Articles
Reviews
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?
The Albright-Knox Art Gallery, designed by the New York affiliate of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, opened in 2023.
What gave the best of OMA’s buildings their power was a lively, active intelligence that was at war, equally, with nostalgia and bourgeois taste.
Luis Fernando Benedit: Invisible Labyrinths, cocurated by Laura Hakel, Bernardo Mosqueira, and Olivia Casa, is on view at the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art through January 25, 2025.
Why this artist? Why now?
Vivian Maier: Unseen Work is on view at Fotografiska through September 29.
Vivian Maier didn’t aim to exhaustively catalog her surroundings. What her work declares is that the ordinary cannot be exhausted.
Spatializing Reproductive Justice was on view this summer at the Center for Architecture.
Political art so often feels like a wish; Spatializing Reproductive Justice represented something like a real plan.
Dream House is a light and sound installation created by La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela, located at 275 Church Street.
Mercer Labs Museum of Art and Technology is located at 21 Dey Street.
Dream House does a lot with a little. Mercer Labs does a little with a lot.
Mapping Malcolm, edited by Najha Zigbi-Johnson. Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 304 pp., $28.
Mapping Malcolm takes Harlem as a starting place for a global project of Black liberation.
Prior Art: Patents and the Nature of Invention in Architecture by Peter H. Christensen. MIT Press, 400 pp., $50.
Prior Art trades in architectural alembics: spaces that distill, refine, and elucidate Christensen’s crucial triad: “creativity, novelty, and property.”
Life and Trust, by Emursive, is currently running at 20 Exchange Place.
Life and Trust occupies Wall Street with craft cocktails and prebatched bromides.
Manor Lords, developed by Greg Styczeń (a.k.a. Slavic Magic), was released by Hooded Horse in April.
If Sim City arguably inspired legions of thirtysomething urban planners, there’s a strong chance Manor Lords will make at least one good historian of the medieval peasantry.
Jenny Holzer: Light Line, organized by Lauren Hinkson, is on view at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum through September 29.
At the Guggenheim, Jenny Holzer presides over a crumbling Babel of mixed messages.