New York Review of Architecture

“Here, a desert was inserted into one of the richest, most active stretches of Manhattan commerce.” Cassandra Rota spots a dupe on Canal in NYRA no. 43/44. “Before it was a street, it was more of a sewer than a canal, a sluggish waterway flowing down into the Hudson, bringing the city’s garbage along with it. This past summer, about half a nautical mile from that river at what is now 301 Canal Street, a curious little storefront put a collection of contemporary ‘garbage’ on display. Behind a set of perpetually locked double doors, a Chinatown studio–sized space lined with shelves displayed about two dozen designer handbags, each lit from below. Mirrors mounted on either side of the space projected the installation to infinity. The front, mounted by the luxury recommerce behemoth The RealReal, behaved as a virtual opposite of Elmgreen & Dragset’s infamously alluring ‘Prada Marfa’ sculpture (2005). The stunt hinged on a particular understanding of authenticity as a designation bestowed on an object according to its provenance, and as an essential quality of designer bags. Of course, this logic is instrumental to the fetishism that upholds the luxury fashion industry, along with the secondhand market and particularly The RealReal, whose primary service depends on the guaranteed authentication of secondhand goods.” https://lnkd.in/eNnigKK7

“What motivated British architects Alison and Peter Smithson to collect ads for American appliances, apparel, and automobiles? What did Jane Jacobs really see in the scrappy street life of Greenwich Village? What was so different, so appealing for Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown about Las Vegas or Levittown? What could a bearded boho bicyclist like Reyner Banham love about a city like Los Angeles? According to Anthony Fontenot, an architectural historian who teaches at Woodbury University, the answer to all these questions was spontaneity—and a disbelief in the ability of planning or design to conjure it.” Michael Abrahamson reviews Anthony Fontenot’s “Non-Design: Architecture, Liberalism, and The Market” (University of Chicago Press) in NYRA no. 43/44. “The methods of intellectual history—close reading and comparative analysis of textual sources—have allowed Fontenot to highlight stunningly clear overlaps with theories of free market economics. ‘Non-Design’ is a useful appraisal of the slippery ideas that permitted seemingly radical figures of the recent past to slide further and further rightward while clinging to their nonconformist bona fides. Fontenot leaves readers not only with a new perspective on this lineage, but with a potent question: ‘What would it mean for the history of modern architecture if we were to realize that some of the most radical theories we have inherited in design, architecture, and urban planning in the postwar period came not from the left but from the right?’ Future scholars and designers alike will have to wrestle with this realization.” https://lnkd.in/df8942zj

In NYRA no. 43/44, Jennifer Kabat published a letter celebrating our Catty Corner columnist Eric Schwartau’s recent focus on Castor Canadensis—the humble beaver. Read Kabat’s letter, as well as Schwartau’s reply and original column, “The Beautiful and the Dammed,” at the link below. https://lnkd.in/dKxBJz4H

“Frazier, a veteran of the ‘New Yorker’ who lives in New Jersey, is an innocent abroad in the Bronx and seems to relish the occasional slapstick encounter or avuncular pronouncement.” Michael Casper meanders through the Boogie Down to parse Ian Frazier’s “Paradise Bronx” in NYRA no. 43/44. “Frazier is at his best when he gets out of the archive and into the streets, thinking on his feet and observing. Some routes have obvious purpose, such as his retracing of the path Jimmy Carter took on a 1977 visit. Others seem intentionally aimless, as when he describes scenes like the “sidewalk ballet” of Mott Haven at dawn in winter.” “He also takes the occasional potshot—even historian Kenneth Jackson, in his blurb on the back cover, cautions, ‘Readers may not agree with all of Ian Frazier’s many judgements.’ One of the oddest is aimed at Leon Trotsky, who lived with his family in an eighteen-dollar-a-month Crotona Park apartment from January to March of 1917, supported, in part, by the Hebrew Sheltering and Immigrant Aid Society. When revolution broke out in Russia, the Trotskys boarded a ship for home. ‘Would they had missed it!’ Frazier crows, ‘Better by far if they had stayed in the new paradise Bronx, in their nice apartment with its affordable rent and modern conveniences.’ He adds, ‘What if Trotsky had stayed, and his kids had grown up happily in the paradise Bronx? The family could have become Babe Ruth fans, and Russia avoided seventy-odd years of bloody despotism.’ Heck, just a few years later, Trotsky could have picked up the first issue of the ‘New Yorker’. As Tolstoy wrote in ‘War and Peace’ about the reductive theory that Napoleon lost the decisive Battle of Borodino because he had a cold, ‘To men who do not admit that Russia was formed by the will of one man … that argument seems not merely untrue and irrational but contrary to all human reality.’ Silly counterfactual aside, what exactly is the ‘paradise Bronx’ about which Frazier waxes poetic?” https://lnkd.in/gbfmMdqm

