An Incomplete Model of Models
“Model Behavior” loses the plot
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Scaled Down
On Model Behavior’s enticing, if ultimately limited, proposition
by Alex Tell
What is the model’s role “in projecting, eliciting, or even reinforcing social behavior,” curator Cynthia Davidson asks. Log, the journal published by Anyone Corporation, dedicated an issue (also titled “Model Behavior”) to this same, worthwhile question in 2020. You’d be forgiven for thinking that Davidson and assistant curator Patrick Templeton would have developed the theme in greater depth, perhaps venturing something of a behavior modification for the discipline and then drawing out any hypothetical social ramifications resulting from this change. But despite (or perhaps, because of) their previous engagement with the topic, they don’t land on any clear answers.
Instead, Model Behavior takes a casual, big-tent approach to its subject matter, opting for volume over specificity. Packed into The Cooper Union’s colonnade are a retail mannequin, an old-timey anatomical model, a Swiss railway clock (“a model of the relationship between the Sun and the Earth,” according to historian of science D. Graham Burnett), a Barbie dream house, a chunk of the Death Star from Star Wars, along with film and sound. The displays dispense with wall text, so I clumsily flipped through the exhibition booklet, trying to make sense of these objects, and more, huddled together in the compact and crowded corridor.
Read more about Model Behavior’s tangents here.
No Love Lost
NYRA talks to prominent labor journalist Sarah Jaffe about changing our views about work.
“Class should be more present in every discussion we ever have about work. But I want to be careful here, because in this sentence I’m presenting the two ways we talk about class. There’s the broad question of class which Grace Blakeley often describes in the simple phrase ‘those who live off work vs. those who live off wealth.’ In this very broad sense artists and architects, too, should be aware of their own position as workers. And then there’s the question of which class you were born and raised in. If you don’t come from money, it is harder to get into a position to make a lot of money, whether as an artist, an architect, a doctor, or an entrepreneur. Some of that is because it costs money to make money—to go to school, to support yourself through the period of making very little money that comes with lots of these professions—and some of it is because of the question of gatekeeping. With the fine arts, gatekeeping is more obvious: someone gets to say whether or not something is art in the first place, whether it should be shown in a gallery or a museum. But it persists in all kinds of work and even in the job interview where you’re subtly sneered at for wearing the wrong outfit or having the wrong accent. This kind of gatekeeping serves to keep white-collar professions to those who were already raised with some level of wealth.”
Read more about what architects can learn from other creative workers.
Banking on Green
Not all cities have private bike share systems, but New York’s proudly bears the logo of a bank.
by Dante Furioso
If the hipster with his fixie is synonymous with gentrification, bike lanes usher in waves of upwardly mobile professionals, changing the economics of neighborhoods in New York and beyond. Debates about bike lanes rage at community meetings and online.
Yet, despite all this visibility for bikes, it’s actually a quite marginal form of transportation. In 2015, biking accounted for one percent of commutes in New York City. Its prominence on blogs like Bloomberg CityLab, Streetsblog NYC, and 6sqft — and even in the mainstream press — points to the high visibility of an issue that, on the face of it, affects a very narrow subset of the population. Nevertheless, it is precisely because of biking’s marginal numbers and outsize visibility that it is emblematic of larger contradictions in US cities.
Read more about the contents—and discontents—of the nation’s growing e-bike infrastructure.
New York Review of Architecture is a team effort. Our Editor is Samuel Medina, our Deputy Editor is Marianela D’Aprile, and our Editors-at-Large are Carolyn Bailey, Phillip Denny, and Alex Klimoski. Our Publisher is Nicolas Kemper.
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