When Creative Time’s latest exhibition Living As Form opened at the historic Essex Street Market on September 24th, it wasn’t without context. Just four months earlier, the Festival of Ideas for the New City brought scores of people to the nearby Bowery to think about urban spaces, generating new notions…
Concentrating the mind and standing still often seem two of the most elusive experiences in New York. In To a Great City, the second edition of the Guggenheim’s multidisciplinary stillspotting nyc program that ran from September 15-18 and 22-25, Estonian composer Arvo Pärt and the NYC- and Oslo-based architectural firm Snøhetta sought to provide New Yorkers with opportunities to do just that. At five sites…
On August 6th, a small group gathered around artist Mary Mattingly to listen to “The Story of Flock House,” a history of her current work-in-progress and its corresponding exhibit, The Investigation, Constitution and Formation of Flock House, currently on view at the LMCC’s Art Center on Governors Island. Flock House is a prototype nomadic living system made…
Many New Yorkers know about Chashama, the arts organization Anita Durst founded in 1995 to help artists and curators find underused spaces to house temporary exhibitions, performance spaces and studios. The organization relies heavily on the Durst family’s history in New York City real estate, and acts as a diplomatic Robin Hood of real estate. Based on the idea that empty property does not always serve the interests of landlords and developers, some have been willing to donate their…
Walking into an exhibition of Ezra Stoller photographs induces a specific kind of vertigo. Tightly grouped zones of square, white frames regiment the wall planes of the white-cubic gallery space; within the frames, monuments of 20th century modernism continue to reflect their mysterious light, vanguards of the era now as embedded in the collective mindframe as the temples of antiquity. Stoller’s articulation of the various species of…
What do you want from your city’s soil? There are many homegrown and local agriculture ideas in Living Concrete/Carrot City, an exhibition currently on view at Parsons The New School for Design, and they’re worth a look. The projects range from farm visits for families to bodega research, education and…
Few figures invoke the tensions of urban planning in New York City like the larger than life Robert Moses. But it is another iconic figure, Paul Rudolph, who may have the last word on the project that Moses hoped would seal his legacy — the Lower Manhattan Expressway. An important new exhibit at Cooper Union, organized by the Drawing Center, provides a much-needed reminder of Rudolph’s breadth of vision for Lower Manhattan.
You Are Here → Mapping the Psychogeography of New York City, an exhibit now on view at the Pratt Institute’s Manhattan Gallery, is guest curated by Katharine Harmon, owner of Tributary Books in Seattle and author of the cartography-inclined books Map as Art (2009) and You…
As I recover from the intense heat and severe foot-pounding of the XIIth Venice Biennale of Architecture, I’m at something of a loss as to what to make of it. Trying to use the theme this year, “People Meet …
After several years obsessively following a cluster of artists, investigators, cartographers and academics interested in varied approaches to human interactions with the land, I was excited to learn that the Experimental Geography exhibition, which showcases many of these projects and …


