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New York Review of Architecture

@nyreviewofarch

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Reviews architecture, in New York.

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Introducing NYRA no. 51: Cup, cone, or inverted zigguRAT?

Issues are on their way to our subscribers. Not yet a subscriber? Become one today and get the scoop from NYRA in your mailbox.

ESSAYS

Thomas de Monchaux roasts the NewMu’s starchy starchitecture in “Hot Potato, Kool Potato.” James Andrew Billingsley is too cool for pool in “Plus Ça Change.” Audrey Wollen follows Michael Sorkin’s foosteps in “Walk and Talk.” Sam Fentress seeks an audience with the toparchs of topiary in “Hedgelords.”Aaron Timms gives Etihad Park the bird in “Fowl Play,” the fourth essay in NYRA’s ongoing PANENKA series.

REVIEWS

Mario Carpo recounts a life among grocers in “Affairs of the Cart.” Olivia Oldham irons out Wages for Housework in “The Theoretical Housewives of New York City.” Lari Rutschmann pushes back on PowerPoint urbicide in “Sunset, Sunrise.” Owen Hatherley dusts off the dialectic in “Question Marx.” Huw Lemmey considers Antifascist Architecture in “Partisan Review.” Jennifer Kabat maps the terra damnata of managed retreat in “Flood Meridian.” Beatrice Loayza samples an uncanny canon in “Horrors d’Oeuvres.” Kannan Mahadevan woke up this morning, got himself a pun in “Casa Nostra.”

AND SO MUCH MORE!

Jo Livingstone is litorally obsessed in BUILDINGSROMAN. Eric Schwartau has a meet-Brut in CATTY CORNER. Nicolas Kemper voyages to Now Voyager in PUBLISHERS NOTED. Jackson Arn, Sammy Biglin, Isabel Cristo, Clare Fentress, Zack Hatfield, Kim Hew-Low, Izzy Kornblatt, Thomas de Monchaux, and Elmo Tumbokon get fast and loose in SHORTCUTS. LETTERS AND REPLIES from Casey Mack, George Claflen, Mark Krotov, and Paul Goldberger.

Illustrations by Lauren Martin, Jason Adam Katzenstein, and our cover artist Sean C. Suchara. by @nyreviewofarch

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a month ago

Come rub elbows in the city of big shoulders for the launch of Chicago Review of Architecture! We’ll be pouring one out for Mrs. O’Leary’s cow and dishing deep on the Obamalisk, LSD, and the wackadoo corporate mannerism of Wacker Drive at BandWith Chicago on Saturday, November 7. Soak in the Mies-en-scène, measure the merits of common brick, and argue about which Chicago river cruise is best (to drink Old Style on).

RSVP at the link in bio.

All tickets include entry to the party and a copy of the issue. If you act fast, you can snag a discounted early-bird ticket!

Want to attend the party for free and continue reading the best writing on architecture from Canarsie to Canaryville? Subscribe. taken in BandWith by @nyreviewofarch

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10 days ago

“Like any avidly online Lavrentiy Beria enthusiast, the book’s editors aver that theirs is the correct Marxism and others, particularly those more concerned with the quotidian political concrete, are deficient in the true understanding of Marxian thought.”

Owen Hatherley dusts off the dialectic in NYRA no. 52.

“The number of architects—including some famous ones—who have been members of Marxist organizations of one sort or another is extensive. Lina Bo Bardi, Ernő Goldfinger, André Lurçat, Hannes Meyer, Oscar Niemeyer, Mart Stam, to invoke a few Great Men and Great Women, were all very public Communists. A handful took this as far as clandestine or armed struggle, like Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, detained in a concentration camp for her work in the anti-Nazi resistance, or Huỳnh Tấn Phát, a guerrilla who led the Vietnamese National Liberation Front into Saigon in 1975 and was also the architect of streamlined villas before the war and of Brutalist theaters after it. For some, their architecture was incidental to their socialism; for others, it was intrinsic.

You will find none of these people, bar a dismissive swipe at Niemeyer and an equally brief but complimentary name-check of Schütte-Lihotzky, in Mark Crinson and Luisa Lorenza Corna’s edited collection STRUGGLES IN THE CONCRETE: ARCHITECTURE AND THE MARXIST TRADITION (2025). Marxism here is not necessarily a revolutionary political project, in much the same way as architecture is not necessarily buildings. Instead, it is a multifaceted academic discipline: a philosophical system and an interpretative method, a political economy and a social ecology. That is, it is 'Western Marxism,' the Marxism of theory-eaters like the Historical Materialism conference and journal franchise, the Marxism that is the bugbear of young neo-Stalinists for whom critical theory was an invention of the CIA.”

