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Architecture

Fulton Center is built in a transit vernacular that extrapolates the charm of a subway car to the scale and complexity of a Piranesian prison.

It’s rush hour in Fulton Center and thousands of black-coated commuters stream into the glass building through entrances on Broadway and Fulton Street and funnel down to the hovering circular concourse before branching off to further descend to the many tunnels that transverse New York’s five boroughs. A steady hum of voices backgrounds the incessant chirp-crank, chirp-crank […]

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Architecture

From Pits and Pendulums to Pastoral Porches: Edgar Allan Poe’s Bronx Getaway

Once upon a morning dreary, I left Brooklyn with eyes bleary, Wearily I took the subway to a poet’s old forgotten home. In 1844, Edgar Allan Poe and his young wife Virginia moved to New York City. It was Poe’s second time living in the city and just one of many homes for the peripatetic […]

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Architecture

Selling Junkspace or One Man’s Trash is Another Man’s Multi-Million Dollar Residential Tower

The September issue of Smithsonian Magazine features an insightful profile of Rem Koolhaas written by former New York Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff. As a companion to that article, I wrote a piece on Design Decoded, Smithsonian’s blog on design and everyday life, looking at some of the unbuilt high-rise towers designed by Koolhaas and OMA. […]

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Architecture

Aesthetics/Anesthetics at the Storefront for Art and Architecture

I wrote a review for Domus of Aesthetics/Anesthetics, the current exhibition running at New York’s Storefront for Art and Architecture. Here’s an excerpt: – – – Storefront for Art and Architecture was founded in 1982 as a non-profit organization dedicated to the advancement of architecture and the built environment. Ten years after its opening, artist […]

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Architecture

New York by Gehry: A Review In Which Your Architecture Critic’s Personal Issues May Be Interfering With His Job

The following post was originally written as an entry to McSweeney’s 2011 Column Contest. It didn’t win. But I had a lot of fun writing it so I thought I’d post it here. As proposed, it was an architectural criticism column written from the perspective of a somewhat emotionally dysfunctional critic who sees his own […]