A Walking Tour of Greenwich Village With Architecture Critic Michael Kimmelman
It’s a late afternoon in early November, nearing dusk, and I’m sitting with Michael Kimmelman, the New York Times architecture critic, inside the West Village outpost of Daily Provisions, a café from the New York City restaurateur Danny Meyer. A sort of contemporary town square, Daily Provisions is exactly the kind of place that Kimmelman, who’s widely known for his egalitarian, public-oriented prose, would consider from a development and urban design perspective: its impacts on the streetscape and the neighborhood, the community around it, and the city beyond. (In 2016, he wrote about another Meyer establishment, Union Square Cafe, unpacking the implications of the then-new location and layout of the legacy Manhattan restaurant.)
Located on the corner of Downing and Bedford Streets, Daily Provisions also happens to be a block from the red-brick prewar apartment building Kimmelman was raised in, at 10 Downing Street, along Sixth Avenue. This is the neighborhood of his youth, but this being New York City, and Kimmelman (aside from his studies at Yale and Harvard, from 1976 to 1982; stints in Philadelphia and Atlanta; and a period in Berlin, from 2007 to mid-2011, during which he was the Times’s “Abroad” columnist) being a lifelong New Yorker, the Village remains his neighborhood, even if he technically now resides on the Upper West Side.
I’m meeting Kimmelman here to discuss his new book, The Intimate City: Walking New York, but also—playing directly off of its theme—to take a walk. Before we head out, we first talk about the book over cappuccinos.
Comprising 17 deftly, expertly composed walks with architects, urban planners, writers, and others, The Intimate City provides multilayered views of the city through the lenses of Kimmelman and such visionary thinkers as the writer Suketu Mehta, the architects Marion Weiss and Michael Manfredi, and the landscape architect and urban designer Kate Orff. Conceived at the beginning of the Covid-19 lockdown and originally published in the Times—beginning with a walkthrough of an empty Times Square with the architect and designer David Rockwell, renowned for his Broadway sets—the project is at once a time capsule, a memorial, and a paean to this city that more than eight million people call home. When I ask Kimmelman about his March 2020 walk with Rockwell in particular, he says, “There was something terrifying about the emptiness. I remember feeling like we had the city to ourselves, which was this great gift and also like, Oh, my God, if anyone comes near us, we’re going to die.”
In a similar vein to his 1998 book Portraits: Talking with Artists at the Met, the Modern, the Louvre, and Elsewhere, for which he walked through those institutions with artists including Balthus, Cindy Sherman, and Kiki Smith, The Intimate City explores certain neighborhoods themselves, from Harlem to Midtown Manhattan to Jackson Heights, each effectively as its own sort of gesamtkunstwerk.
An “abiding mission for the project,” Kimmelman tells me, was to give readers “a sense of distraction and hope.” For him, the series was also, in many ways, about taking a prolonged period of slowdown to patiently probe and prod the city and many of its multifarious layers. “If you just look at the city as a bunch of buildings,” he says, “you’re not really understanding what made it and what can change it, and how we live it.” A sort of close reading of the vast, combustible metropolis that is New York, The Intimate City offers an alternative way of seeing, being in, and feeling the city: lost in its wonderment, with a critic’s openness, curiosity, and candor, and guided by some of its shrewdest urban-design minds—all in the midst of a pandemic.
I ask Kimmelman how he went about organizing the walks, which have a breezy, easy-to-read quality, but are also highly intelligent and densely packed with detail. Noting that the strolls were “the product of a lot of work,” Kimmelman says, “Even a great jazz musician—I’m not conflating myself with that; I’m merely making that point about jazz—does have a lot of preparation beforehand. All of the people I talked to took this seriously. Nobody was winging it here. I wasn’t, either, and that was important. That doesn’t mean that the conversations weren’t also spontaneous and real, but we were trying to create a tone and a kind of intimacy representative of how you would walk around the city with a friend. Each walk also contains within it an enormous amount of obscure, complex information.”
Cappuccinos done, Kimmelman begins our tour. Admittedly, we sort of wing it—I told him to take me wherever strikes him, without much foresight or planning. Not that this is a particularly challenging assignment for him: These streets are his home turf, and a literal walk down memory lane. What follows is our brisk hour-long ramble through the neighborhood, condensed and edited for clarity, beginning at 10 Downing Street; continuing on to Winston Churchill Square, up Minetta Street, and down Minetta Lane and MacDougal Street; back up to Washington Square Park; over to the gated Jefferson Market Garden; and finally, with a stop at Greenwich Avenue and Charles Street, next to his alma mater, P.S. 41.
Here, Greenwich Village through Kimmelman’s eyes.
DOWNING STREET AND SIXTH AVENUE
Spencer Bailey: I didn’t know until reading your book that Sixth Avenue used to be what you call an “eight-lane Thunderdome.” This is where the other two lanes were [points to the widened brick sidewalk]?
Michael Kimmelman: Actually, it’s hard to remember from my childhood. The sidewalk was widened in order to narrow the street, because we had just this crazy amount of traffic, and it would get clogged here. I don’t want to mislead you, but fundamentally, there were, I think, two more lanes—six there and two more here.
10 DOWNING STREET
Kimmelman: My dad’s medical practice was on the ground floor. Now, you have to understand, Spencer, this does not even vaguely resemble what this building looked like. It was an incredibly banal, kind of dumpy building. It was horrible and rat-infested.
