The Weight of Reaching

The smell of ozone always reminds me of the air right before a summer storm—that sharp, metallic tang that makes the fine hairs on your arms stand up. It is a prickly, electric sensation, like touching a wool blanket after walking across a carpet in winter. We are taught to keep our feet on the ground, to find comfort in the soil and the steady pulse of the earth beneath our heels. Yet, there is a deep, aching hunger in the marrow of our bones to stretch upward, to test the thinness of the atmosphere until our lungs burn with the effort of being somewhere we were never meant to breathe. It is a dangerous, beautiful arrogance to want to scrape the belly of the sky. Does the height change the way the wind tastes against your skin, or does it only make the silence feel heavier, pressing down on your shoulders like a cloak made of cold, thin air?

Nishad Kaippally has captured this tension in his work titled An Architectural Pinnacle. The way the structure climbs into the void mirrors that human need to touch the unreachable. Can you feel the pull of the sky when you look at it?