Tag
Architecture
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The Once and Future Bathhouse
Utilitarian public baths and pools once filled the world’s cities, but now new expensive spas are taking their place. Has even bathing become a luxury?
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A Statue Gives Romans a Voice: 2021, Rome, Italy
The people of Rome have been leaving notes on the Pasquino statue for over 500 years. And this practice continued in the pandemic, fortunately.
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Gaza: Landscapes of Exclusion and Violence
Design can lift some communities. But it can also subject others to live precariously, often at the same time.
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What Folklore Erases: Under Columbus, Georgia
The current owner of the Lion House is happy to let rumors about his property’s basement passageway simmer.
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Against Walled Worlds: Remembering Michael Sorkin, 1948–2020
Could architecture and design transform a place like Gaza, and do so with justice? One of Sorkin’s last projects tackled exactly those questions.[none-for-homepage]
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Public Housing and the Right to the City
Not simply a roof over one’s head, public housing nurtures its inhabitants’ demands for an even greater stake in the life of the metropolis.
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The House That Form Built
Across the slatted border between the United States and Mexico, near Ciudad Juárez, the artists Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello recently installed several …
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Pornotopia
In 1962, Hugh Hefner was photographed posing next to the scale model of a modern building, echoing the portraits of Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier taken a few years earlier. Indifferent to the …
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Fill the Halls: Space and Possibility in Lahore, Pakistan
Lahore today can feel like a city of security checks and gated passages, tall walls and …
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A City Plans for War
What if war was waged not with bombs but with blueprints? Urban planning’s promise of an improved city of the future is especially bright in postconflict cities, where planning is expected to bring not only the usual modernist improvements—development, growth—but also peace. Yet in postconflict Beirut, planners, developers, and architects, instead of designing for a…
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Casa de Pueblo: Recovering Spain’s Rural Past
I wish I had an answer, but the truth is, I don’t know what I’m going to do with this dilapidated, 17th-century historic estate that has been vacant since the 1960s …
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See How The City Divides Us
In New York the preference is for discrete rails or sharply sloped surfaces, in London polished studs do the trick; San Francisco opts for boulders, and Lima has no …
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Modernism, Heal Thyself
Austria’s most famous asylum rises on regular terraces up the shallow slope of Vienna’s Gallitzinberg hill. Seen from the south, the asylum’s 60-odd buildings appear to merge, presenting a continuous facade of white walls and glistening windows crowned by an onion-shaped golden dome. The Lower Austrian Provincial Institutions for the Care and Cure of the…
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The Gowanus Overpass: Brooklyn, New York
In 2012, I moved into a Sunset Park apartment with a kitchen window nearly perpendicular to the Brooklyn Queens Expressway …
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Planning Happiness: A Postcard from Christianshavn, Copenhagen
This is the latest installment of Public Streets, an urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. This street used to be quieter, just an occasional bike rattling over the cobblestones along a pretty stretch of Copenhagen canal. The 19th-century residential apartments were built to service an older naval and industrial quarter. When we were renovating our…
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Rebuild by Design: Interviews with Ricky Burdett and Hitoshi Abe
There is a growing feeling among both critical social scientists and design professionals that the two groups need to undertake a more intensive dialogue. In the New York region, some of this dialogue resulted from Rebuild by Design (RBD), an initiative of President Barack Obama’s Hurricane Sandy Rebuilding Task Force. To deepen that conversation, RBD…
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Don Justo and the Never-Ending Cathedral: Mejorada del Campo, Spain
The 21st-century traveler is chronically late: the cathedrals are all built, or, if by some historical accident left unfinished, buried under …
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The “New York Values” of “City on Fire”
Some readers will come to Garth Risk Hallberg’s City on Fire with chips on their shoulders. Hallberg’s youth; the seeming ease with which he parlayed his manuscript into an enormous advance …
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Thérésa Tallien’s Legacy: Style on the rue de Babylone
Since the 18th century, the rue de Babylone has been a site for salons that bring the haute monde into contact with innovative artists …
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Weekend Reading: Bad Santa
The holidays are fast approaching, and with them, travel, Seasonal Affective Disorder, and the need for excuses to avoid conversation with your uncle when he’s in one of his moods. As such, here is your weekend reading: The brilliant Penelope Fitzgerald, who would have turned 98 this week (and who was the subject of a…
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Street Corner Society
The world thinks it knows Manhattan. A thousand movie portrayals, among them Woody Allen’s classic Manhattan, and TV shows like Sex and the City have imprinted its iconic skyscrapers on our imaginations. Looking at Richard Howe’s extraordinary photographic portrait of the island, New York in Plain Sight, reveals that this assumed familiarity is a sign…
