The window looked out on a brick wall and down into an alley full of New York air, the kind fit for cats and garbage.
Flannery O’Connor, “Judgement Day,” 1965
New York was swishing and jamming one minute and dirty and dead the next. His daughter didn’t even live in a house. She lived in a building—the middle in a row of buildings all alike, all blackened-red and gray with rasp-mouthed people hanging out their windows looking at other windows and other people just like them looking back. Inside you could go up and you could go down and there were just halls that reminded you of tape measures strung out with a door every inch. He remembered he’d been dazed by the building the first week. He’d wake up expecting the halls to have changed in the night and he’d look out the door and there they stretched like dog runs. The streets were the same way. He wondered where he’d be if he walked to the end of one of them. One night he dreamed he did and ended at the end of the building—nowhere.
Flannery O’Connor, “The Geranium,” 1946
He was the man in the house and he did the things a man in the house was supposed to do. It was a dull occupation at night when the old girls crabbed and crocheted in the parlor and the man in the house had to listen and judge sparrow-like wars that rasped and twittered intermittently.
Flannery O’Connor, “The Geranium,” 1946
There was a thing inside him that had wanted to see New York. He had been to Atlanta once when he was a boy and he had seen New York in a picture show, Big Town Rhythm it was. Big towns were important places. The thing inside him had sneaked up on him for just one instant. The place he'd seen in the picture show had room for him! It was an important place and it had room for him! He'd said yes, he'd go.
Flannery O’Connor, “The Geranium,” 1946
The economist and game theorist Thomas Schelling called central coordinates in games “focal points.” For example, when two people had agreed to meet at a given day in New York but had not coordinated the time or place of their meeting, Schelling found that they would likely both come to the main concourse of Grand Central terminal in New York, at 12 noon, at the clock in the center. In anticipation of what the other would do. That would be tacit coordination.
Daniel Van der Velden and Vinca Kruk of Metahaven, “On Transparency and Propaganda,” 2017
Weiss / Manfredi, Diana Center at Barnard College, New York City, NY, 2010
Flad Architects + KPF, CUNY Advanced Science Research Center, New York City, NY, 2014
#flad architects#kpf#kohn pedersen fox#cuny#advaced science research center#new york#new york city#research#science#wet lab#nanotechnology#clean room#glass#transparency#undulation#facade#stair#interior#interior design#interiors#lobby#atrium#light#color#lounge#landscape#landscape architecture#design#tower#twin
A lot of contemporary art is agitating. Gratuitous sexual provocation and moral bullying; sensory irritation and intellectual grandiosity; gaudy spectacle and cults of personality. Roiled by such strident forms of sociopathology, today’s art and its attendant New York society can sometimes seem like a boiling caldron of bile and tears heated by a bonfire of money. In many ways, it’s not so different from the mainstream cultures of music, movies, television and politics, and it’s usually not as entertaining.
Ken Johnson, “Robert Irwin at Dia:Beacon,” 2015
RPBW, Jerome L. Greene Science Center + Lenfest Center for the Arts at Columbia University Manhattanville, New York, NY, 2017