Watch This Space

It’s rare to read passion pieces that are true long reads nowadays, in our era of drastically abbreviated attention spans. When I saw that critic Thomas de Monchaux wrote a review of the Astor Place Wegmans (“Fifth Column”) in NYRA #41, I thought, “This is the ideal piece for me.” But the essay is so much more than what one originally suspects; it’s a hallucinatory ride across architectural history, from its deepest trenches (beginning with the invention of the Tuscan column, which has been around since deepest antiquity) to the heights of mass production, to architectural ornament’s alienation from its contexts, which is fitting at a time when people are already alienated from architecture. All of this is merged, via ludic prose, within the context of shopping, consumerism, and New York itself. De Monchaux reminds me of vintage Charles Jencks in his brisk, quip-filled passages, as when he describes the grocery store as “a spatial field of pure and uninterrupted movement, organized in the service of grazing.” The piece, by recalling the Astor Place Wegmans in minute,…