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Why Nicolai Ouroussoff Is Not Good Enough

When I told an editor recently that my dream upon graduating from college was to be an architecture critic, she laughed. Not at me (I don’t think), but at the idea of aspiring to a job that might be doomed. Online, both everyone and no one is a critic, and architecture talk proliferates, often in [...]

Music in Zeroes and Ones

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Don’t Go in There!: How to Design Fear

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Somebody Nailed My Dress to the Wall

On June 30, 2009, dance devotees from around the world mourned the untimely death of choreographer Pina Bausch. At 69 years of age and just four days after a diagnosis of cancer, she left behind a son, an acclaimed dance company, devoted fans, and a trove of masterpieces that changed the course of dance and [...]

The New Park on the Old High Line

For a park so young, the High Line Park, built on an abandoned freight train track that runs from Gansevoort Street in the Meatpacking District to 34th Street, between 10th & 11th Avenues, has already created a mythology of sorts for itself. Reviews of the park in various publications, a packed events calendar and a multitude of blog [...]

Why There Are No Locks on the Bathroom Doors in the Hotel Louis XIV

An ingenious example of the product-situation cycle could once be found in a Quebec waterfront hotel called L’Hotel Louis XIV, lamentably destroyed by fire in the 1980s. At the Louis XIV, the term “private bath” meant what it means in many European hotels: the bath is yours but not yours alone, for it is also [...]

Lady Gaga is a Machine for Dancing

Warholian pop princess, poster child of “neon noir,” hermaphroditic Ann Coulter doppelganger, butter face, the list goes on: Lady GaGa, née Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta, has been called a lot of things more ridiculous than her own stage name—which, as it turns out, is actually a reference to Freddie Mercury song—but she doesn’t seem to [...]

Advertising Takeover

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Pedicab Wallah

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Celebrating Design

September is the best time to visit Calcutta, the capital city of West Bengal, India. In the gentle autumn weather the Bengalis celebrate a ten day festival in honour of their favourite diety: the ten-armed Mother Goddess Durga. There is private worship in every home, but each neighbourhood organizes public worship at a stall, or [...]

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