a single file of passers-by, stooped and penumbral and annihilated by the vertical power of the supertalls
the new venue’s art will be made to work, to prove a “fit” with the cultural tastes of the supertallified city: an injunction writ large in the choice of that utilitarian name
The Art Students League will be shrouded but kept barely alive as a sop to its billionaire neighbors; though they may not engage with it, they will have the comfort of knowing there is art close by.
Cities change, of course they do; but what matters is for whom they change, and at what cost. Demolition, displacement, accommodation, and compromise are the conditions of urban life. But the city of the supertalls is engineered to take its denizens beyond these conditions, to deliver them into fri…
Another New York lay mere blocks away: a city of crowded subway cars and diners and panhandlers and mounds of sidewalk garbage piled high. But the supertall’s residents, whoever they were, wherever they were, did not know that place. Their building contributed to the density of urban life but insul…
