Love, Sex, and Utopia: The Lost History of America’s Communes
And other tales of architectural romance and alienation
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Commune People
They proved American socialism was possible, at least in microcosm.
by Owen Hatherley
The problem with being the change that you want to see in the world is that the world will get its own back on you eventually. This strange little book, published in West Germany in the early 1970s and now wrested out of the dustbin of history and translated into English, is a sympathetic pocket guide to the various ways in which a prefigurative utopian socialism has been built in the United States of America since before its foundation. The Marxian objection to these experiments—that utopian enclaves do not affect the workings of the capitalist system at large and that capitalism will eventually force them to conform to its demands—is pretty spectacularly borne out by the fact that in the mid-nineteenth century around 100,000 Americans lived in communes (a significant number in a far less populous country of 23 million people—it would be over a million Americans today in relative terms), yet the US has notoriously never produced a mass socialist or labor party. But that doesn’t make the details of these experiments any less fascinating.
Read the full review of Communes in the New World 1740–1972 here.
It’s Not An Easy Job
On the life of Aline Louchheim Saarinen, the wife and PR pro who wrote Eero into fame
by Marianna Janowicz
Aline and Eero met in 1953 when they were scheduled for an interview about his recently completed General Motors Technical Centre. At the time, Louchheim was associate art critic and editor at The New York Times and recently divorced. After the meeting and until they got married and moved in together in 1954, Eero and Aline exchanged many letters, now archived at the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. The letters are sweet and affectionate, like the one on the first page of Hagberg’s book, which features two cut-and-pasted hearts pierced by an arrow, but they are also professional: Aline and Eero continued to work together. The book focuses on Aline and mainly quotes her letters. They are full of love, ambition, power, and drive all at the same time. Some of them, Hagberg shows, were partially job applications.
Read the full review of When Eero Met His Match here.
Inner Feelings
When everything is on fire, why worry about the little ember of a problem inside you?
by Marianela D’Aprile
Scene after scene in Paris, 13th District, we see our protagonists turning away from themselves, away from what really ails them. All of this unfolds against an alienating architectural backdrop: towers whose repetitive facades belie the potential diversity of their inhabitants, an esplanade that carries pedestrians high above street level, streetscapes that read monotonous and blank. We get a feeling of place-specificity through shots of building exteriors and rooftops—the film opens by panning over the rooftops of the Olympiades shopping mall, known at the Pagoda—and the camerawork also gives the impression that the world is closing in around the protagonists, tight and suffocating. Audiard colors this sense of estrangement with an overtone of entrapment through closely cropped interior shots that flatten foreground and background, showing the characters suspended inside small worlds, each of them in a separate isolation.
Read the full review of Paris, 13th District.
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.
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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