#34/35

It is the poet, of all people, who exposes the narratives that architects, critics, and institutions use to justify destruction.

Food halls have spread far and wide, deflavorizing neighborhoods every step of the way.

New York’s foremost memoirist-crank blames the “normals”—influencers, neo-yuppies, consumers with bland taste—for the city’s decline.

The new R211 subway cars represent a high-tech distraction from the system’s deeper woes.

If there’s a correct path through American Museum of Natural History, it’s totally elusive.

As if the concept of “justice” alone weren’t complicated enough, adding spatial to it moves things into labyrinthine territory.

In Unsupervised, everything comes to you from the giant LED screen and aiming straight for your eyeballs. Call it blunt force psychedelia.

They are trying to be ugly and, more gravely still, to be viral.

The clean white walls, gold text, and ambient jazz combined with the occasional flash of a red sprinkler pipe to facilitate an elegant perusing experience.

On New York’s changing bath culture

It was a strange, tentacular artifact, but a welcome respite from all the noise, visual and otherwise.

On the work of wily Italian designer Gaetano Pesce

Armory buildings are everywhere in this city. Should they be?

They grasp at their future until a tragedy snaps the present into place.

War, religion, and eternity at Calatrava’s new World Trade Center church.

The privileges Caro and Gottlieb enjoy go unexamined, and the sacrifices of everyone around them are mentioned only in passing.

Anish Kapoor’s decade-in-the-making squidge does not, as of yet, have a title. May I suggest “The Dud”?

Neglected for decades, the area around Citi Field is poised for major redevelopment. What changed?

Penn Station’s condition has had little to do with its architecture, and much to do with how people who don’t live in big cities feel about big cities.

It would be tempting to lump CLT in with the “post-digital” tendency in architecture. But that would be wrong.

Amid an unending bombardment of shows focused on the plights of the ultrawealthy, Cale’s working-class protagonist is a refreshing experience.

They do their best.

He was an architect who designed for infinity, if not for the future.

Rising sea levels and new weather phenomena portend an uncertain future for New York City’s Superfund Sites.

You, too, could own a piece of the marketplace of ideas.

Like many disaster stories, the story of the Titanic continues to compel us because it contains so many traces of human choices and fallibility.

His work bursts with an exuberance that, like us, is not designed to last.

Seen on the subway, it’s comparatively a welcome respite from whatever direct-to-consumer hair loss company might’ve taken up the space instead.

Nothing is more New York than hating how the city has changed.

I. L. Sherman takes the 1 and the proverbial sledgehammer to the Columbia Business School.

For all his “Junkspace” anti-consumerist rhetoric, Rem Koolhaas is phenomenally good at making shopping look fun.

I first visited Seward Park on the Lower East Side in 2020, looking for a newspaper box that served as the single distribution point for a publication then much in demand among New York’s writing set: the Drunken Canal.

Julie Becker spent her life in Los Angeles. She ended it there too.

Unlike the city’s current modes of participatory planning, a recent City College exhibition seemed genuinely concerned with realizing the desires of residents.

A union sympathizer turned strike veteran walks the picket line.

Manfredo Tafuri’s first book—a study on Japanese modern architecture—offers a picture of a brilliant historian as a young critic.