Catalogue · the survey plates

The Plates

Everything the survey has produced so far, in one place. Some of these are studies of what the city might be. Some are of things that have never existed and, on present evidence, never will. None of them is a photograph of anything that happened.

Which is the honest description of every image on this site, and the reason they are collected here rather than scattered where they might be mistaken for a record.

**Plate I** **The working survey** Ink on vellum. Irregular streets, unnamed plazas, and a dark red stamp that settles the question of how much of this is known.

**Plate II** **The city, massing study** Seen from a low ridge at night. Hundreds of structures, each lit from inside by somebody who is still awake.

**Plate III** **The Stranded Fleet** Two vessels aground, impossibly far from water. Vessel 01 lists and is partly buried. Vessel 02 stands level, which is worse.

**Plate IV** **The scar** A furrow hundreds of metres long, ending at a bow. The ground was cut like this long before we arrived; we are only agreeing about why.

**Plate V** **Vessel 02** Forty metres of real steel, and an argument about the rest.

**Plate VI** **Deck level, Vessel 01** A catwalk running away into the dark, lined with doors that are not ours to open.

**Plate VII** **The hold** A cargo volume five storeys deep, converted into a covered plaza. Small life inside an enormous steel room.

**Plate VIII** **The bridge** Brass, dust, cracked dials — and a forward window looking at something that is not the desert.

**Plate IX** **Guardian under construction** Suspended in a gantry cradle, half assembled, lens dark. Nobody will admit to having started it.

**Plate X** **Stair tower** Eight flights bolted to the outside of a hull, one amber bulb per landing, and dust falling through all of them.

**Plate XI** **The corridor of doors** It runs further than the ship could contain. We have measured it twice and stopped measuring.

**Plate XII** **The chart room** The chart is illuminated from beneath, unreadable, and slightly wrong. Two people reading it rarely agree.

**Plate XIII** **An ocean, in a desert** Four metres of real steel, and then a screen. The formula the whole city is built on.

**Plate XIV** **Module study** One structural standard. No two interiors related to each other in any way.

**Plate XV** **Guardian 01** Function: to obstruct, misdirect, reward, and occasionally malfunction in your favour.

**Plate XVI** **The Long Market** Nothing identifiable is for sale. People come anyway, and stay longer than they meant to.

**Plate XVII** **Procession** A brass whale, a rolling clock tower, a ship-shaped bus. Moving at walking pace, because everyone is walking.

**Plate XVIII** **Over the berm** A district you could not see from anywhere else, discovered by climbing the wrong bank.

**Plate XIX** **The transit line** One track kept rideable, running a loop through the dark all night. It does not publish a timetable.

**Plate XX** **The gates** A row of starting gates, repurposed. A better threshold than anything we would have built.

**Plate XXI** **Seven seats** Somewhere in the city it is running tonight. You were not told where.

**Plate XXII** **The library of one book** Hundreds of empty shelves, one lectern, one volume. Nobody agrees on what it says.

**Plate XXIII** **The travelling apothecary** Several hundred bottles, none of them labelled in a language anyone has identified.

**Plate XXIV** **The office** Red string, blank cards, rain on the glass of a door that opens onto a desert.

**Plate XXV** **Desert broadcast** Transmitting nightly on a frequency it will not confirm, to an audience it has never counted.

**Plate XXVI** **The quiet room** Two benches, candles, nothing on the walls. Open to anyone, belonging to no one.

**Plate XXVII** **The long table** Hospitality to strangers is the civic virtue of this city, and this is where it is practised.

**Plate XXVIII** **The beacon** Thirty metres of scaffold and one enormous lamp, visible from everywhere, explaining nothing.

**Plate XXIX** **The burn** An enormous thing, made carefully over months, given up in an evening.

**Plate XXX** **First light** The silhouettes come back out of the murk and everyone walks home across open ground.

**Plate XXXI** **The Caravan Ring** Thirty vehicles, thirty authors, one horizon. Intended to be there all year.

**Plate XXXII** **Transport study** Every world that comes here arrives on a truck first.

**Plate XXXIII** **Night workshop** The only qualification that has ever mattered here is that you made something.

**Plate XXXIV** **Site survey, generic** Graded berms, serviced pads, an access road that already takes a forty-foot trailer. None of it ours.

**Plate XXXV** **The door** Freestanding, lit, attached to no building. One figure walking toward it.

**Plate XXXVI** **Struck token** First pattern. The physical version comes later, and not for everyone.

**Plate XXXVII** **What you are given** A small light, and no information about what is beyond it.

**Plate XXXVIII** **Cast brass, bulkhead** Proverbs 25:2, cast into a plate and bolted up by somebody nobody has identified.

**Plate XXXIX** **Enamel, plant room** 1 Corinthians 14:40. The only sign in the city that means exactly what it says.

**Plate XL** **Branded lintel** Hebrews 13:2, burned into the timber over a doorway that is always open.

**Plate XLI** **Stencil on a footing** Psalm 127:1, painted on concrete before anything stood on it.

**Plate XLII** **Maker's plate** 1 Kings 7:14, engraved small and screwed to a machine that still runs.

On the plates

Drawings of a place, made before the place.

Architects have always done this — rendered a building standing in weather that has not happened yet, on a street that has not been built, full of people who do not exist. It is how you find out whether an idea is worth the concrete.

These are generated images, made deliberately and labelled plainly. When there is something real to photograph, the plates will be replaced by photographs, and we will say which is which on the day it happens.

A city that intends to be honest about its land should start by being honest about its pictures.

Enter the register What is being built