New York’s Armories Are Nuisances
They also represent potential for cultivating community. Plus, Gaia theories and loudreading
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To the Ground
Armory buildings are everywhere in this city. Should they be?
by Rachel Bondra
There are more than two dozen armories across the five boroughs, and dozens more have been razed. While the extant structures are most united by their architectural dominance of the landscape—the complexes of former drill halls, administrative buildings, shooting ranges, and club rooms often occupy an entire block—their functions vary greatly. The well-known Park Avenue Armory in Manhattan, dedicated to the Seventh Regiment (a volunteer militia called to arms by President Lincoln in 1861), serves as a cultural center; the Twenty-Third Regiment, or Bedford Avenue Crown Heights Armory is used as a shelter for unhoused men. Still, these armories remain linked by the social order that they all helped to establish about a century ago. The armories of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries calcified class distinctions; they were the infrastructure through which working-class rebellion in New York City was suppressed. Today, the city’s armories continue to embody upper-class solidarity and enforce a continuation of a hierarchical social order, particularly in their typical development processes.
What Can a Planet Do?
An astronomic-scale thought experiment
by Benjamin Bratton
If one were to imagine the Blue Marble, not as an image but instead as a movie that fast-forwards through the entire 4.5-billion-year history of the planet, we would see continents emerging, splitting, and consolidating, asteroid strikes, and all the rest played out as the biggest “nature video” of all. At the very end of this film, in the last minutes, we’d see the last Ice Age ending and the polar caps retreating, and then in the last seconds of prodigious movie we’d see something very unusual compared to what had occurred up to that point. We would see the planet wrap itself in wires, antennae, cables, satellites—together forming an intricate inorganic crust extending beyond the atmosphere. We would see the emergence of planetary-scale computation as a geological and geophilosophical fact.
Loudreading the Manifesto
Recovering an old form of critical practice
by Cruz García and Nathalie Frankowski
In 1919, Puerto Rican feminist, writer, and anarcho-syndicalist Luisa Capetillo would rent rooms of her apartment on Twenty-Second and Eighth in New York to fellow workers, for whom she would also serve delicious vegetarian meals, even if they didn’t have any money. In addition to operating a boarding house and a restaurant, Capetillo wrote fiction depicting feminist and workers’ utopias, and she shared them through her work as a loudreader in cigar factories. Before they were banned by authorities, loudreaders (lectores) read aloud for workers who were often denied any other means of formal education. Capetillo read her own stories alongside the words of Mikhail Bakunin, Peter Kropotkin, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Engels. Together with the tobacco workers she turned the intellectual void opened up by repetitive work into an advantage, filling the shared communal space of capitalist exploitation with the subversive ideas of an underground anti-capitalist culture.
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.
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