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All Pillar No Killer

Advocates of adaptive reuse still face a kind of ew-my-peas-are-touching-my-mashed-potatoes aversion to the idea of integrating new and old construction.

Boerum Decorum

On offer is a labyrinth of amenities for the introverted minotaur.

Burp Your Building

The Victorian-era eggheads to whom the book introduces us readily equate walls with porous skin and rooms with mechanical lungs.

Frankophile

Upon arrival, you are welcomed as a “fellow human” by the whole entourage, sporting matching plastic daisy chains and faux-dharmic printed pants (an homage, presumably, to the “East-meets-West” sensibility central to Wright’s oeuvre).

Honey, I Shrunk the Bronx

We like to shrink the miniaturist.

It’s All Noguchi

When Noguchi presented Play Mountain to the city, its headstrong parks commissioner laughed in his face.

Liminal Intent

There should already be hundreds of scary movies set in backrooms.

Tech Brocade

While elsewhere, the screeching exaltation of tech’s latest offering portends nothing less than a threat to artists everywhere, in Amsterdam, Van Herpen quietly finds a strange equilibrium.

Woodsstock 2026

Lebbeus Woods was an original thinker. You can’t say that about most people.

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?
New York Review of Architecture
reviews architecture in New York
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