Read Later
Above Grade: On the High Line
Places Journal
A native New Yorker traces the pre-history of the High Line, and ponders whether the celebrated park will be a victim of its success.
Jane Jacobs, Andy Warhol, and Community
Places Journal
An urban geographer compares the radically different New York worlds of Warhol’s Factory and Jacobs’s Greenwich Village — and comes to some provocative conclusions.
The City’s End
Places Journal
A review of The City’s End: Two Centuries of Fantasies, Fears and Premonitions of New York’s Destruction, by architectural historian Max Page.
Adventure Playground: The Transformation of New York
Places Journal
Beginning in the late 1960s, New York City was transformed under Mayor John Lindsay from a workaday zone to a scenic setting for urban play, an “adventure playground.”
The Occupation of 123 Delancey Street
Places Journal
How a band of “dirty little artists” liberated a vacant public building on the front lines of urban renewal, on the Lower East Side of New York City.
Please Save Modernism from the Modern
Places Journal
Why the Folk Art Museum is a great modernist building, and why the Museum of Modern Art should reverse its decision to tear it down.
Digital Deception
Places Journal
Welcome to the world of architectural photography without architecture.
A Building, Not a Colt Revolver
Places Journal
From prehistoric cliff dwellings to recent projects by Morphosis and Herzog & de Meuron, the question of how a building should relate to its site offers no easy or universal answer.
TEDification versus Edification
Places Journal
The magical thinking and many contradictions of the TED Talks — and the implicit threats to design and education.
The Chinese Dream
Places Journal
In booming Guangzhou, rural migrant workers find their first footing in one of the city’s many urban villages. But what happens when the land becomes more valuable than the village?