You see that person in that window [points to a window on the second floor, above Clover Grocery and the restaurant Hancock St.]? That was my bedroom. And that was my fire escape. My piano was in the den that’s straight ahead. This was my parents’ room here; that was my parents’ bathroom. We had one of the building’s most extravagant apartments, which as you can see is extremely straightforward.
It was quite noisy here. I would look out on the traffic, and also on the park, where I would go and play basketball and occasionally throw a baseball with my dad.
I went back into that apartment a few years ago and discovered that it was split in two and that the rent on each was—I don’t even want to tell you, but let’s just say, an incredibly mediocre apartment, in an incredibly loud place [Editor’s note: As if on cue, two fire trucks came screaming up Sixth Avenue as Kimmelman said this, with their horns and sirens at full blast], in a not-remarkable building, between the two, the monthly cost was twice my college tuition as a freshman. Which tells you what happened to the Village, that such a place would change this much.
Downing [Street], where we just walked, one reason I wanted to meet you there was because there were a couple of artists, friends of the family who had bought a place there, but fundamentally, it was a back alley, mob run, with a few garages and lots of nefarious things going on. It was a place you really wanted to avoid.
WINSTON CHURCHILL SQUARE
Kimmelman: I used to go to this little playground as a kid. Before this area here, which has now been turned into a garden, was greened, it looked like a little penitentiary for toddlers. It had that feel to it. So you’d go onto this ratty alley and into your children’s prison to swing on the swing over a concrete floor.
MINETTA STREET
Bailey: From your walk through the Village with the architectural historian Andrew Dolkart, it was interesting to learn about the neighborhood’s mob history, and how at one point the gay community and the mob were quite linked.
Kimmelman: Absolutely. Well, the mob had—listen, I don’t want to associate the Italian community here simply with the mob. This was a very Italian neighborhood and there was also the mob. But that was true. The mob made gay bars possible because New York City didn’t.
Bailey: Right. The mob would pay off the cops or whatever.
Kimmelman: That’s why there was a Stonewall [Inn], even though it was a dump. But you see that change after Stonewall, and then places like Crazy Nanny’s, which took over these odd little triangles that were created by the changing streets, after Sixth Avenue cut through the Village.
By the way, the Minettas [Minetta Street and Minetta Lane] are interesting. This is one of the things you don’t think about until you’re told, but why does this weird street curve off this way and deadend? And then another Minetta [Minetta Lane] is over there [points north, to Minetta Lane]. Well, this was a creek. It was a waterway, and it curved around here and then drained basically toward Downing. Originally, this was an area where freed African American slaves lived. So the Village—here, and if you go up the Minettas toward Washington Square Park, that southern end of the park—was an African American neighborhood. Then immigrants started to arrive, especially from Germany and Italy, and they began to take over that part of the neighborhood.
You know, so much of the history of New York is the constant dislocation of African Americans. That’s the story at Penn Station, for instance. The Tenderloin, which was a largely Black neighborhood, was cleared out. And where did they go? They went to the next place that was possible, some of them having come from here, and that was Harlem. So Harlem’s development, if you track it back, runs through Minetta Lane.
MINETTA STREET–MINETTA LANE INTERSECTION
Kimmelman: All I’m going to tell you here is, since I’ve written about bikes… I always walked home from school. Even as a little boy, in second, third grade. And then I started to ride my bike home from school. It didn’t look all that different, this street.
But I would swing down here, coming from Friends Seminary—I went to P.S. 41, and then to Friends, with a short stint [in between] at I.S. 70. One day, I came down the street, speeding, and there was a giant pothole, more or less right here [points at the street corner, just beyond a stop sign]. And I couldn’t quite see the turn. So my bike went into it, stopped dead.
Bailey: Did you go flying?
Kimmelman: I went into the wall—splat, like in a cartoon—and slid down it. All I remember is that one of the elderly Italian women in the neighborhood, who was, I think, a patient of my father’s, came from the corner over there, which was then a Pioneer Supermarket, carrying the Pioneer bags, stepping over my body as she went to her apartment. I thought, That just tells you so much about New York. She sort of knew who I was. She was like, “He’s alive, he’s fine.” That stopped me from riding the bike for a little while. But every time I come to this corner I relive my near-death experience.
Bailey: Against that very brick wall.
Kimmelman: Yeah, it’s got my head mark on it.
MINETTA TAVERN
Kimmelman: We’ve been walking through what are fundamentally a bunch of alleys—Downing Street, the Minettas. Now, because the economy has changed and the nature of the Village has changed, we’re at Minetta Tavern, at the corner of MacDougal [Street]. Minetta, when I was growing up, was one of the better, not the best, Italian restaurants. This area was full of these places. Now, of course, Minetta Tavern is super high-end and quite good.
Bailey: And with a bouncer at the door.
Kimmelman: And with a bouncer at the door, yes. But look at these buildings. There are a lot of tenement buildings. You walk down MacDougal and you think, Okay, it has always been this sort of thing. On some level, that’s true. But it’s quite distinct architecturally from where we’re going to walk in a second, and that’s because this area, when tenements started to be built, the cold water flats, the Village was full of these places. That’s what made it attractive to immigrants and to what became a bohemian community. Because it wasn’t what we all have an image of now, which are these higher-end townhouses.
When people walk through the Village, or a neighborhood like this, they don’t really see why things are where they are. The southern end of Washington Square Park was one economic class, and the northern end was the other. That’s important. Because the Village was maybe the first place in the city where you had within a single neighborhood these very distinct lines drawn between classes. You could begin to read the city as a map of privilege, poverty, different kinds of economic opportunity, races, and so forth.
