Articles
Reviews
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.
The Pacific Circuit: A Globalized Account of the Battle for the Soul of an American City by Alexis Madrigal. Picador, 384 pp., $32.
For activists of air, the atmosphere is not only “up there” but comes from, and returns to, the ground.
Lawrence Lek: NOX High-Rise is open at the Hammer Museum through November 16, 2025.
NOX presents consciousness not as humanity’s exclusive domain, but an emergent property that brings with it inevitable suffering.
Franklin D. Israel: A Life in Architecture by Todd Gannon. Getty Research Institute, 256 pp., $60.
Franklin D. Israel embraced the “intensification of uncertainty” on the long slide toward oblivion of the American Century, with Los Angeles, as always, glittering on the precipice.
Tesla Diner, designed by Stantec, opened at 7001 Santa Monica Boulevard in July.
In July, Tesla opened its own neo-Googie Diner on Santa Monica Boulevard, giving Los Angeles a slice of Muskian techno-utopia.
The Small Lots, Big Impacts initiative is a collaboration between cityLAB-UCLA, LA4LA, and the City of Los Angeles. The winners of its inaugural design competition were announced in May.
There’s room aplenty within LA’s vast sprawl, where interstices of immanent potential have been left unbothered for the last hundred years.
“Something to wrap the herring in” by Esther McCoy appeared in the February 1986 issue of Progressive Architecture. The magazine published Roger Corman’s response in August of that year.
McCoy takes shots at MGM Studios, Mel Brooks, and the director Herbert Ross—La Mesa property owners all—but reserves the bulk of her disgust for Roger Corman.
Shade: The Forgotten Promise of a Natural Resource by Sam Bloch. Random House, 336 pp., $32.
On our own, we are defenseless against the fireball we happen to depend on for existence.
Twentieth Century Architects and Victorian Architects, published by various authors beginning in 2009. RIBA Books/Liverpool University Press/Historic England, $34.
Everywhere ought to have a series like this.
Emergent City, directed by Kelly Anderson and Jay Arthur Sterrenberg, was on at DCTV’s Firehouse Cinema from April 25 through May 18, 2025.
Five years on from its conclusion, the fight over Industry City continues to have repercussions in New York’s political firmament.
Severance is created by Dan Erickson and executive produced by Ben Stiller. Seasons 1 and 2 are streaming on Apple TV+.
Saarinen’s caliginous Crystal Palace is the ideal headquarters for Severance’s vision of corporate supremacy.