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That’s Me in the Corner
A tiny pocket of Chinatown and its discriminating, religion-affirming denizens loom large in the media: a tour.
by Lyta Gold
Going strictly by the numbers, standard religious affiliation in the US has been dropping for the last three decades. Instead of the usual increase in religiosity, there’s been a rise in what Pew Research calls “nones”: people who call themselves atheist or agnostic or who otherwise don’t identify as religious. Most of this loss has come from younger Christians leaving the faith. In the early 1990s, a solid 90 percent of adult Americans considered themselves Christian, but today only 63 percent make the claim. (Other religious affiliations have stayed more or less steady.) Belief in God has also dipped: according to recent polling by Gallup, only 81 percent of American adults believe there is a God (down from 98 percent from the 1940s to the 1960s and 92 percent in 2011), to say nothing of possessing a settled idea of what to do with him.
And yet, if you believe the culture-reporting buzz, everyone’s wild for Catholicism these days. Manhattan is crawling with God-fearing scenesters, especially of the “tradcath” variety, clutching their rosaries. “Members of a small but significant scene are turning to the ancient faith in defiance of liberal pieties,” writes First Things editor Julia Yost in the New York Times. “Disaffection with the progressive moral majority—combined with Catholicism’s historic ability to accommodate cultural subversion—has produced an in-your-face style of traditionalism. This is not your grandmother’s church.” How thrilling! Where is this exciting, in-your-face, not-your-grandma’s traditionalism taking place? According to Yost, it’s happening among the Dimes Square set, the residents or hangers-on of a three block “micro-neighborhood” at the edge of Chinatown. He assures us that although “the Dimes Square scene is small ... its ascent highlights a culture-wide shift.” I’m not quite sure if the ascent of Dimes Square highlights anything, except the power of marketing and gentrification.
Read more about the devout young conservatives in fashionable lace.
Free Radicals
Architecture builds norms, and Radical Pedagogies’ project is to question the discipline’s fundamental assumptions.
by Alex Kitnick
With so many contributions, one feels wary of identifying too many connections. A certain back to the land ethos, however, is hard to ignore. Radical Pedagogies is full of images, and the reader finds many photographs of people en plein air, sitting on hillsides, generally outside buildings. While nude bodies are scattered throughout, there are as many different forms of technological media—radio and televisual waves, Fun Palaces and Media Labs—as bare bottoms. (There are plenty of coats and ties, too; radicality is not always outfitted in outré fashion, though it often seems to be gendered male.) School here wants to break out of the classroom and be broadcast, and, fittingly, this is the moment of open universities, global tools, environmental communications, information environments, hives, and thinkbelts. The connection, of course, between the back-to-the-landers and high-tech heads is that both were wrapped up in a post-building feeling, sensing that architecture with a capital A had passed. This is architecture in the expanded field, amid open systems, and perhaps as a result many of these projects are ideologically far-flung. What does radical mean, one might ask, if it can refer to both Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown’s Learning from Levittown studio, held at Yale in 1970, and the art schools built by Ricardo Porro in post-revolutionary Cuba? Are both getting to the root of the field? Or to ask the question another way, what is not radical? Is it simply anything falling outside the Beaux-Arts box?
Read more about architecture education during the long 1960s.
Gotham in One Building
Under the trunk of the tower’s seventy stories, daylight is pretty scarce, and there may be no other block in Manhattan that comes so close to the Tim Burton’s Gotham.
by Ian Volner
Thanks to architectural draftsman Hugh Ferris, whose famous massing studies—prompted by the 1916 zoning change—helped popularize the so-called “wedding cake” type, the setback tower became a staple of cities all around the country and indeed around the world. But imagine, for an instant, that this weren’t so: imagine dissolving the seeming synonymity between the familiar ziggurat profile on the one hand and the Deco style on the other. What would prewar towers be, and what would the city they shaped look like, without the light-loving 1916 resolution and the setbacks it brought about?
The skyscraper at 70 Pine Street, originally known as the Cities Service Building, doesn’t exactly answer that question, at least not on paper. Completed in 1932, just a year after the Empire State, the building from the obscure if impressively titled office of Clinton & Russell, Holton & George obeys every letter of the law: occupying a parcel of roughly 30,000 square feet at the corner of Cedar and Pearl Streets in the Financial District, the tower rises 952 feet in a series of regular steps—most of them used as outdoor spaces by tenants (formerly commercial ones, including employees of the late AIG; now high-end-condo owners)—narrowing to less than a quarter of the base area by the time it reaches the top floor (once a viewing platform, today a restaurant). If anything, the uppermost levels display a special exuberance of setback-itude, replete with beveled corners and telescoping pilasters, all topped by a needlelike mast. Given its vintage and its locale, 70 Pine is just the kind of tower you’d expect it to be.
New York Review of Architecture reviews architecture in New York. Our Editor is Samuel Medina and our Deputy Editor is Marianela D’Aprile. Our Publisher is Nicolas Kemper.
To pitch us an article or ask us a question, write to us at: editor@nyra.nyc. For their support, we would like to thank the Graham Foundation and our issue sponsors, Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects and Thomas Phifer.
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