(link in bio) by @nyreviewofarch

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2 days ago

What is funny? The old canard about obscenity—I know it when I see it—comes to mind. Yet surely a description is possible. That’s the challenge of our much-anticipated caption contest: Starting with no. 51, every issue of NYRA will feature an original panel by doyenne delineator Madelon Vriesendorp awaiting a punchline. Send your rattiest gags and most risible blagues to the care of editor@nyra.nyc.

(Be sure to include “caption contest” and the issue number in the email subject.)

Winners will receive the nonpecuniary honor of publication in the following issue of NYRA and an eternal place in our yellowing annals.

Art by @madelon_vriesendorp. by @nyreviewofarch

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3 days ago

“Observing a scene of wintry repastination through the bars, I wondered again: What does the visitor to Central Park gain by relinquishing their impression of the landscape as subject to chance and change?”

Sam Fentress seeks an audience with the toparchs of topiary in NYRA no. 51.

“The principal irony of Central Park’s topography lies in the assiduously maintained tracts at its northeast corner that make up the Conservatory Garden, constructed eighty years after Olmsted and Calvert Vaux’s Greensward Plan. This recently renovated trio of formal plots, revered by its patrons but not especially well known, represents everything the planners rejected in their original rus in urbe design; nothing else in the park’s 840 acres approaches the garden’s geometric rigidity. Even so, the garden appears to complement—in its air of acute civility—Olmsted’s dream of a spiritually ordered park....

When I visited in spring of 2025, just as the garden was reopening, the atmosphere of fanatic upkeep was almost too much to bear. For fifteen minutes I watched a conservancy worker endeavor to wrangle a rosebush in the French garden back within the confines of a wrought-iron fence, from which it was attempting a prison break. (Clarence Cook, a Ruskinian critic who at Olmsted’s behest wrote an early book-length encomium of the park, had wondered: ‘Who ever knew … what the honeysuckle can do when it can follow its own inclination, and is not urged to climb a trellis it has no mind for?’)

During another visit, I followed a tour unfolding in the English garden, where a park ranger was extolling the virtues of a weeping higan cherry. Around the corner, she warned us not to consume the leaves of a flowering Japanese andromeda shrub lest we suffer blindness or death. A man leaning over to inspect the leaves stumbled onto a patch of mulch, incurring a sharp rebuke from our guide: ‘Please don’t step off the path.’ If one is more ready to hear this kind of admonishment in a gallery of paintings than in a park, that is exactly the point.” (link in bio) by @nyreviewofarch

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4 days ago

Events this week, through Sunday, October 18.

Highlights include a panel on the municipal sublime hosted by n+1 and the Center for Architecture, CULTURAL CAPITAL (2026) screening, AT THE EDGE OF WHERE GOD BUILT (2026) book talk.

Find details on these events and more, or submit an event of your own, at our link in bio. by @nyreviewofarch

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5 days ago

Thanks to everyone who joined us at the NYRA no. 51 launch party on September 28!

Attendees relished the autumnal air at @honeysbrooklyn, sipping glasses of mead and devouring our latest. Some entered ideas for our caption contest, which you can find on the first page of NYRA no. 51.

Visit the link in bio to read NYRA no. 51. Subscribe now to have it delivered to your door.

Photos by @nathaliebasoski. taken in Honey's Brooklyn by @nyreviewofarch

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9 days ago

“More than it is a soccer ground, a community facility, or a job creator, Etihad Park is above all a laboratory for a new idea of the city, a meeting point between Emirati and American notions of the late-capitalist good life.”

Amid Manchester City’s finance scandal, read Aaron Timms on Etihad Park, the team owner’s new stadium in Queens.

“The stadium’s boosters will counter that Etihad Park is necessarily a structure committed to equity and fairness: Just look at all that pristine housing—affordable and already equipped, in some sections, to welcome its fortunate poors—that bricks the stadium in. … Etihad Park is no boondoggle for the billionaire class; it is the fulcrum of a new community, built by union labor for that most politically useful and definitionally slippery constituency: ‘ordinary New Yorkers.’ But will the ordinaries have any real contact with their twenty-five-thousand temporary neighbors? On the one hand, it’s good the city is building more homes, especially affordable ones (however their affordability is defined). On the other hand, since most of their inhabitants will likely be priced out of match-day attendance, the apartment complexes abutting Etihad Park seem more like décor to boost the stadium’s atmospherics, a panel-clad Potemkin village built to approximate the dense urban cotton nesting inner-city grounds in England or Spain. It’s not uncommon for major new sports venues to disrupt existing neighborhoods; what’s unusual about Etihad Park is that it conceives the stadium and an adjoining locality for the stadium to ignore at the same time.

Here the contradictions of the sports economy reach their zenith, and the crisis of the modern stadium scales a fresh peak of absurdity. Not only does Etihad Park appear destined to alienate its own support base through various financial contortions and extortions; it will also be the world’s first football stadium dropped into a new neighborhood it doesn’t serve. And not just any new neighborhood but one of the club’s own design. Modern sport could have no clearer expression of the contempt in which its owner class holds ‘ordinary’ people.”

