Gottland: Mostly True Stories from Half of CzechoslovakiaMariusz Szczygiel
Glass! Love!! Perpetual Motion!!! A Paul Scheerbart ReaderEdited by Josiah McElheny and Christine Burgin
The Sympathy of Things: Ruskin and the Ecology of DesignLars Spuybroek
The Pentagon of Power: The Myth of the MachineLewis Mumford
The Bone Clocks: A NovelDavid Mitchell
January 9, 2022
Art Chantry’s first cover for The Rocket, so wrong it’s right.
Greetings from the Catskills where, despite the fact that the temperature is well below freezing, the stuff falling from the sky is rain, destined to become a sheet of ice. This morning I read an interview with Art Chantry, a graphic designer who was well known in 1980s Seattle for his posters. He eventually became the art director of The Rocket,
January 3, 2022
From Ruth Asawa: All is Possible at David Zwirner
My New Year’s resolution is simple: to finish what I started. I have a small pile of projects that I began in the past year or two that I put aside whenever something with a deadline came up. And I need to return to those less immediate projects and transform them into the urgent, all-consuming ones.
One minor thing: the contact email in the bottom left-hand corner of this website’s homepage has changed.
September 11, 2021
Lower Manhattan as seen from South Slope, Brooklyn.
When I look out my bedroom window, this is what I see. This morning it occurred to me that, of the all the places I’ve lived in New York City (10 by my count…I may be forgetting a couple), this is the only one with a view of the World Trade Center.
20 years ago today, I wasn’t living in NYC at all.
June 29, 2021
Little Island is neo-Olmstedian. (Photo: Karrie Jacobs)
Last week I rode a CitiBike from southernmost South Slope, Brooklyn to the newest attraction on the Hudson River waterfront, that Thomas Heatherwick conceived/ Barry Diller funded spectacle. And I found Little Island to be the most perfect symbol imaginable of our present moment. If anyone asked me what our relationship with the natural world is like in the third decade of the 21st century,
July 7, 2020
“And then, in what may be the strangest drive of the trip, I head west and south to Mt. Rushmore, accompanied along the way by a swarm of bikers that grows thicker as I get closer to the monument until, on the final approach road I feel like a float in a parade. In my Volkswagen, I am the only non-biker in a stream miles long. I pull into a concrete parking garage that works like a woofer,
May 18, 2020
Today is the 40th anniversary of the eruption of Mt. St. Helens. It’s not an event I often think about, despite being the only time I’ve ever been anywhere near a live volcano. What I remember about it is this: on the afternoon of the eruption, I was riding the bus from my apartment on Seattle’s Capitol Hill to Pioneer Square, south of downtown. I was on my way to a print shop where,
May 11, 2020
The New Jersey Meadowlands and Turnpike at their most poetic.
Because the future of Curbed is a bit unclear, I decided to go through everything I’ve written for them over the past five years — during Kelsey Keith’s tenure as editor-in-chief — and make copies of all my stories. In the process, I reread it all.
I haven’t updated my list of things I’ve written in a long,
April 30, 2020
The Kingston, NY Shopping Mall District during the pandemic.
I’d be lying if I said my fascination with walking in places where pedestrians are not exactly welcome began in late 2018 when, on assignment for Curbed, I journeyed on foot to LaGuardia Airport, accompanied by photographer Stanley Greenberg. The truth is that I’ve spent most of my life fascinated by non-places, the portions of the man made environment for which no one has bothered to craft an image,
April 4, 2020
What I wish we could do right now is dust off our pussy hats and pour into the streets to protest Trump’s criminally dysfunctional response to the coronavirus pandemic. And we also need to loudly condemn the things he’s doing while he thinks we’re too distracted by our dying neighbors to notice (like his Friday evening firing of Michael Atkinson, the intelligence community watchdog who informed Congress of the Ukraine whistleblower’s complaint).
January 2, 2020
A glimpse of the Oculus, February 2016, during a hardhat tour of the complex.
When I started Tweeting in 2013, I stopped blogging.
I think many of us — maybe most of us — did. We moved from hammering out thoughts on our own websites to making quick hits on social media. Whatever blogs remained were professionalized, less about the exploration of half-formed ideas and more about monetizing them.