MACDOUGAL STREET (BETWEEN BLEECKER AND HOUSTON STREETS)
Kimmelman: These buildings were built as a different model that was turned inward and created this [interior] garden. I would come here to visit my aunt and uncle. This is a good example of the way in which the Village was a really peculiar neighborhood. My aunt and uncle lived here, and Bob Dylan lived next door.
This was built for middle-class clientele. It’s a beautiful model of urban living, in which you sort of are on the street, but you also have a shared space in the back. A lot of the Village developed housing in the back, so there are a lot of townhouses, brownstones, other buildings—like on Jones Street, where I used to go visit friends—where you go in and don’t see it, but the backyard is essentially a shared garden.
For instance—this was a typical Village situation—I used to go to my friends on Jones Street, play basketball in the backyard. It was a cobblestone yard with a tiny house in it. Those houses were built, many of them, because you had a growing working population, and they needed extra housing. It wasn’t what it now sounds like, which is a beautiful little house with a cobblestoned, tree-lined garden in the Village. It was: We’ll just build a house here because somebody needs a place to live.
By the way, the famous photo of Dylan walking down a street—he’s on Jones Street, on that [The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan] album cover.
WASHINGTON SQUARE PARK
Kimmelman: The northern part of the park became a place where the wealthy settled as they moved out of Lower Manhattan. They moved out of Lower Manhattan because it was overcrowded, and there was a lot of disease, cholera, and so forth. They wanted to move essentially to the country, and in the early days of the city’s development, this was the country. This had been a parade ground, and also a cemetery, and then it became a park. As a result, it was a sort of open space. Wealthier, old, blue-blood families would move to the northern parts of the park. Around them, lower Fifth Avenue developed.
It’s interesting how you move from one [part of the Village] to the other. And what has happened? We moved from the overcrowded sidewalks, noise, density, a certain amount of light, to something that feels like we could be in London, in a gated park. The beauty of New York is that you do this without noticing. You move through these extremely different spaces that are somehow seamless and therefore feel like they’re the same neighborhood.
WASHINGTON SQUARE NORTH (BETWEEN FIFTH AVENUE AND MACDOUGAL STREET)
Kimmelman: I’m stopping here because my friend—it’s a horrible real estate story. I had a friend who grew up in this building here, a floor-through to the back—in this case, to the mews. When his mother died, at over the age of 100, my friend was deciding what to do, because the landlord who was here, who had known this woman for fifty years, said to my friend, “Look, you can keep the apartment. I would never want to kick you out.” But he had moved to Portland, Oregon, and didn’t think he wanted it. I said to him, “Well, you don’t want to pay for an apartment when you’re not living here.” He said, “It’s not really the money. She told me I’d pay the same rent.” I asked, “What is it?” He said it was $112 a month. So this apartment facing Washington Square Park was $112 a month, and he gave it up. I wanted to kill him.
So why was the rent $112 a month? Well, it turns out that the story of these buildings is a little more complicated. Because, while the landlord owns the building, there’s some dispute about whether she really has the right now to control the building. Why? Because the descendants of the Dutch family that originally owned all of this land when it was a farm still own the land under these houses, and therefore believe that they have some claim to ownership of the buildings themselves. Because, of course, now the buildings are worth something. N.Y.U. took over all the rest of these [points to the buildings to the east, one of them with a purple N.Y.U. flag hanging at its entrance], but these particular buildings on the western end of this row remain privately owned.
I think the landlord felt they weren’t going to start to change things around and start raising red flags about this, because there’s still some dispute. The pre-colonial farming Dutch family—now a foundation in, I don’t know, Amsterdam, The Hague—has decided that this property is worth something. So right here you have the entire history of New York City, from the Dutch; to the first families, like Henry James, who came here; to my friend living here for all those years; and now, the Dutch again.
JEFFERSON MARKET GARDEN
Kimmelman: We’re now at the Jefferson Market Garden, which was the site of a women’s house of detention. That incredible, weird Victorian building, which is now a library, was a courthouse.
One of the city’s most beautiful, although not always accessible, community gardens is in some ways a memorial for the suffering that many women were put through in this particular site. When I walked home, I would walk past—this was a jail. Women were kept here, and many of them, it turns out, were abused. And they would be screaming out the window, constantly.
Just imagine, this was actually a place where you were walking past a twenty-four-hour site of suffering and misery. But what was the history of the women’s house of detention? Why was it here? It’s because the jail system in the city was so abusive and broken that the city decided, at a certain point, that it needed to build “reform” jails, and that they should be in neighborhoods like this. So placing a women’s jail in the Village, next to the courthouse, was considered a more humane thing to do. And not only that, but the jail itself was to be a humane place. So it was an Art Deco building, if I recall, with art in it. The idea was that it would be a place of culture, a place of architectural distinction, and in the beginning [when it opened in 1931] I suppose that’s what it was. But like so many of these experiments in the city, it was an abject failure.
As a result, the city decided it needed to reform its jail system and build a place that would provide a campus for women, as well as for men, someplace that wasn’t smack in the middle of things, but was a refuge, and would have a whole new regime of progressive incarceration. The way to do that was to move to a place called Rikers Island, because Rikers would be so much more humane and better-run than this urban disaster, which had grown out of a failed urban-reform movement.
Bailey: So this little piece of greenery can be tied directly to Rikers?
