The current owner of the Lion House is happy to let rumors about his property’s basement passageway simmer.
Tag: Architecture
Against Walled Worlds: Remembering Michael Sorkin, 1948–2020
Could architecture and design transform a place like Gaza, and do so with justice? One of Sorkin’s last projects tackled exactly those questions.
Public Housing and the Right to the City
Not simply a roof over one’s head, public housing nurtures its inhabitants’ demands for an even greater stake in the life of the metropolis.
The House That Form Built
Across the slatted border between the United States and Mexico, near Ciudad Juárez, the artists Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello recently installed several ...
Pornotopia
In 1962, Hugh Hefner was photographed posing next to the scale model of a modern building, echoing the portraits of Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier taken a few years earlier. Indifferent to the ...
Fill the Halls: Space and Possibility in Lahore, Pakistan
Lahore today can feel like a city of security checks and gated passages, tall walls and ...
On Christopher Street Pier
This month, Public Books mourns the loss of the writer, teacher, and editor Ellis Avery to leiomyosarcoma, a rare uterine cancer. Ellis’s essay about a beloved ...
A City Plans for War
What if war was waged not with bombs but with blueprints? Urban planning’s promise of an improved city of the future is especially bright in postconflict cities, where planning is expected to bring ...
Casa de Pueblo: Recovering Spain’s Rural Past
I wish I had an answer, but the truth is, I don’t know what I’m going to do with this dilapidated, 17th-century historic estate that has been vacant since the 1960s ...
Modernism, Heal Thyself
Austria’s most famous asylum rises on regular terraces up the shallow slope of Vienna’s Gallitzinberg hill. Seen from the south, the asylum’s 60-odd buildings appear to merge, presenting a continuous ...
See How The City Divides Us
In New York the preference is for discrete rails or sharply sloped surfaces, in London polished studs do the trick; San Francisco opts for boulders, and Lima has no ...
Modernism, Heal Thyself
Austria’s most famous asylum rises on regular terraces up the shallow slope of Vienna’s Gallitzinberg hill. Seen from the south, the asylum’s 60-odd buildings appear to merge, presenting a continuous ...
The Gowanus Overpass: Brooklyn, New York
In 2012, I moved into a Sunset Park apartment with a kitchen window nearly perpendicular to the Brooklyn Queens Expressway ...
Planning Happiness: A Postcard from Christianshavn, Copenhagen
This is the latest installment of Public Streets, an urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. This street used to be quieter, just an occasional bike rattling over the cobblestones along a ...
Rebuild by Design: Interviews with Ricky Burdett and Hitoshi Abe
There is a growing feeling among both critical social scientists and design professionals that the two groups need to undertake a more intensive dialogue. In the New York region, some of this ...
Don Justo and the Never-Ending Cathedral: Mejorada del Campo, Spain
The 21st-century traveler is chronically late: the cathedrals are all built, or, if by some historical accident left unfinished, buried under ...
The “New York Values” of “City on Fire”
Some readers will come to Garth Risk Hallberg’s City on Fire with chips on their shoulders. Hallberg’s youth; the seeming ease with which he parlayed his manuscript into an enormous advance ...
Thérésa Tallien’s Legacy: Style on the rue de Babylone
Since the 18th century, the rue de Babylone has been a site for salons that bring the haute monde into contact with innovative artists ...
Weekend Reading: Bad Santa
The holidays are fast approaching, and with them, travel, Seasonal Affective Disorder, and the need for excuses to avoid conversation with your uncle when he’s in one of his moods. As such, here is ...
How the 9/11 Museum Gets Us
There was little choice. From the earliest conceptions of what would be done at Ground Zero, there would be one. A museum. And now here it is, the National September 11 Memorial Museum, which opened ...