Friends of the Review,
We are beyond excited to be mailing Issue #19 out tomorrow. Managed by Carolyn Bailey and Samuel Medina with design by Laura Coombs, this issue launches the first iteration of New York Review of Architecture’s new expanded format. Along with more visual content, it features reviews and essays from Mimi Zeiger, Malcolm Rio, Marianela D’Aprile, Kate Wagner, Michael Nicholas and Kevin Rogan, a full spread print by Michael Sorkin, and a tribute to Leslie Robertson by Eric Höweler. Read on below for the full line-up and some tantalizing excerpts.
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In the issue…
Malcolm Rio, “Black Spaces, White Walls” (on MoMA’s Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America)
While reflecting on the exhibition next to Mario Gooden’s Protest Machine, I was asked by a staff member to exit the gallery in order to “make space for others.” The incident, ironic as it was, brought home the fact that merely giving space to others, as MoMA has done with Reconstructions, is hardly sufficient when the quality of that space, its mode of engagement, and the institutional apparatus behind it remain structurally the same.
Kate Wagner, “The Thing About the Vessel”
I lasted less than ten minutes in the Vessel, an architectural bauble that serves to remind us that we are surveilled objects of consumption, driven by technology to put on a happy face and pretend that our lives are more interesting than we are, in a city that is becoming increasingly inaccessible to residents both new and old, in a world that is quite frankly cruel and difficult to live in.
Michael Nicholas, “Redemption Song?” (on Moynihan Train Hall)
Moynihan’s carefully choreographed press rollout would seem to backdate the project origins to the turn of the last century; that is, to a time of great public architecture, premodern Beaux Arts craftsmanship, and a well-maintained train system. In the midst of declining confidence in the state and the country’s handling of the pandemic, it’s a story people were eager to hear.
Mimi Zeiger, “Both/And” (on Two Sides of the Border: Reimagining the Region)
What is the border? Line. Crossing. Wound. While dualities govern much border thinking, Two Sides of the Border is most instructive when it triangulates, bringing in histories, species, and atmospheres that defy cliched understandings.
Alex Klimoski, “History of Flux” (on Plaster Monuments)
Large-scale plaster casts became obsolete during the early twentieth century, eclipsed by a modern movement concerned with space rather than ornament. When Josef Albers arrived in New Haven in 1950 as chair of the new Department of Design at the Yale School of Fine Arts, he banished the university’s prestigious cast collection from its art galleries to rot in storage.
Nicolas Kemper, “Cancel the Corridor” (on the tyranny of the double loaded corridor)
The possible connection to stress may be because corridors are often symptoms of a hierarchical social structure. That is to say, the first corridors were designed not by their users, but those who use their users. Double-loaded corridors showed up in barracks, palaces, and institutions as spaces where the commanded can access their commanders, without risking solidarity.
Marianela D’Aprile, “Critical Mass” (on building institutions of criticism)
Criticism—already flimsily held together prior to Covid—becomes splintered into hundreds of floating heads talking past each other. There are people duking it out on Twitter; there are Instagram meme accounts; there are podcasts. Everyone is reacting and responding. Sometimes it feels like much of the “dunking” energy previously reserved for particularly galling displays of elitism is now directed horizontally, critic to critic.
Carolyn Bailey, “The World According to BIG” (on BIG. Formgiving)
It’s unclear what the recommended actions are specifically, but all signs point to collectively waving about the magic wand of “technology” in order to advance human evolution safely beyond our contemporary crises of climate change, migration, unequal resource distribution, and social unrest. While not explicitly named, these specters are lurking and can be exorcised one generic rendering at a time.
Kevin Rogan, “BID for Power” (on Business Improvement Districts)
In a very real sense, the BID is a mechanism for transforming wealth into political power. Despite the rhetoric of solidifying and deepening community bonds, in reality a BID relegates change to a relatively small, unaccountable clique of property owners. It is, in essence, a property owner’s union.
Phillip Denny, “A Joyful Practice” (on Michael Sorkin)
Solidarity was a lodestar of Sorkin’s architecture—his design and his writing, coequal branches of a critical practice. He was devoted to his communities. Community, first, in the broad sense of one’s city and its many characters, its lively polis.
Eric Höweler, “Les is More” (on Leslie Robertson)
The World Trade Center weighed heavily on Les for the rest of his life. He revisited the design over and over again, thinking about how it could have been different, how it might have been stronger, to let more people escape. Les was more than an engineer. He was a humanist, urging himself and others to do more—to live by our values and speak out against injustice.
SKYLINE, eds. Phillip Denny and Alex Klimoski
The subjects of Liam Young’s investigations—networks of extraction, exploitation, and information circulation—are hardly new to film or academic discourses, though their quality of production, and Young’s specific approach to speculation, takes the imagination on a trip that neither Hollywood nor JSTOR can muster. —TIFFANY XU
… and more from NYRA contributors Stephanie Choi, Palmyra Stefania Geraki, Harish Krishnamoorthy, Antonio Pacheco, and Nicholas Raap.
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Five desk editors run NYRA: Alex Klimoski, Phillip Denny, Carolyn Bailey, Samuel Medina & Nicolas Kemper (who also serves as the Publisher). They rotate duties each month — the current SKYLINE editor is Carolyn Bailey, and the Managing Editor is Alex Klimoski.
If you want to pitch us an article or ask us a question, write us at: editor@nyra.nyc