“This winter, visitors to Madison Square Park’s greensward were treated to a hunk of postindustrial kink.” Travis Diehl fixes his gaze on Nicole Eisenman’s “Fixed Crane” installation, forthcoming from NYRA no. 45. “‘Fixed Crane’ is fixed, mobility-wise, but broken—a superannuated antique model that, if it weren’t gracing this snow-dappled ellipse in Manhattan, would be rotting in a boneyard. The forty-foot dinosaur rests on its side, lewdly displaying its undercarriage and treads, with its engine, gears, and hook tastefully scattered around the lawn. Smaller, fabricated sculptures—a goblet, a bandage, a giant red piercing—adorn its scaffold and enhance the corporeality of this rusty red odalisque. To the Parks Department’s credit, you can touch the crane—polite signage only asks that you not climb it—and the piece provides the thrill of seeing big rigs up close, feeling the girth of the cable, the teeth of the gears, the implacable gravity of the counterweight.” https://lnkd.in/da2pymBs

The hat is back! Shifting weather means shifting wardrobes. With forecasted highs beginning to break fifty degrees in the city, it’s about time to trade our balaclavas for ball caps. Just in time, we’ve restocked our popular six-panel nylon NYRA hat. For a limited time, start a new annual subscription at the link below, and we’ll send you a fresh new NYRA hat along with our current issue. You’ll get full access to our online archive, be supporting worker-owned media, and have the perfect accessory to add a little sartorial sprezzatura to your springtime. NYRA contributor Peter Lucas has one, Deborah Berke takes hers on garden strolls, and Paul Goldberger even wore his to visit Paul Rudolph’s Concourse Building in Singapore. Don’t miss your chance to pick one up while supplies last: Subscribe today. Need to get your hands on this hat but already subscribe? Head to our shop to pick one up at a special discount. https://lnkd.in/eC_zd7Kq

“What is the AKG wing trying to say, aside from the fact that daylit circulation spaces can be a nice touch during a Buffalo winter or that the Bunshaft courtyard needed to be covered by any means necessary? Why does the pavilion on Wilshire Boulevard have rocks in its mouth?” Christopher Hawthorne road trips upstate and tours through OMA’s history along the way in NYRA no. 43/44. “In 1973, as Bunshaft’s star was beginning to fade within SOM and in the architecture world more broadly, Ada Louise Huxtable published an essay in the New York Times lamenting the declining quality of the firm’s output, which had reached such sublime heights with projects like Lever House on Park Avenue (1952), the Beinecke Library at Yale (1963), and the Marine Midland tower at 140 Broadway (1967). ‘Something has gone wrong at SOM,’ she wrote, ‘and saying so is a little like attacking the Pope.’ The problem, as Huxtable saw it, was a growing aloofness and arrogant monumentality, a jarring shift after the great sensitivity of those earlier buildings, which in her mind owed a great deal, and were natural successors, to Mies’s ‘pragmatic poetry.’ In OMA’s case what has emerged is not arrogance or aloofness but something closer to the opposite: agreeableness. What was once an energizing crudeness in detailing and even execution has become in these recent buildings crudeness in strategy and intent, or at least an appreciable softening in that department. It was always clear to see which architectural or social conventions Koolhaas was impatient with, which sacred cows he wanted to slay—donor expectations be damned—as when he and Ramus insisted on lining a ninth-floor event space at the Wyly Theater in Dallas with Astroturf or made the entry ramp to that building steep enough to be treacherous in heels (or even loafers). Or when he made his debut on the Mies-designed campus of Chicago’s Illinois Institute of Technology with a student center that not only declined to genuflect in the German architect’s direction but took the shape of a Miesian glass box that appears to be cartoonishly deformed by a train line running overhead.” https://lnkd.in/eJGmu6iN

Events this week, through Sunday, March 2. Highlights include an exhibition opening on the working class architecture of Herman Jessor at Cooper Union, a lecture by Dolores Hayden on domestic revolutions at City College, and Anna Puigjaner of MAIO discussing their housing work with the Architectural League Find details on these events and more, or submit an event of your own, at our link below: https://nyra.nyc/events

Ford the Hudson and come visit us at the Jersey Art Book Fair, presented by Dense Magazine. Join us and over 200 other independent publishers, artists, designers, and zinesters at Mana Contemporary in Jersey City this Saturday and Sunday, from 11:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. For tickets and details, visit the link below. https://lnkd.in/euWjDGFh