Kimmelman: Yes, and Rikers is now doing what? Undergoing the same transformation, to come back to neighborhoods where people will be embedded back in the city, and will have a much more reformed system. So we’ve been through this cycle before.
For me, it was just a very, let’s say, formative experience, to come home from P.S. 41, right here around the corner. And while deciding if I could afford to get a cupcake at Sutter’s bakery, I would also be yelled at by these women who were trying to describe the horrors of what was going on inside there.
P.S. 41 PLAYGROUND (AT GREENWICH AVENUE AND CHARLES STREET)
Kimmelman: When I was little, P.S. 41 was a progressive school. It was the Village school for Village kids—still is, I’m sure.
One of the things that was characteristic of when I was growing up is that, even when you were little, as an elementary school student, we would go out for lunch. It’s a crazy thought. Nowadays, parents—and I’m one of them—would never imagine sending your fourth-grader out for lunch. But we did that, even though the Village was a lot less safe than it is now, notwithstanding alarmist headlines about crime.
So kids would come and go at the beginning of the day and at lunch, and at the end of the day. By the time I was in fourth grade, I was one of the street monitors. We were kids who had a sash and a badge, and we would stand on the corners to make sure the kids were crossing the street properly. Crazy. But it tells you something about the peculiar nature of the Village.
[Points to the P.S. 41 playground, behind a chain-link fence] This was our playground. This field here is where I shared the trophy as best fifth-grade softball team. It was one of the great triumphs of my life.
So I was a street monitor, and one day, I was late coming back from lunch, because I decided to try a new French restaurant just around the corner there, on Christopher [Street]. I don’t remember what the name of it was—Chez something. And I was late. Who knows, in fourth grade, how long a French restaurant lunch takes. I’m sure it was, in retrospect, like going to Le Pain Quotidien, at the most, probably not even. But to me, it seemed like it was a fancy restaurant, I guess.
I came back late, and my classmate—whose name I could give you, because I remember to this day, but won’t, just in case he reads this—fired me. I was just so upset. I reported to the head of the street monitors, who was a P.S. 41 teacher named Mr. Capiaggi. I remember tearfully going to Mr. Capiaggi and explaining to him that I was really sorry. But I had gone to Chez Marseille around the corner and ordered a quiche, and it took a long time. Something about his reaction, I now realize, was the reaction of an adult public-school teacher hearing one of his students complain that he had gone to a French restaurant—
Bailey: To have a quiche!
Kimmelman: —as a fourth grader, and was late. We were not a wealthy family. Nonetheless, I said I was deeply sorry, and I would never do it again. But I did this, and he replaced me. I remember going home that night and telling my parents this story. I can still see in their eyes that look of “Oh, my God, our child went to a French restaurant for lunch, and then tells this to the teacher as an excuse!”
Why do I tell you this? Because there was about the Village—and about the city even—at that point a kind of openness. To me, it’s a little bit what progressiveness is about. I think it’s why I’ve always felt the city is an open place. Really, it wasn’t incredibly safe. But it was just a different attitude. It was a trust in children, trust that I knew people in the shops. It gave me a sense of ownership of the city, a sense of comfort that this was a place where I could navigate and find my way. Now, the concept of a 9-year-old, 10-year-old, first of all, going into a restaurant alone, but even just walking the streets, is really hard to imagine.
Bailey: And monitoring their elementary-school classmates as they cross the street.
Kimmelman: It seems impossible and totally lunatic, but it didn’t seem that way to me at the time. It was wonderful. We all survived, somehow, and I think it gave us a sense that being a New Yorker was a special thing. I came to understand that only when I went away to school—
Bailey: And later, to Berlin.
Kimmelman: —and met other people. I began to understand that there’s a sense of pride that comes from, as it were, owning the city.
Bailey: So how does it feel to stand on the corner of Greenwich and Charles today?
Kimmelman: It’s an odd thing. I’ve lived now—with my family, raised our children—in Berlin and now in an entirely different part of the city, and they’re very happy there. And so am I. But I am here all the time. Like a homing pigeon. For reasons that have to do with my family, but also because some part of me is drawn back here regularly. I know what you want me to say is “I haven’t been here in years, and it’s wonderful to be back,” but actually, I was here last night. I’m around here with some regularity. I think that also speaks to the way in which the city can be a neighborhood, really be a place where people feel entirely at home. Even a place like this, which seems so anomalous, the Village.
I just want to say one more thing along those lines, which is that the great privilege of my job is that I’ve been able to discover all of these other places in the city, which I didn’t know before, where people have these same feelings. There are literally hundreds of these places. The city is a constant, shocking discovery. And that’s not an advertisement or just words. It’s truly astonishing how complex and beautiful the city is. This is just one place. It happens to be where I was lucky enough to grow up.
Keep reading
A prominent figure in the world of qigong; meditation; and neijia, or internal martial arts (she is a sixth generation lineage holder in the Baguazhang practice), Mimi Kuo-Deemer has a Qigong and the Tai Chi Axis: Nourishing Practices for Body, Mind, and Spirit (2019) and Xiu Yang: The Ancient Chinese Art of Self-Cultivation for a Healthier, Happier, More Balanced Life (2020) have served as guides for countless individuals seeking the transformative power of these disciplines. Originally from
All too often, gifts that bring initial delight end their lives in dusty corners, attic nooks, or worse still, the dump.used for years or even decades to come.