(link in bio) taken in Etihad Park by @nyreviewofarch

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12 days ago

Events this week, through Sunday, October 4.

Highlights include THE ARCHITECTURAL REVIEW in the US, Brutalist zoo design, and a screening of THE STORY OF THE BQE (2024).

Find details on these events and more, or submit an event of your own, at our link in bio. by @nyreviewofarch

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13 days ago

“I’ve always thought, I said to her, that gay people came to Riis because of the veneer of disrepair and the privacy it made possible. Now you’ve done the repairs.”

Jo Livingstone previews a separate Riis in NYRA no. 51.

“In August, the first phase of a new $88 million mixed-use facility opened at the Jacob Riis Bathhouse, under the name Rockaway Ocean Club....I joined a press tour of the site on a very hot morning in late June....A courtyard separates the low-lying entry pavilion from the larger building with the turrets, which won’t open until next year. On one side of the courtyard is a veranda and on the other is a U-shaped pool—both new additions, Ursula Damani, founding partner of Rockaway Ocean Club, explained. She was friendly and seemed genuinely excited to show journalists around. She was also at pains to emphasize continuity: The original complex opened when it was only 60 percent finished, and so would this one....

Investment in the Rockaways has been profoundly uneven. Aspirational holiday homes are set adrift in food deserts. In this sense, the Rockaway Ocean Club perhaps represents another point of continuity. According to the club’s website, more than half of the restored complex will be open to the public. Access to the pool, lounge chairs, and other amenities will be limited to members, with annual fees ranging from $1,000 to $3,500 (for a family). Damani, who cited the development’s expense in connection with the rates, seemed earnest about keeping the bathhouse true to its roots. ‘People like to put things in boxes,’ she said. ‘Why can’t we have a kids’ summer camp in the morning, and a queer dance party in the evening?’

After my visit, I called Ceyenne Doroshow, founder of Gays and Lesbians Living in a Transgender Society (GLITS) and longtime community steward at Riis, to ask what the beach had meant to her as a younger person, before she grew into a doyenne of glamour and activism. ‘That was my home for many years,’ she said. ‘Every summer, when I had no place to go, those people took care of me.’ (I also put Damani’s question to her. She replied, ‘Whose kids?’).’

(link in bio) taken in Jacob Riis Beach by @nyreviewofarch

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Events this week, through Sunday, October 4.

Highlights include tonight's NYRA no. 51 launch party, new American architecture, and a discussion of ‘Last Year in End Times Cinema.'

Find details on these events and more, or submit an event of your own, at our link in bio. by @nyreviewofarch

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20 days ago

“TIME Magazine’s twenty-five best inventions of 2013 included ‘alcoholic coffee’; cronuts; such things as ‘the Amplituhedron,’ ‘the 3Doodler,’ and ‘the Gastric-Brooding FROG’; ‘artificial memories’; Northrup Grumman’s X-47B drone; and Plus Pool, which is what you get when you average all the others together.”

James Andrew Billingsley is too cool for pool in NYRA no. 51.

“In the sixteen years since its debut, Plus Pool, which promises to use innovative filtration methods that would enable New Yorkers to swim in water taken directly from the East River, has drifted in and out of the shallow end of pop architecture coverage, accompanied by cerulean renderings and overly optimistic timelines. From the beginning, the pool’s boosters have presented its origin as a sort of chill parthenogenesis—a concept springing fully formed from the doldrums of 2010’s record-breaking New York summer. ...

By 2015 Plus Pool had raised more than $300,000 through two Kickstarter campaigns, produced a working prototype the size of a hot tub, and established a governing nonprofit, Friends of Plus Pool, with a board whose members included Joshua David, the Friends of the High Line cofounder, and Marc Kushner, cofounder of the architecture firm Hollwich Kushner and the website ARCHITIZER (and cousin of Jared). ...After the 501(c)(3), however, progress begins to be measured in crossovers and collaborations, and the autobiography becomes so loaded with brands (Heineken, MacLaren, Campari, Lavazza), celebrities, and charitable honors that it feels feudal, like a wedding invitation from the elector of Brandenburg. ...

In a situation where pool access is supply constrained, any additional lanes, no matter how tardy or potentially gentrifying, might seem beneficial. But $50 million for 300 swimmers (in the Plus Pool’s hypothetical, fully quadri-brachial form) isn’t the kind of math that will change anything. ...What makes the Plus Pool hype feel the most exaggerated of all is that the city already has a quixotic floating pool, which is to say a barge with a pool on it; it’s just in the Bronx, where no Kushner would want to have a gala.”

(link in bio) by @nyreviewofarch

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