Nicholas Raap

Gramercy — An authority on skyscraper design spoke to a crowd at the National Arts Club about the ins-and-outs of this “fundamental building block of the modern city.”

Midtown — A real-life New York archidrama crosses the footlights.

Chinatown — Design-types flocked to Citygroup for the opening of The Great Outdoors, a taxonomy of New York’s dining sheds.

Brooklyn Navy Yard — ...many heads buried in fresh issues.

LAGUARDIA PLACE — "...as though architecture qua architecture can do anything about any of that.”

Lower East Side — The librarian just wanted to see what it was about.

Laguardia Place — “I came more from conceptual art, and the thing lived and died on its own merits. Before you theorized it, it had to be done first.”

HUDSON YARDS — “Well, it moved.”

MIDTOWN — “It’s about you speaking to the residents,” Karen Blondel told the architects in the audience. "You really have to do your work and talk to the residents.”

Zoom — The discursive ghosts of well-worn debates occasionally lingered

New York City — “The spectacle of ‘man’s achievements ...progress, optimism, power.’”

Zoom — “How do we situate the problem of the modern?” asked Elisa Iturbe.

Zoom — “I think what’s powerful about what we were able to do is that we have provided rigorous evidence of the scale of this detention program, showing where it is, doing this work to calculate the capacity [of the camps]…but also tell the human stories that show what the impact of this is on a human level. I think that is a very powerful way of telling people what is happening and why it is important.”

NOLITA — “What I wanted do to”, said Justin Beal, “was to write about architecture in a way that felt closer to my own experience of it, which is quite personal…and most architectural writing isn’t terribly personal.”

Zoom — “If an architect is building a building from the ground up in 2060, they’re either going to be really rich or super stupid.”

Zoom — “What is more important is that ornament is perhaps timeless and transcends specific culture.”

Zoom — We have written a nerdy archival account on a canonical building designed by a famous architect. Looking only at the building and the archival documents pertaining to it, somehow I believe allowed us to undermine the obvious and I hope new views are emerging.

Zoom — The 3,000+ strikers had five primary demands…

London — “Critique means that you are transforming the framework, exploring its contradictions…and every crack you see, you punch it.”

Zoom — For Patrik Schumacher, cyberspace is another infrastructure—like architecture—which sustains societal order and communicative systems, and so its design should be the purview of the architect.

Zoom — “Cultivation is often an expression of power.”

Zoom — According to Nayan Shah, racial and class differences have been woven into policies and perspectives about health security.

New York — What was it about Streeteries—those outdoor dining structures variously known as Corona Shacks, COVID Shanties, or Pandemitecture—that gave rise to dozens of Instagram accounts and Twitter threads documenting them?