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A Super Fund Thing I’ll Never Do Again

To paddle the Gowanus of today is to encounter a body of water that is neither fully alive nor quite dead.

Camp Camo

When Four Freedoms finally opened in 2012, Times architecture critic Michael Kimmelman described the park as “monumental triumph for New York” and its “new spiritual heart.” I can’t say I’ve ever seen what Kimmelman saw.

Gummy Shelter

At Lil Sweet Treat, everything is cute, infantilized, little—even the word itself.

Helvetica Is Other People

125 pages of Adobe Creative Suite, social media activism, and farm-to-table dinner parties culminate in the bathetic labors of running an agriturismo on an inherited Mediterranean property.

Raster Builder

A challenge coin belonging to a Bridge and Tunnel “Peace Officer,” an unanswered letter addressed to Moses from a Black resident of Harlem reporting harassment from white park users, and other archival finds document Moses’s built legacy as it crumbles around us, all too slowly.

Sardi Pooper

Along the walls of this storied den of celebrity and cannelloni, icons of a perennially obsolescing art form are memorialized alive on a wall of caricatures.

Spilled Beans

Had the caffeination crisis exposed fault lines in the imperial core?

Steely Diane

The sculptures shimmer between plane and volume in a kind of dimensional dishabille, plotting ornament’s revenge upon Minimalism.

Veggie Tales

I was struck by a sudden and irrational surge of affection, the kind I typically reserve for entities with a pulse.

Village Voice

You just try to devise a poem that channels the qualia of zoning. And another on the splendiferous tonic of equity trusts.

708s & Heartbreak

Moss’s project posits, through a handful of spare drawings, a “conceptual redo” of his 708 House, built in Pacific Palisades in 1982 and sadly incinerated in the recent wildfires, its playful flying buttresses, cheeky gangplank, and pomo supergraphics all gone up in smoke.

Casa Studies

What goes on behind the bougainvillea and stucco walls?

City of Angles

Because the Street View on this corner is a composite, like a David Hockney photo collage, I am only visible from one specific Dutch angle.

Greene Washed

I wondered how our guide would explain the anachronistic additions placed throughout the prodigious Craftsman home, built in 1908 by storied Pasadena firm Greene & Greene for some heirs to the Procter & Gamble fortune.

Helter Shelter

SOM’s design is a successful glow-up of LA Metro’s existing brown bus shelters—kind of like when a local coffee shop gets a matcha makeover.

Koo Koo for Pūpū Puffs

When I was eight, my culinary preferences stretched only as far as the Sherman Oaks Koo Koo Roo, a long-defunct rotisserie chicken chain that served the best Caesar salad in the world—or at least in the Valley.
New York Review of Architecture
reviews architecture in New York
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