One of the chief joys of living in a city is walking it—not as a means of transportation, but for enlightenment. “Walking is not a sport,” wrote Frédéric Gros in A Philosophy of Walking, his elegiac manifesto to bipedal life. “When you are walking, there is only one sort of performance that counts: the brilliance of the sky, the splendor of the landscape.”

The New York–based artist Alex Wolfe would agree, and add that human-made infrastructure plays an equally powerful role in orienting our lives. By his own admission, Wolfe, 32, is an unusual artist. Originally trained as a sculptor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, his medium these days is walking.

If the idea of walking as a creative practice seems comical at first, it’s not an idea without precedent. In the 1920s, surrealist artists and writers such as André Breton organized purposefully meandering strolls through an urbanizing Paris. In 1988 Marina Abramović walked for ninety days along the Great Wall of China, meeting her collaborator and romantic partner, Ulay, at the end of her journey. More recently, during the pandemic, walking exploded as a welcome antidote for boredom and source of inspiration.

While some might walk for productivity, health, or “unexpected scenic views” (as Wolfe noted of a recent journey from New York to New Jersey), Wolfe walks for meaning. His aim is always the same: to better understand the landscapes America has built for itself, and how people have chosen to live and move within them over time. By his own estimate, he completed 30 uniquely crafted walks in various locations across the country last year.

One recent rainy morning, I met Wolfe for a jaunt of our own. He chose Midtown Manhattan for what he promises will be a comfortable eight-mile journey. “Welcome to my studio,” he says, half yelling over the traffic, as I spot him on the corner of 40th and Fifth Avenue. “Isn’t it absolutely beautiful?” I can’t tell if he’s joking. But no matter. We’re here to walk, and Wolfe has a new route he’s excited to try.

Few know the city’s streetscapes as intimately as Wolfe. As we head down 40th Street, he rattles off his big walks: Columbus Circle to Weehawken, Brooklyn to Montauk, St. George’s terminal to Ward’s Point beach. His longest walk to date, from Manhattan to Philadelphia, was an agonizing sojourn of nine days and 180 miles.

For the less intrepid, Wolfe also leads shorter group walks around his favorite neighborhoods in the city, organized in collaboration with the co-working and event space Index. A recent outing, titled “Noticing: Shaping Nature in Lower Manhattan,” explored urban nature in the Financial District, peeling away its corporatized density to reveal a forgotten history of natural topographies and plant-based life.

But all of Wolfe’s really big walks are solitary affairs. He completes them without headphones or other self-imposed distractions. He’ll walk almost anywhere, but he’s most drawn to places considered either difficult or uninteresting to traverse: industrial zones, suburban neighborhoods, the entire city of Los Angeles. Understanding a place, he says, means getting off the beaten track.

Wolfe quickly checks the directions on his phone to make sure we’re on the right path. His routes are carefully, maybe even obsessively planned based on the social, cultural, or architectural history of wherever he’s exploring. The confluence of memory and geography is a primary concern (he cites urban activist Jane Jacobs and German writer W.G. Sebald as important influences), as well as what he’s called “the overlooked corners of Elsewhere”—sites of meaning that go too often unnoticed in the back and forth of daily life.

“Landscape is like a character,” he says, “and I’m trying to understand it at the level that it deserves.” In Wolfe’s hands, a walk over the Bayonne Bridge between Staten Island and New Jersey transforms into a profound meditation on global trade routes and public infrastructure. Trek with him down Broadway—all 13 miles of it—and you’ll recreate the ancestral “desire path” of the Weckquaesgeek peoples, Manhattan’s Indigenous former inhabitants. As Wolfe points out, any place is the result of thousands of years of accumulated history. Walking helps us excavate the sedimentary layers of time.

Wolfe began to consider walking something of a “practice” in 2018. It was the same year he launched Pedestrian magazine, publishing a range of essays, interviews, and visual projects about urban life. (The title has since been acquired by the New York Public Library and the Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection at the School of the Art Institute). Wolfe stopped producing Pedestrian in 2022, but its spirit lives on in a Substack of the same name, where he chronicles his walking through writing and photographs. He’s also working on a book, an opportunity to develop his ideas on walking and life in long form.

For some time Wolfe wondered how to memorialize walks in a more lasting, holistic way. Unlike the assemblage-style sculptures he made in college, a walk is inherently ephemeral, and words and images can only capture so much. Maybe this was the point. To document a recent nine-miler, Wolfe constructed a shallow cardboard box by hand and filled it with various items: a USB drive loaded with the route’s geo-coordinates, snapshots of roadside attractions, a pen found on the sidewalk, and a “certificate of authenticity,” complete with Wolfe’s signature and a rubber stamp.

