A tree is a lot more than what we can see. There is a whole lot of the tree under ground. The same with cities. When it rains the water disapears into grates in the road. It hasn't gone away. There has been an indredible amount of effort to deal with this water as well as all fluids and solids that get flushed in a toilet. There is an amazing architecture underground.

Drains of Canada: An Interview with Michael Cook

In the following conversation with BLDGBLOG, Cook discusses how and where these drains are found; what they sound like; the injuries and infections associated with such explorations; myths of secret systems in other cities; and even a few brief tips for getting inside these hyper-functionalist examples of urban infrastructure. We talk about ecology, hydrology, and industrial archaeology; and we come back more than once to the actual architecture of these spaces.

  thanks to wood s lot

Michael Cook's site is well worth investigating.

The Vanishing Point

The built environment of the city has always been incomplete, by omission and necessity, and will remain so. Despite the visions of futurists, the work of our planners and cement-layers thankfully remains a fractured and discontinuous whole, an urban field riven with internal margins, pockmarked by decay, underlaid with secret waterways. Stepping outside our prearranged traffic patterns and established destinations, we find a city laced with liminality, with borderlands cutting across its heart and reaching into its sky. We find a thousand vanishing points, each unique, each alive, each pregnant with riches and wonders and time. This is a website about exploring some of those spaces, about immersing oneself in stormwater sewers and utility tunnels and abandoned industry, about tapping into the worlds that are embedded in our urban environment yet are decidedly removed from the collective experience of civilized life. This is a website about spaces that exist at the boundaries of modern control, as concessions to the landscape, as the debris left by economic transition, as evidence of the transient nature of our place upon this earth.

And the blog Michael Cook's interview was in merits investigation.

BLDGBLOG
Architectural Conjecture, Urban Speculation, Landscape Futures