience of night in cities across Europe. First introduced in Paris in the early 1800s, it quickly spread through London, Berlin, and Vienna, transforming not just visibility but the practice of urban life after dark. Warm, golden, and ambient, gaslight offered a new kind of illumination—less clinical than later technologies, more theatrical than moonlight. It flickered gently, glinted off wet stone, and rendered fog incandescent.
This wasn’t simply a technical upgrade—it was a sensory shift. Streets became softer and stranger. Architecture shimmered with artifice. Shadows lengthened and thickened in corners just beyond reach. The city no longer disappeared with sundown; it acquired new rhythms, new rituals. Gaslight rewrote the rules of nocturnal engagement across Europe, inviting both spectacle and solitude into the night’s domain.
Out of this glow emerged the flâneur—a figure of leisure and observation, drifting through the evening crowd. The city’s new aura made room for detachment, for lingering, for the idle act of looking. Under gaslight, urban life didn’t just continue after dark. It became defined by it.
But, for all its glow, the age of gaslight was a brief flickering chapter in the long night of the city. In a matter of decades, the warmth and shimmer of that nocturnal world gave way to something cooler, sharper, more electric. The temperature of night shifted again—this time not with softness, but with voltage. Neon, an inert element born in stars and buried deep within the Earth, was extracted, purified, and sealed into tubes. When electrified, it glowed with an otherworldly pulse—an alchemy of atmosphere and current that rewrote the city’s nighttime register in synthetic colour.
If gaslight softened the city, neon sharpened it. Where the former glowed with the warmth of hearth and flicker, the latter pulsed—synthetic, brazen, and unmistakably modern. First introduced in Paris in 1910, neon quickly spilled across the Atlantic, where it found its fullest expression in the American city. It was no longer about safety or visibility. Neon was a calling card, a lure. It didn’t just illuminate—it seduced.
The alphabet of the night changed. Letters no longer hung discreetly above doorways. They shimmered in reds and greens, traced in argon and mercury vapour, wrapped in glass and voltage. The language of the city grew louder. Light became movement. Logos danced. Arrows blinked. The outlines of cocktails, palm trees, or women’s legs flickered with insistent rhythm. The city no longer slept—it advertised.
But beneath that voltage was something rawer. Neon lit not just nightclubs and cinemas but peep shows, burlesques, and after-hours bars. It marked the theatres of temptation and transaction. The red-light district—named not metaphorically but literally—was organized by the chromatic cues of capital and sex. Light shaped desire, but also risk. It signalled a kind of sanctioned deviance: pleasures to be purchased, bodies available for trade, shadows just outside the line of vision. If gaslight invited the flâneur to drift, neon drew him in with a grin and a price tag.
This was not the curated warmth of the incandescent bulb. Neon offered the night as marketplace and maze. It was ambient in the loudest possible sense—making every block feel like a threshold, every intersection like a dare. By mid-century, the temperature of night had become more than physical. It was a measure of appetite.
When the lights went out on the afternoon of August 14, 2003, most people thought it was a little blip. I had just finished moving apartments and was paying the bill for lunch when the credit card system went down. Unfussed, the server reached under the bar and produced a credit card imprinter—one of those metal clunkers, a “knuckle buster” relic of the 1980s I thought had been formally retired.
Back at my new apartment, I climbed onto the roof and looked south along Yonge Street, all the way to the lake. What I saw was odd: a slow, thick exodus of people walking north. At the time, the scale of the outage was unclear, but this was the first sign that it wasn’t one of the rolling blackouts that occasionally posed an inconvenience. At first, there was confusion. And then, something close to grace. Random citizens stepped into intersections to direct traffic. Shopkeepers pulled their inventory onto the street. Ice cream parlours held impromptu clearance sales, handing out melting stock to strangers in line.
By sundown, the city erupted in communal activity. Restaurants glowed with candlelight, not marketing ambiance but by necessity. Conversations broke out between neighbours. Entire blocks gathered in the street, liberated from schedules, screens, and the logic of productivity. The night air was thick with something else—a kind of ambient intimacy, uncoordinated and rare. In the absence of power, the city became self-aware.
Beyond exposing the vulnerabilities of the power system, the blackout offered something more unexpected: a reset. It began with a single failure—an overloaded line sagging into foliage in northern Ohio—but that fault rippled outward. Alarms failed, redundancies faltered, and within minutes, the grid began shedding load across multiple states and provinces in an attempt to protect itself. Like tectonic stress long buried in the crust, the pressure had been accumulating invisibly, until the system gave way.