This past June, The Slowdown launched our Book of the Month newsletter, for which, at the start of every month, we revieNot Too Late to Tracy K. Smith’s urgent yet timeless memoir To Free the Captives, here are the books we thought fit the bill.
Lara Gilmore lives by the Italian adage festina lente, or, “make haste slowly.” “I interpret it as: Do things, and don’t stop doing them; keep moving forward,” she says. “Bu
Family. Memory. Legacy. These words, these themes, build upon each other. Within our families there are shared moments, To Free the Captives: A Plea for the American Soul (Knopf), the former U.S. poet laureate Tracy K. Smith examines the deepest of American wounds through her own family. Th
Emilia Terragni has a palpable zest for books, food, and design—and for books about food and design. As associate publisher and editorial director of Phaidon’s titles on these subjects, she is a driving f
I find essay collections captivating because they offer the opportunity to dive in at any point. Of course, reading themOpen Questions: Thirty Years of Writing About Art (Phaidon) by Helen Molesworth, the first-ever collection of her art writing, I did in fact start from the beginning.
The Austrian-born, New York–based graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister has a rare knack for tackling broad, universal subjNow Is Better, just out from Phaidon, he’s taken on the subject of long-term thinking, arguing that never before in human history havbetter. First started in the 2020 lockdown, the project vividly brings statistics to life through a range of media, including
Philosopher William B. Irvine’s journey from a youth spent in mining towns in Montana and Nevada to becoming a renowned A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy (2007), Aha!: The Moments of Insight that Shape Our World (2014), and most recently, The Stoic Challenge: A Philosopher's Guide to Becoming Tougher, Calmer, and More Resilient (2019). Though he no longer gives classroom lectures, he continues to spread his wisdom through his writing, which aims
Until February 4, 2024, the Brooklyn Museum will have an (unofficial) new name: the Crooklyn Museum. As of last weekend, the fifth floor is hosting “Spike Lee: Creative Sources,” an immersive exhibition featuring more than 450 objects—ranging from artwork, sports jerseys, and film posters to pho
When it comes to astute and unvarnished observations about pressing issues of our time, Roxane Gay never fails to deliveNew York Times contributing opinion writer has gained international recognition for her sharp, subversive output across genres, includDifficult Women (2017); her novel An Untamed State (2014); her memoir, Hunger (2017); and her New York Times best-selling essay collection, Bad Feminist (2014). As is evident across her writing, Gay has a rare knack for both exposing raw truths of the society we live in aThe Sacrifice of Darkness (2020) and the comic book series and Marvel spin-off World of Wakanda (2016-2017)—providing imaginative havens to escape to.
Just over a decade ago, in 2012, Jhumpa Lahiri moved with her husband and two children to Rome. In the 12 years prior, sInterpreter of Maladies; her best-selling 2003 novel, The Namesake, was turned into a Hollywood film directed by Mira Nair. Her arrival in Rome, it turned out, would alter her already exThe Lowland, which was a finalist for both the Man Booker Prize and a National Book Award, remains her last published work of ficti
Every year, the fall brings a global gauntlet of gallery openings, museum galas, and art fairs (Frieze London and Paris+ in October, Salon Art + Design in New York and Paris Photo in November, and the perennial year-end juggernaut Art Basel Miami Beach in December, to name a few). In an effort to cut through the noise—just as we did this past summer—we selected five must-see shows this season, from New York City, to Washington, D.C., to Denver. In New York, we recommEp. 97 of Time Sensitive—so of course we’re a bit biased).
At New York’s Climate Week, a “Climate Science Fair” Cultivates Optimism and Future-Forward Thinking
This past Wednesday, I made a visit to Chelsea’s High Line, where a certain kind of science fair—coinciding with New YorClimate Science Fair, hosted by Emerson Collective in collaboration with the climate-tech nonprofit Elemental Excelerator. With the aim of cultivating climate optimism and impactful conversations about our collective future, the community-drEp. 2 of our Time Sensitive podcast) to the marine biologist Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson. “The heart of so much of our work is really thinking of the power
David W. Orr could be considered at once an educator’s educator, a political scientist’s political scientist, and an ecoDemocracy in a Hotter Time: Climate Change and Democratic Transformation, from M.I.T. Press, which he edited), articles (more than 250 to date), and lectures (hundreds around the world) with a
Despite juggling the responsibilities that come with being the editor-in-chief of Dwell, the internationally acclaimed home-design magazine, William Hanley still finds time to bike around New York City, wher
In the whirring, flashing, globe-spanning machine that is American popular culture, Memphis, Tennessee—population 620,00Memphis Blues” was a key evolutionary link between ragtime and jazz; just over 50 years later, Bob Dylan namechecked it with his semiStuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again”; 15 years after that, a group of radical Italian designers in Milan, listening to the Dylan track while thinking up a
If there’s anything that Christopher John Rogers cares even more deeply about than clothes, it has to be color. Since establishing his namesake fashion label in 2016, tGossip Girl, red carpets (Lady Gaga, Beyoncé, and Rihanna have all donned his dresses), and into the illustrious halls of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (two of his dresses were featured in the Co
As I was reading Katy Kelleher’s beautifully written new book, The Ugly History of Beautiful Things: Essays on Desire and Consumption (Simon & Schuster), I found myself returning to a conversation I once had with the graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister, who in 2018 himself published an astute book on beauty. “If you’re in an environment that is lacking beauty,” Sagmeister told me, “you are becoming an asshole.” Cheeky as his
When the artist, performer, and poet vanessa german was selected to design a temporary memorial on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., as part of the “Beyond Granite: Pulling Together” exhibition (on view from Aug. 18 through Sept. 18), she quickly found herself turning to a catalytic moment in AmericaMarian Anderson’s 1939 Easter Sunday concert at the Lincoln Memorial. Attended by 75,000 people in the then segregated U.S. capitol, with millions more listening on
Defying the pull of our digital, largely two-dimensional age, the New York–based stylist and shop owner Beverly Nguyen tVogue, Opening Ceremony, and La Garçonne; as an assistant and later studio director of the stylist Kate Young (the guest on Ep. 3 of Time Sensitive); and now as a professional stylist herself, Nguyen has in recent years plunged headlong into a new sBeverly’s NYC. Lining the shelves of the specialty market are wooden spoons, brooms, baskets, and pepper grinders—many of these itemsextra virgin olive oil.
