We’re just about to send our next issue to the printer, and we’ve planned a party to celebrate. Scroll down for all the info!
Chronically Overparked
What stands in the way of creating affordable housing, equitable urban spaces, and an architecture resonant with our climate-sensitive times? Parking policy.
Grabar rightly singles out for special blame so-called minimum parking requirements: the “step that virtually every U.S. jurisdiction took in the 1950s and ’60s to mandate the provision of parking spaces with every new home, store, school, office, doughnut shop, movie theater, or tennis court.” As he puts it, “Making parking the private and exclusive responsibility of every individual destination had consequences far more destructive than any double-parked car.”
The statistics Grabar has collected are mindboggling. The United States now has almost a billion parking spaces. Des Moines, Iowa, has built twenty spaces for every household. The San Francisco Bay Area now counts fifteen million spots in all, “enough to wrap a parking lane around the planet twice and still have some left over.” So overparked has the nation become that many if not most of these spaces, most of the time, sit empty.
Zillownership and Its Discontents
We’re attached to a dream we’ve been sold but can’t afford.
If you’re like me, you have dreams, big dreams. A dishwasher. A surprise inheritance. A six-figure columnist salary. And of course, a house upstate. You have hundreds of homes saved on Zillow in far-flung towns due north with names like Whitekill and Cocksport. But columns don’t pay like they used to. Sex and the City this is not. So you set your price filter to $150,000 max. You’re looking for a fixer-upper. Turns out you’re actually going to need to make money off this property. So you expose a few beams, redo a bathroom, paint it charcoal (or is that trend over?), invite your journalist friends up for the weekend, get an impressionable couple to move in next door, open a coffee shop or a farm-to-table diner or a project space or a farm-to-coffee-table-shop-space-project. Suddenly Whitecock is the new Hudson. Easy, right?.
Crash Landing?
As the drone pans over the now empty, Borg-like interiors, commentators talk about the “soul” of the place.
by Yasmin Nair
Nathan Eddy’s documentary Starship Chicago II circles the rotunda of the James R. Thompson Center, which was recently sold off by the city of Chicago to Google. What will become of this postmodernist icon?
You’re invited!
It’s true. Another issue is almost here, and we’re throwing a party to celebrate. You should come!
Contributors to this issue include Thomas de Monchaux, Marisa Cortright, Owen Hatherley, Zach Mortice, Ellen Peirson, Lily Puckett, Claudia Ross, Eric Schwartau, Sean Tatol, Aaron Timms, and Kate Wagner. Some of them will be there, and a couple will read their articles live.
Our hosts, Arcana, are architectural fabricators and will be turning their entire shop upside down to make it into a proper party space. They will be leading a crafts session for early comers.
Expect games, free food, reasonably priced drinks … and a late-night dance party.
By purchasing a ticket, you will receive a free drink, a free issue, and that warm fuzzy feeling you get from supporting a small publication. If you are a subscriber, you get a discounted ticket, and if you are a subscriber and move quickly, you can snag a free ticket.
If you are not yet a subscriber and really want that discount, then simply go to nyra.nyc/subscribe.
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.
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