"My school bought me a $30,000 flight back from Greenland...
...and all I got was a ham sandwich."
Climate Change Blues
A group of Yale students gets stuck in Iceland.
by Signe Ferguson
Thursday: The morning we’re due to leave, some of us split off from the group to explore the local sights and maybe have lunch. We barely make the ferry that takes us to the airport at Narsarsuaq, an old US army base. Once there, all the screens displaying flight times flash the same warning: canceled. With storms still being a major issue, planes will be grounded for upwards of three weeks. We retreat back to our hotel, which has to scramble to accommodate all of us again.
Friday: Our studio coordinator makes something like twenty visits to the airport to try to get a flight out of the country. He appeals to school administrators for help. Students are caught in the ensuing email crossfire. It isn’t clear how long we’ll be stranded for, so some of us plan an expedition to the ice sheet. Suddenly, word comes from our school that we must be back on campus on Monday. No explanation as to how or why is given.
Read the full travel diary here.
Schoolhouse Shock
After Uvalde, what can we learn about safety and design?
by Joy Knoblauch
Lt Governor of Texas Dan Patrick blamed the design of the school, just as he had done after the 2018 mass shooting at Santa Fe High School. Speaking to reporters outside the Uvalde school, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas identified “unlocked back doors” as the culprit and even suggested that the shooting could have been prevented by “having one door that goes in and out of the school [and] having armed police officers at that one door.” Taking up these arguments, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif, proposed that any remaining Covid-relief dollars be used for “enhancing safety” of schools. Now, it is absurd and beside the point to suggest that a perceived design flaw invites a mass shooting. Yet this particular red herring—that the right building can overcome social failings—has appealed to many politicians and administrators for at least one hundred years. Blame the open doors, not the society and its policies.
Read about the speckled history of Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED) here.
Extended Universe
On the metaverse and architecture.
by Kevin Rogan
Oceans of ink have been spilled about the Metaverse. A few critical eddies of note: it is nothing new (see: Second Life); it’s classist because of its high barriers to entry (that’s the point); it’s a libertarian playground (ditto); it’s shitty pop-dystopian escapism (not wholly dissimilar from the incipient fantasies that underpinned the “information superhighway”); it’s filled with bad architecture (more on that later). Of course, it bears mentioning that the Metaverse is far more boring than most commentators admit, and what’s more, it is almost exclusively “populated” by obscene dullards. But by harping on such features, we miss what underpins this very annoying phenomenon.
Read about this brave new frontier of capital here.
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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