“All too often, we humans push papers, ideas, or money around at a monotonous pace with no time for rest and even less tLook: How to Pay Attention in a Distracted World (Riverhead Books). The result of decades of research and time spent thinking and writing about the subject of observatiLook spans a vast range of theories—from philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s notion of embodied perception, to psychologist M
Designing a truly great building is no easy feat. Among many things, it must be cognizant of history, responsive to the Tate Modern—a former power station transformed into an art gallery in 2000, then extended in 2016 by the Basel, Switzerland–based a
As head of curatorial at the Design Museum in London, Priya Khanchandani sees her role as that of a “cultural observer.”
For the past 15 years, the architect, curator, and writer Pedro Gadanho has been raising alarm bells about the urgency tEco-Visionaries,” a 2018 exhibition he co-curated at the Museum of Art, Architecture, and Technology in Lisbon, Gadanho is at the forefClimax Change: How Architecture Must Transform in the Age of Ecological Emergency (Actar Publishers, 2022), brings together his most recent research and thinking to profound and potent effect.
“I have collected lines (and they have collected me).”
Ever since the Ghanaian British architect David Adjaye and I first met, in 2011, in large part because of our many interIn Memory Of: Designing Contemporary Memorials (Phaidon, 2020).
As we head into the summer, we scouted the globe—from London to Dallas to Miami to New York—to select what we feel are tArt Basel Miami Beach in December): “Joan Didion: What She Means” at the Pérez Art Museum Miami.
As far as architecture career paths go, Lina Ghotmeh’s is a bit of an anomaly. In 2005, at age 25, while working in Londreceived the Grand Prix Afex, a prestigious French architecture prize. Around that time—project complete—Dorell, Tane, and Ghotmeh shuttered DGT and
The astronomer Chris Impey’s latest book, Worlds Without End: Exoplanets, Habitability, and the Future of Humanity, explores the implications of the fact that there are, by his rough count, a mind-boggling four billion Earth-like planthe latest episode of our At a Distance podcast, adding that, “We’re not gonna go there; the energy cost is insane. We have to look after this planet.”
Norman Teague has a global outlook, but the artist, designer, furniture-maker, and educator keeps his work close to homeAfricana” furniture and homeware collection from 2021 incorporates hand-carved details that reference African tribal carvings, a
In the ebb and flow of history, civilizations have long endured through sculpture, the distillation of a society’s valueBeyond Measure,” an exhibition of new and early works by the British artist Thomas J Price (on view through Aug. 20), presents monuments of a subject almost wholly excluded from the sculptural canon: the casual
If there’s one book I’m going to be shoving into peoples’ hands for years to come, it’s the recently released collectionNot Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility (Haymarket Books)—which is why it’s our pick for The Slowdown’s debut Book of the Month column.
The Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena, the curator of the 15th Venice Architecture Biennale in 2016, was on hand last week for the debut of the Biennale’s 17Davos Baukultur Alliance, a new global initiative from the organization that aims to advance eight core principles it deems essential to a prosphis celebrated half-built house developments, Aravena’s words were as stirring as ever—only now, their impact felt strangely, eerily different.
Three weeks have passed since our Milan Design Week exhibition “Take It or Leave It,” in collaboration with the Italian architect and designer Paola Navone, during which she gave away hundreds of items she had collected or designed over the years, from Indian metal spoons an
As the design and interiors director of T: The New York Times Style Magazine, Tom Delavan adheres to a schedule of nonstop, high-intensity days that consist of writing, overseeing photoshoots, porDomino, Delavan also operates his own interior design practice, drawing on three decades of immersion in the worlds of fine anBeni Rugs called Archival, which launches next week.
