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Part of the Plumbing
NYRA’s Catty Corner columnist takes the plunge.
by Eric Schwartau
In one of the biggest, gayest cities in the world, there’s one big, gay thing missing: big, gay bathhouses. New York City bathing establishments like the Everard (fondly nicknamed “Ever Hard”) and the New St. Marks Baths were flourishing centers of gay social life until 1985, when the city shut them down amid the AIDS crisis. Whether you believe their closure was a necessary measure to save lives or a draconian overreach, almost forty years on, bathhouses like these have yet to return—and they won’t so long as New York State Codes Rules and Regulations, Volume A Title 10 Part 24.2, which deems such facilities “a threat to the public health,” remains on the books.
Still, we work with what we have.
An Old, Familiar Story
On why the story of the shipwreck continues to compel us
by Sophie Haigney
Titanic: The Exhibition lacks the depth of informed research we would expect from a museum exhibition, as well as the visual panache of something more fully cinematic—an IMAX documentary or even the Banksy exhibition, tasteless as it was. (Though it is, on the spectrum of pop-up immersive exhibitions I’ve seen, perhaps the deepest; it’s not a bad way to spend an afternoon if you find yourself for some reason marooned near Union Square and want to learn a little bit about the RMS Titanic.) Titanic wants to do everything—tell us about the people on the ship, tell us about the sweep of the grand narrative, show us some objects, and re-create some of the ship’s physical spaces. This is one of the more baffling aspects of the exhibition—walking through a simulation of the cabins, which have the feel of a movie-set version of a nice hotel. What exactly are we doing here? (Maybe taking pictures, but even that seems weird.)
Point Blank
It would be tempting to lump CLT in with the “post-digital” tendency in architecture. But that would be wrong.
by Mario Carpo
CLT panels used to be called, in the technical lingo, “blanks,” but—and this is the gist of this book—their blankness becomes here, metaphorically, an aesthetic value, part of a core architectural agenda. That is not to say a new architectural agenda: the book—edited by Jennifer Bonner, a designer, and engineer Hanif Kara, and comprising essays, design projects, art installations, and student work—is the latest emanation of an architectural trend that has been around for some time now, which happens to have found in CLT the perfect building material to match its aesthetic ambitions, thus offering a conduit to advance and promote a certain architectural style.
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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