Articles
Reviews
The Ideal Communist City by Alexei Gutnov, et al. Weiss Press, 192 pp., $25.
Newly reissued, The Ideal Communist City presents an abstract dreamworld whose contemporary relevance is questionable, to say the least.
Some Rockin’: Dan Graham Interviews by Gregor Stemmrich (ed.). Sternberg Press, 384 pp., $28.
Dan Graham’s quirks were the stuff of legend. They’re also key to appreciating his artworks.
The Forest: A Fable of America in the 1830s by Alexander Nemerov. Princeton University Press, 336 pp., $35.
The Forest reads like a heady and roving literary essay, whose forays into art and environment have a “blink and you’ll miss it” quality to them.
Berenice Abbott’s New York Album, 1929 was on view at The Met Fifth Avenue, Gallery 852, from March 2 to September 4, 2023.
Berenice Abbott documented a city that seemed a monument to everything other than what and who had produced it.
On the Street: In-Between Architecture by Edwin Heathcote. Heni Books, 288 pp., $45.
The Financial Times’ architecture and design critic gets his steps in.
Architecture Now: New York, New Publics, curated by Evangelos Kotsioris, Martino Stierli, and Paula Vilaplana de Miguel, ran from February 19 to July 29, 2023.
Architectural impotence at MoMA’s latest
Bold Ventures: Thirteen Tales of Architectural Tragedy by Charlotte Van den Broeck. Other Press, 304 pp., $28.
For the poet Charlotte Van den Broeck, the idea of a building is ludicrous, a bottomless vessel filled by an architect’s unslakable longing.
Discipline Park by Toby Altman. Wendy’s Subway, 109 pp., $18
It is the poet, of all people, who exposes the narratives that architects, critics, and institutions use to justify destruction.
Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World by Henry Grabar. Penguin Press, 346 pp., $30.
What stands in the way of creating affordable housing, equitable urban spaces, and an architecture resonant with our climate-sensitive times? Parking policy.
Sublime Ideas: Drawings by Giovanni Battista Piranesi, curated by John Marciari, was on view at the Morgan Library from March 10 to June 4, 2023.
What do we mean when we call something “Piranesian”?
Confronting Carbon Form, curated by Elisa Iturbe, Stanley Cho, and Alican Taylan, was on view at the Cooper Union from March 21 to April 16.
Material Reform: Building for a Post-Carbon Future by Material Cultures with Amica Dall. Mack Books, 144 pp., $22.
Two approaches to weighing carbon form.
How to Blow Up a Pipeline, directed by Daniel Goldhaber, opened in the US on April 7, 2023.
Every work of art is an uncommitted crime. “How to Blow Up a Pipeline” is no different.
The Laboratory of the Future, the Eighteenth International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Architecture Biennale, is open through November 26.
Lesley Lokko’s sprawling, dense Biennale asks us to engage different representational languages. It’s a slow burn, but finding new legibility takes a moment.
The Laboratory of the Future, the Eighteenth International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Architecture Biennale, is open through November 26.
Lesley Lokko’s curation of the Central Pavilion at the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale offers a bright future.
Various national pavilions at the Venice Architecture Biennale
A tour through the Venice Biennale National Pavilions
New York’s foremost memoirist-crank blames the “normals”—influencers, neo-yuppies, consumers with bland taste—for the city’s decline.