Nicolas Kemper

Articles

“Moving furniture around is a good form of procrastination when you are in a complete panic.”

The warm, comforting glow was unmistakable.

Applying universal suffrage to economics.

Publisher's Note

On the occasion of our first special issue

The magazine batted down a suggestion from its architects to put bookshelf wallpaper on the wall: it would be redundant.

Getting to know City Island’s paper of record

Since I first signed up for e-flux about six years ago, the publishing platform has graced my inbox to the tune of about ten emails a day.

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.

The network probably enjoys the building’s intimidation factor.

In its sixteen-foot-tall cellar, the presses churned out hundreds of thousands of issues a day. A gold-plated dome housing Pulitzer’s private office pierced through its cornice.

Or, an introduction to our redesign.

Conversation

Peter Eisenman memorably tussled with the late Christopher Alexander on a Harvard debate stage. He talks to NYRA about that match-up and his aversion to Alexander’s ideas about “comfort” and “harmony.”

What’s the case against double loading a corridor?

The drive to unionize architects looks like a contest between management and labor. This characterization, however, is misleading.

Mohamed Elshahed’s quest to save Egypt’s architectural patrimony

US bombs, Yemeni buildings, and Saudi urbicide

Address A Building

Too wide to be a tenement but too narrow to be a courthouse, 538 East 11th Street is one of the last extant examples of a unique type of public building that proliferated during the first decades of the twentieth century.

Dispatches

UNION, NJ — “Rather than having [students] look at some building in France they could never go to, I [had] them draw the buildings they are constantly running through in video games.”
Astor Place — “Have you ever felt frustrated working in axonometric?”
Wall Street — “I’ve seen the renderings, and it ain’t going to work out.”
World Trade Center — “The problem with ‘genericism’ is it costs so much operating budget to change the space, it may as well be a strait-jacket.”
New York Harbor — “It is so easy to forget that New York is a port city.”
Chelsea — New York Review of Sex, New York Review of Sex and Politics, and The New York Review of Sex, Politics, and Aeronautics...
Lower Manhattan — We need to stop trying to do more with less and simply do a whole lot less.
Zoom — Unlike, say, films or books, people have very little choice about which architecture they consume.
Zoom — Easterling urged architects to move away from “geometric shapes and outlines” and look instead “at the rules and relationships that shape our space.”
Chinatown — As artists, architects, and passerbys filled the sidewalk and the gallery in Chinatown, the air was abuzz with calls to sign petitions, analysis of competing opinion pieces, and artists weighing how far to push the very system upon which they depend for a living.
Zoom — “Mobility is in the service of creating a fully sedentary domesticity.”
New York City — “What if architects dealt primarily not with form but with flow—material flow, energy flow, human flow?”
New York City — “Architecture is the European art of building...it projects the future, it claims the future...it does not do well with the present at all...June Jordan, by contrast, is about the now and how to build the future in relationship to it.”
Zoom — “The true goal of cooperatizing is not just the empowerment of architects, but the empowerment of communities.”
New York City — Using the tricks of perspective, Ames dissolved the walls of the narrow gallery to take on the appearance of a much larger space.
Zoom — “While everyone says vernacular architecture is declining, vernacular urbanism is growing immensely.”

Mentions

The word that went mostly unsaid at the event was power.

“This crowd wants to celebrate the corridor, not cancel it.”