Articles
An unconventional key to some of the features of a Los Angeles housing tract
Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist by Liz Pelly. Atria/One Signal Publishers, 288 pp., $29.
I’m not sure how I feel about a team many times the size of the New York Philharmonic fine-tuning a formula of Lucinda Williams and Willie Nelson hits with which to drip-feed me throughout the day. Actually, I take that back. I hate it.
Nightshining: A Memoir in Four Floods by Jennifer Kabat. Milkweed Editions, 360 pp., $20.
Like Shakespeare’s Prospero—who ultimately abjures his “rough magic” and drowns his book of spells—Kabat implies that addressing climate crisis requires not merely technological innovation but philosophical reorientation.
Lower East Side Yearbook: A Living Archive, curated by Ali Rosa-Salas, is on view at Abrons Arts Center through January 6, 2026.
The Settlement’s communitarian, social-reformist spirit embedded itself in the Lower East Side, including in its architecture.
Rosario Candela and the New York Apartment: 1927–37 by David Netto, Peter Pennoyer, and Paul Goldberger. Rizzoli, 304 pp., $45.
Nothing so good will be built again in New York City, not for the billionaires nor anybody else.
The Stones of Venice by John Ruskin and William C. McKeown (ed.) University of Toronto Press, 1,040 pp., $150.
Ruskin was writing, between the lines, against Victorian England’s industrial society, to save his homeland from a revolution he knew it deserved.
Robert F. Wagner Jr. Park was closed in the spring of 2023, just prior to its demolition and wholesale reconstruction. Reopened this past August, the park features a landscape by AECOM and a pavilion by Thomas Phifer and Partners.
New York’s coastline is homogenizing as it hardens and greens.
To have Jane Jacobs, we need to go beyond Jane Jacobs.
The Tenement Museum memorializes working-class families even as it evicts them.
The higher the New York observatory experience climbs, the dumber it gets.
Somehow, heartbreak feels good in a place like this.
Maligned and condemned, the Port Authority Bus Terminal will be missed after it’s gone.
Once a sparkling fixture of New York high society, the Plaza Hotel has lost its fizz.
These objects preserve the social-democratic spirit that remained flat-packed, stateside, until Mamdani finally found an Allen wrench.
With its sloping shake roof and sliding glass doors, the Scandi-shack was meant to sell itself—sidesaddle and sunbaked on the roadside, a prefab portal to the pine-strewn, snow-covered San Gabriels beyond.
On January 5, Doctor Kathy Hochul finally gave New York its gogo juice, prescribing a bitter pill known as congestion pricing to clear its clogged passages and stimulate its mass transit system.
Suddenly, the beaver cosplay is feeling very real.
Archforum, which continues our tradition of shamelessly purloining the mastheads and editorial savior faire of long-out-of-print design publications (Architectural Forum, 1917–74.), aims to convene consequential voices in architecture, culture, technology, and politics on the issues of the day.
