Articles
Reviews
Building the Metropolis: Architecture, Construction, and Labor in New York City, 1880–1935 by Alexander Wood. University of Chicago Press, 496 pp., $35.
Wood’s wall-to-wall chronicle of New York’s building booms exposes the limits of an architectural history focused solely on architects.
Building Culture: Sixteen Architects on How Museums Are Shaping the Future of Art, Architecture, and Public Space by Julian Rose. Princeton Architectural Press, 368 pp., $35.
According to Julian Rose, art museums today “effectively enjoy a monopoly on aura.”
If we want to understand today’s prevailing ideas in design, we should look, not up at buildings, but down at our feet.
An Anarchitectural Body of Work: Suzanne Harris and the Downtown New York Artists’ Community in the 1970s by Friederike Schäfer. De Gruyter, 400 pp. $76.
Sifting through the spoofable pedantry of An Anarchitectural Body of Work reveals Suzanne Harris, intrepid multipotentialite.
Assembly by Design: The United Nations and Its Global Interior by Olga Touloumi. University of Minnesota Press, 312 pp., $35.
Sensitive to the subtle interplay of sound and space, Olga Touloumi’s self-consciously novel study of the United Nations offers an unintended material history of internationalism’s hollow performance.
Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy was on view at The Shed from November 20, 2024, to March 16 in Hudson Yards.
Audiences expected the Drake-sired respawn of Luna Luna to be fun. In fact, it was a memorial to fun.
Walking the Streets/Walking the Projects: Adventures in Social Democracy in NYC and DC by Owen Hatherley. Repeater, 218 pp., $17.
An attack on New York’s city planning orthodoxy, in the guise of a guidebook
Georgia O’Keeffe: “My New Yorks,” curated Sarah Kelly Oehler and Annelise K. Madsen, was on view at the Art Institute of Chicago from June 2 to September 22, 2024.
O’Keeffe’s New Yorks did not exist in an artistic vacuum; they live within an entire tradition of experimental art about modern architecture.
Brooklyn Crime Novel by Jonathan Lethem. Ecco Press, 384 pp., $15.
Jonathan Lethem’s historical autofiction from below
Yes, Chef, curated by Zoe Lukov, and its affiliated restaurant concept, Black Caesar, are open at Water Street Projects through December 15.
Yes, Chef. Hail Caesar. Eat me. Incubate me.
Villa E: A Novel by Jane Alison. Liveright, 192 pp., $24.
It’s August 1965; Eileen Gray is eighty-seven and blind in one eye, and she’s spending a week on the French Riviera to design an extension for a house she’d built decades ago.
The Complete Guide to Combat City by Julia Schulz-Dornburg. Jovis, 156 pp.,
$40.
The world is rapidly urbanizing, and the theater of battle is urbanizing with it.
The New York Film Festival ran from September 27 to October 14 at Lincoln Center and additional venues throughout the city.
Phillips’s musical sequel to his haggardly wrought early Scorsese pastiche more aptly encompasses the existential malaise of NYFF62 than the proudest members of its main slate.
Giorgio Morandi – Time Suspended II was on view at Galleria Mattia De Luca’s New York City pop-up on East 63rd Street from September 26 to November 26.
With such distancing, refuge—or so the curators believed.
Non-Design: Architecture, Liberalism, and The Market by Anthony Fontenot. University of Chicago Press, 376 pp., $54.
The desire for spontaneity was overtly political, a reaction to the perceived authoritarianism of the planners, broadly defined.
Paradise Bronx: The Life and Times of New York’s Greatest Borough by Ian Frazier. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 576 pp., $35
What exactly is the “paradise Bronx” about which Frazier waxes poetic?