A City Rises, Along With Its Hopes
(The entrance pavilion to the Botanical Garden in Medellín, Colombia, designed by Lorenzo Castro. Paul Smith for The New York Times)
“What sets Medellín apart is the particular strength of its culture of urbanism, which acts now almost like a civic calling card. The city’s new mayor, Aníbal Gaviria, spent an hour describing to me his dreams for burying a congested highway that runs through the middle of town, building an electric tram along the hillsides to stem the sprawl of the slums, adding a green belt of public buildings along the tram, rehabilitating the Medellín River and densifying the city center — smart, public-spirited, improvements. It’s as if, in this country whose relatively robust economy has underwritten many forward-thinking projects, every mayor here has to have enormous architectural and infrastructural plans, or risk coming across as small-minded or an outsider.” (New York Times)
3 days ago
Carroll Shelby, Builder of Cobra Sports Car, Dies at 89
3 weeks ago
Jungleland
(Two houses on Alabo Street, one abandoned, one occupied. Photo by Andrew Moore/European Pressphoto Agency)
The Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans Gives New Meaning to ‘Urban Growth.’ The Lower Ninth has become a dumping ground for unwanted dogs and cats. People from all over the city take the Claiborne Avenue Bridge over the Industrial Canal, bounce along the fractured streets until they reach a suitably empty area and then toss the animals out of the car. But it’s not just pets. The neighborhood has become a dumping ground for many kinds of unwanted things. (New York Times)
2 months ago
Pastorals of the Atomic Age
(Photo by Mark Klett)
Two recent books of photography wrestle with the tension between official forgetting and the populist urge to remember.
“The Half-Life of History: The Atomic Bomb and Wendover Air Base” by the photographer Mark Klett and the writer William L. Fox (Radius) focuses on the Utah airfield where the Enola Gay was prepared before it flew to Asia and dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945. Wendover was deactivated in 1949, and most of it has been in decay since. “Chernobyl Zone (I)” by the Russian photographer Andrej Krementschouk (Kehrer) ushers us into the restricted zone around Chernobyl, where Reactor No. 4 melted down in April 1986.
When governments choose to forget — whether consciously or not — they make places restricted, create blank lands of secrets. And those places end up haunted, as truth, memory and the official story struggle for primacy. (New York Times)
2 months ago
Domesticities | Lieb House, Saved
(Lieb House, designed by Venturi & Rauch and completed in 1969, has a new life as a guest house in Glen Cove, N.Y. Photo by
For such a little building, the Lieb House has a notorious history. Designed by the Philadelphia architecture firm of Venturi & Rauch (now Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates) for Nathaniel and Judith Lieb and completed in 1969 in Barnegat Light, N.J., the house — a two-toned, asbestos-shingled box with a giant, Pop Art-influenced number 9 on the front and a huge crescent window on one side — caused outrage even in a neighborhood where clotheslines and telephone poles were essential parts of the landscape. (New York Times)
3 months ago
A Timeline of Marc Newson’s Designs
(The O21C Concept Car for Ford)
The prolific Australian-born industrial designer’s most memorable works over the past 25 years. (New York Times)
3 months ago
Into the Heart of Lightness
Doug Wheeler’s installation “DW 68 VEN MCASD 11” (1968-2011), in San Diego. Photo by Doug Gates/Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego.
The artist Doug Wheeler tells two stories, both having to do with light, that go a long way toward explaining why he is so revered by many fellow artists — as a visionary and a relentlessly stubborn perfectionist — and also why his work has been seen by so few American artgoers over the last few decades, particularly those in New York. (New York Times)
4 months ago
In Madrid’s Heart, Park Blooms Where a Freeway Once Blighted
More than six miles long, Madrid Río took over a neglected area of Spain’s capital, knitting together neighborhoods that had been severed from the city center. An article by Michael Kimmelman (New York Times)
5 months ago
A Genius of the Storefront, Too
“The best clients, to my mind, don’t say that whatever you do is fine,” Mr. Bohlin said last week, a few days after Mr. Jobs’s death. “They’re intertwined in the process. When I look back, it’s hard to remember who had what thought when. That’s the best, most satisfying work, whether a large building or a house.” (New York Times)
7 months ago
Writing’s on the Wall (Art Is, Too, for Now)
(Photo by Todd Heisler/The New York Times)
“These walls to me are no different than a canvas in a museum,” said Jonathan Cohen, 38, an artist from Flushing. He is the primary guardian here, and the source of the billboard-size words painted on the main wall, “5Pointz: The Institute of Higher Burnin’.” That his piercing eyes are worried and his dark hair infiltrated with gray is directly linked to recent statements by the building’s owner that 5Pointz is living on borrowed time — destined to be replaced by two residential towers. (New York Times)
9 months ago