“The pieces, when combined, create a narrative that leaves interpretation open for the viewer,” he says. But for Wolfe, as the person who completed the walk, the artifacts function as a potent trigger for memory—of what he saw, felt, and heard in a specific place and space in time.

One might see the box’s contents as nodding toward the increasingly rare act of building physical relationships with places, particularly the places in which we live. In the age of turn-by-turn GPS and self-driving cars, the journey from A to B has increasingly become a thoughtless, automated experience, leaving us only impersonal or abstracted narratives about what it felt like to be somewhere. Wolfe fights against this, encouraging a more intentional and embodied relationship with the environments we inhabit daily.

Wolfe darts into an office building we just passed, which turns out to be the former headquarters of the New York Daily News, designed by Raymond Hood and completed in 1930. He explains that the building is one of the new breed of towers conceived after the 1916 Zoning Resolution, a landmark act of planning policy that mandated step-backed façades for the city’s skyscrapers. Dramatically influencing the architecture of these soaring structures, the resolution’s ultimate impact would be felt on the ground, ensuring that daylight and fresh air would reach earthbound pedestrians.

We wander silently through the building’s decadent art deco lobby. In 1930, Architectural Forum derided the lobby as a “​​P.T. Barnum three-ring effect;” Rem Koolhaas called it a “chapel of Manhattanism” in Delirious New York. Sheepishly, I mention that I didn’t even know this fantastical space existed, much less that it was open to the public. Wolfe smiles proudly. “Most people don’t. I found it just by walking,” he says.

Back on the street, we keep moving. Wolfe’s curiosity is infectious, his affection for even the most banal features of the urban firmament strangely inspiring. Every few blocks he lights up with a new discovery to share with me: a hidden garden that was once part of the first postal route between Boston and New York, a coffee shop in the basement of a Swedish church, an office tower where Seinfeld’s George Costanza worked.

While seemingly trivial, sightings like these lie at the heart of Wolfe’s project, an echo of what architects Steven Harris and Deborah Berke, nearly 20 years ago, called the “architecture of the everyday.” Although famous landmarks and heroic architectural gestures have their place, it’s often the more quotidian, unremarkable facets that give a place identity—and therefore meaning—in our lives.

We stop for a moment under the portico of the Seagram Building, the famous Modernist office slab at 52nd and Park Avenue, to escape the drizzle. I expect Wolfe to launch into a spiel about Mies van der Rohe or the intricacies of the building’s tower-in-a-park design; instead, he talks passionately about Privately Owned Public Spaces (POPS), a zoning innovation that incentivizes New York’s private developers to build publicly accessible spaces as part of larger construction projects.

Wolfe explains how, although the POPS program was inaugurated a few years after the Seagram’s completion, the building’s open raised plaza helped prototype what the idea might yield: generous, democratic urban spaces for the weary pedestrian to sit, rest, or just be. “I’m not saying POPS doesn’t have its issues,” he says. “But it’s still a good idea. This is what we need more of. People need to know these places exist.”

If he had his way, what other urban interventions would he support to make New York a more pedestrian-friendly place? Wolfe frowns; to him, it’s the wrong question. In his mind, the city is, for the most part, already easy to navigate on foot—if only its denizens would make the effort. “So many people move to this city and sort of shut themselves off from what’s actually around them,” he says. “Would better sidewalks or crosswalks actually encourage people to walk more? I’m not sure. I think it’s more that people just don’t like walking. They like Ubering.” (Maybe that will change: Since our walk, New York has implemented the nation’s first congestion pricing toll; its impacts on walking remain to be seen.)

As we make our way back to our meeting spot at 40th and Fifth, I wonder what might be gained if all of us followed Wolfe’s philosophy of walking. More pedestrians (and fewer cars) would be an obvious boon as far as reducing carbon emissions. And greater appreciation for all aspects of the built environment—not just those famous landmarks—could also have positive effects, like allowing for more sustainable ideas of architectural reuse (such as Jeanne Gang’s “architectural grafting” model) to take root.

But walking’s greatest opportunity might be found inward, not outward. In our era of social isolation and eroding civic discourse, the “public-ness” of American life has rarely been more fractured. Isolation leads to ignorance, and ignorance to a breakdown in understanding about both one another and the world around us. As Wolfe reminds us, walking gets us out there: back into the joyful swirl of chaotic, teeming life. Walking is enlightenment—if only we would take the first step.