For a brief window, the temperature of night was ungoverned by infrastructure. It returned to something elemental—pools of candlelight, the sweep of car headlights, the jitter of flashlights against alley walls. In those hours, the affected cities slipped into an older rhythm, and people—freed from the backlit script of schedules and devices—moved differently. Night, for a fleeting moment, did not feel engineered.
The blackout was not the event itself, but its residue. A fracture that revealed the structure beneath. Spall, in this case, wasn’t physical—it was ambient, behavioural, temporal. The grid, usually so seamless it escapes notice, had failed. And in its failure, it became legible. Like all spall, the blackout reframed what had seemed whole, illuminating not just the night but the systems that define our experience of it.
If the city is a text, then night reveals its marginalia. Each glow and absence, each hum of neon or flicker of flame, each engineered temperature of light and darkness, is a kind of annotation—layered, contested, half-erased. We navigate by these traces without always knowing it. But once seen, they linger. A light source replaced. A corner forever changed.
The night remembers what the day forgets.
First, there were fractures
Spall 001: A brief genealogy of extraction and accumulation
In the mining regions of 17th-century Saxony, where timbered adits webbed the hillsides and extraction was measured by mule-load, a new entry begins to appear in the margins of guild records and yield ledgers: “spall.” It was not a commodity nor even an object of concern—just a notation of what came loose.
Gunpowder had recently entered the trade, a technological intrusion adapted from military use. Before that, rock was broken by fire-setting and hand chisels, coaxed into parting by heat, water, and repetition. Powder altered the method and the material at once. The seams fractured more unpredictably. More force meant more yield, but also more waste. Explosives created fragments that could not be shaped, only cleared. These were the spalls.
They marked a shift not just in technique, but in temporality: from endurance to velocity, from coaxing to breaching. Spall referred to what broke off under pressure—not as failure, but as by-product. The term settled into use without ceremony. It was not named into existence so much as swept aside.
Fast forward to the mid-19th century, and vast accumulations of spall were quietly marking the edges of empire. The construction of the North American railway—an infrastructural fever dream of steel, ties, and blasted stone—generated millions of tons of fractured rock. To lay track across mountains and prairies, crews drilled and packed charges into granite faces, detonating their way forward through what seemed immovable.
The pace of expansion demanded rupture. In the American West, during the gold rush years, whole hillsides were flayed open in search of veins, leaving talus slopes and scree fields that had never existed before. Mining towns rose amid their own rubble. In both cases, spall became a new sort of geography—an emergent terrain of extraction, forming beneath the feet of workers and settlers alike, even if it went mostly unnoticed.
Not all spall is born of dynamite or design. Some is shaped by slower, more ambient force—the exfoliation of granite in desert heat, or the rhythmic freeze and thaw of alpine stone. Erosion does not announce itself. It accumulates until a fragment loosens, and what had seemed whole becomes visibly stratified. What breaks off was always coming apart. The structure only appeared to hold—until it didn’t.
Spall is thus both what breaks off and what it reveals. A fragment, yes—but one that makes visible the strain that preceded it. The fault lines build, often in silence, as pressure accumulates before rupture becomes a kind of testimony.
Spall is not strictly what the event leaves behind—it's what gives the event its shape. The fragment doesn’t follow the rupture. It is the rupture. The instant something breaks, there is spall: material sheared from the whole, neither fully part of it nor fully outside.
There’s a temporal slippage in the term. What flakes away appears after the fact, but its presence retroactively alters what came before. Even as we are surrounded by the posture of stability, the appearance of a crack recasts that posture as illusion. So while the accumulation of spall can be used to mark time, its existence also suggests that pristine objects and the scenes in which we view them carry within them their future ruins.
Spall unsettles the trudge of linearity. What comes loose does so in a moment, but it points backward—to forces long in motion—and forward, to the unravelling yet to come. It is the first visible sign that the whole was never whole.
Some fractures are too large to ignore. Others slip by unnoticed. But every fragment that breaks free—even the smallest—alters what surrounds it. A chipped edge, a fissure in the grain, a seam that opens under stress: none of them reset the clock, but they reframe the time that came before. What looked solid becomes contingent, the visible index of a system strained beyond its threshold.
And so, the ledger: an accumulation of fragments that orient us. No thesis, no centre. Just pressure and release. A record kept in pieces. Each entry a surface pulled back, a point of exposure, a glimpse of what the system can’t fully conceal.
Sometimes it’s memory, sometimes it’s infrastructure. A quiet seam in an urban expressway, fretting loose. Concrete flaking away to reveal rusted steel beneath. Repairs done in patches. The surface holding, barely. But what’s visible now won’t un-see itself. The fracture has begun to speak.
And once it does, it calls for a different kind of attention.