Across his 40-year career, the British architect John Pawson has realized a vast portfolio of impeccably refined projectMaking Life Simpler (Phaidon), one by his longtime friend the design writer and critic Deyan Sudjic, a book not only about his work and visi
Everywhere I went during this year’s Milan Design Week, there seemed to be a palpable feeling that the Salone del Mobile design and furniture fair, now in its 61st year, is sputtering, or, at the very least, puttering. While it unquestionabAlcova, which this year took place at a former slaughterhouse, and spaces in and around the city’s Brera neighborhood, long a GUBI presented its latest collections this year, or the Bonacossa Tennis Club, where the Milan-based designer Cristina Celestino created a pop-up restaurant with the food collective We Are Ona. Many architects, designers, and journalists I spoke wi
One thousand numbered objects, 623 lottery drawings, 591 “Take Its,” 32 “Leave Its,” and a smattering of trades therein,Take It or Leave It,” in collaboration with the Italian architect and designer Paola Navone, and it was no placid affair. But of course it to give away hundreds of items she had collected or designed over the years, from Indian metal spoons to indigo textiles to ceramic
Daniel Rozensztroch has a rare knack for subtly telling stories through objects. The world of the Paris- and Nice-based
The Slowdown’s first-ever public event, the exhibition “Take It or Leave It,” made its debut yesterday at Milan Design Week. Organized in collaboration with the Italian architect and designer Paol
Radical by nature and a rule-breaker at heart, Paola Navone has been on an endless self-described “treasure hunt” for thArchitettura Radicale, and then went on to join the Italian radical design groups Alchimia and Memphis. From the early 1980s to 2000, she liv
Entering “The Yanomami Struggle” exhibition at The Shed in Manhattan’s Hudson Yards, I find myself standing before a vast arrangement of photographs, s
Nearly 150 years ago, on April 14, 1876—the eleventh anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s death—Frederick Douglass spoke befDouglass said, “I warmly congratulate you upon the highly interesting object which has caused you to assemble in such numbers and spi
For Lesley Lokko, plurality comes naturally. Born in Scotland to a Ghanaian father and a Scottish mother, and moving freThe Laboratory of the Future,” she’s bringing exactly this outlook to the main exhibition. On view from May 20 through Nov. 26, the six-part presentAfrican Futures Institute in Accra, a new architecture school and research institute that, as with her Biennale show, positions Africa as a labor
Jonah Takagi comes across as laid-back and casual, but the truth is, he keeps pretty busy. The bulk of his time is splithis namesake design studio, and Providence, Rhode Island, where he teaches a Herman Miller–inspired furniture design course at the Rhode Island Sc
For the past 20 years, Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, has been teaAwe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life (Penguin Press).
Few people in history have managed to maintain an image as precise and immutable as that of the late fashion designer Ka
From its classic swoosh logo, to its signature Air Jordan silhouette, to its legendary “Just Do It” tagline, to its recent 50th anniversary video short by Spike Lee, Nike knows how to expertly engineer and craft its brand down to the tiniest detail, and how to subtly zoom out and in
Marina Koren, who covers science and space exploration as a staff writer for The Atlantic, realizes her job doesn’t sound real. “But I promise it is,” she says. “When I tell people I’m a ‘space reporter,’ they
When Janet Malcolm first wrote for The New Yorker in 1963, her debut wasn’t in the form of the piercing prose she became known for, but instead a slim poem titled “Thoughts on Living in a Shaker House.” On the surface, it may seem an odd starting point for Malcolm, who would become one of the foremost writers about—andNew Yorker staff writer until her death, on June 16, 2021, at age 86. But the poem’s lines are indeed pure Malcolm: plainspoken, cu
Anne Helen Petersen resides on Lummi Island, a small land mass in the Puget Sound seven minutes off the coast of WashingThe Tome, the island’s newsletter, which arrives in their (physical) mailboxes once a month.
When the Covid-19 pandemic arrived, and with it, the lockdowns of March 2020, I sat at home in Brooklyn Heights, alone,
The old’s been rung out, the new’s been rung in. We’re now all looking out on the year ahead, thinking about what it migthe tide turning on travel restrictions and peace of mind slowly being restored to the masses. 2023 is forecast to be the year when, for better or worse, travel will make a full return to its pre-pandemic patterns.
That the first work of art I saw during this year’s Miami Art Week was a newscast seems somehow appropriate in our precaage of misinformation and sped-up media ecosystem?” the artists behind it, from the civic-engagement coalition For Freedoms, appeared to be asking. “And really, what’s t
What’s the purpose of a museum—and who decides which objects are worthy of value, attention, and care? These two questioYoung Lords and Their Traces” at the New Museum, the Chicago-based artist Theaster Gates’s first-ever museum survey exhibition to be staged in New Y
Home is unequivocally where the heart is. But in a world that far too often embraces soulless or downright bland furnituSight Unseen, comes in.
In February 2009, some 500 miles above the Siberian tundra, a defunct Russian satellite and a U.S. communication satelli
While the Danish design firm HAY is just celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, it has achieved a rarefied place in
It’s a serene, bluebird-sky day, a slight chill in the air, and I’m walking with the Paris-based, Austrian-born designerSculpture Gallery, a transfixing space of light and shadow built in 1970 that’s home to works by artists including Michael Heizer, Robert
Ever Heard of Noh Theater? Our Primer to Three Major Productions Arriving in New York City This Fall
Two winters ago, I picked up a copy of Penguin Classics’ Japanese Nō Dramas, a volume of two dozen translations by Royall Tyler I’d been meaning to read since tearing through Yukio Mishima’s Five Modern Noh Plays a decade previous. I had moved into a New York City gem (an apartment with a fireplace), and with Covid cases skyrocketi
As changes in weather patterns, economic realities, and public perception have triggered a wave of climate consciousness over the past few years, renewable energy sources have enjoyed a newfound level of attention, no longer relegated to thlong-sputtering industry of solar power. Factoids like how an hour and half worth of sunlight hitting the earth could provide the world’s total energy consumption in a year have been employed to tease out the industry’s transformative power for decades. Now, with technological advances makincheaper and more efficient than ever, it seems better poised than ever to take on a greater role in weaning humanity off of its fossil fuel and coal depende
Since 1997, when she founded her eponymous (now shuttered) gallery, Elizabeth Dee has been a fixture of the New York artIndependent Art Fair. An elegant, tightly curated event that remains an outlier in its efforts to elevate overlooked, underrepresented, and
What does it mean to revisit a photograph? When a camera shutters, it locks a moment in time, forever trapping the imageGathered Leaves, the latest book by the Minneapolis-based photographer Alec Soth, whose work has long documented lonely souls and fractured dreams in spaces across the United States. In Gathered Leaves, Soth revisits five of his previous books, including in its pages new notes, annotations, text excerpts, and even photo
In 2016, a stampede of people flooded the streets of Taipei, stopping garbage trucks and buses in the wake of their single-minded pursuit. What unifi
Kate Berry’s glowing personality transmits what she seems to desire most: a breath of fresh air, and time to care for her myriad plants; raise her 9-year-old daughter, Quinn; or host intimate dinner parties for friends on the garden-covered terrace of her Domino and of the food, wine, and travel magazine Saveur, Berry has interactions with media that, due to her demanding schedule, tend to be brief and light—and meaningful. She lives her work, which leaves plenty of time for creating media, but not so much for taking it in. As she puts it, “You don’t
Consider the flower. What image blossoms to mind? What emotion does it elicit? For centuries, flowers have persisted as Flora Photographica: The Flower in Contemporary Photography (Thames & Hudson), out August 30, editors William Ewing and Danaé Panchaud compose a selection of vibrant modern floral
Lush fruit trees bursting over a roof. A canopy of plants covering a facade. Intricate bamboo constructions spiraling frVõ Trọng Nghĩa: Building Nature (Thames & Hudson), readers get an inside look into how the celebrated architect has embraced two core themes throughout
As the director of archives and brand heritage at the Michigan-based furniture powerhouse Herman Miller—now known as MilIni Archibong.
The climate writer and essayist David Wallace-Wells has a knack for translating the unimaginable into the painfully realarticle for New York magazine and subsequent book of the same name, The Uninhabitable Earth, played a critical role in jolting the conversation, detailing the varied plagues and, finally, apocalyptic conditions The New York Times, who added him to their Opinion section, where he has begun a weekly newsletter to reflect on the latest in our Anthropocene Age.
“A forest in Norway is growing.” So begins the cryptic text printed on a certificate for the Future Library, or Framtidsbiblioteket, an artwork by Scottish artist Katie Paterson that, over the span of a century, cumulatively builds a collection of wri
At New York’s Lisson Gallery, an unfettered approach to sculpture is the driving force behind a new group exhibition. OnThe Odds Are Good, The Goods Are Odd” presents the work of 11 groundbreaking New York City–based contemporary artists. In the exhibition, sculptures are a m
Earlier this year, Burkina Faso–born Diébédo Francis Kéré became the first African, and the first Black architect, ever
Rising from a patch of spiny ornamental grass on New York’s High Line park, a 9-foot-tall tornado spins in place, whirliWindy”, a new (and first-ever) sculpture by the Moroccan-born, New York–based artist Meriem Bennani, installed near West 23rd2 Lizards” (2020), made with filmmaker Orian Barki and launched on Instagram at the start of the pandemic, depicted the bewilderi
“We think we invent things and create things and define ourselves by ourselves, but that’s not the whole story,” BaratunAmerica Outdoors, a six-part travel series that premiered last week on PBS. Thurston—a writer, comedian, and podcaster who has advised tThe Daily Show, and authored the best-selling memoir How To Be Black—has a knack for navigating nuanced conversations around race, culture, politics, and technology, framing these discussi
The jagged spine of the Rocky Mountains is too beautiful to mar. Yet over the years, developers and builders have manageBuckminster Fuller, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Eliot Noyes, and Eero Saarinen completed commissions in the Western United States, transforming it into a hub for architectural modRocky Mountain Modern: Contemporary Alpine Homes (Monacelli Press).
A recurring theme in design critic Alexandra Lange’s work is unpacking how—and for whom—objects and spaces are designed.The Dot-Com City, and surveyed how kids’ toys and physical environments impact their development in her 2018 book, The Design of Childhood. The ways in which outdoor public spaces, with their basketball courts, playgrounds, and skate parks, fail teen girls wa story she wrote for Bloomberg CityLab—one of many publications she has contributed to over the past two-plus decades.
Time standards are one of the many seemingly invisible societal constructs we interact with every day but seldom ponder.Mountain / Time,” the show is a nod to both the local time zone in Aspen, Mountain Standard Time (MST)—which the writer and critic Kylehas hailed for its “apartness” and “sense of detachment from the economic and cultural centers of the nation”—and the conceptual d
Detroit is a city of craft. Of carmakers and Carhartt. Of Motown Records and Eminem. Of iconic midcentury design (Isamu Noguchi’s Hart Plaza and Dodge Fountain, buildings by Mies van der Rohe and Minoru Heidelberg Project. So it’s fitting that, following previous iterations in Copenhagen, last fall, and in Turin, Italy, last month, the Freits latest “Hermès in the Making” exhibition (through June 15). A playful, Willy Wonka factory–like presentation of the company’s know-how, the display offers “an o not to smile while walking through it. Divided into four sections—”A Culture of Traditional Craftsmanship,” “High-Quality Msecret!” Beyond, stations feature artisans in saddle-stitching, porcelain painting, gemstone setting, glove-making, leather wor
Emerging from the pandemic, the design industry, like most of us, has changed. The past two and a half years, which havean increasingly pressing climate crisis, have formed a solemn backdrop. In March 2020, almost at once, in the locked-down lives of many, the notion of “home” a
The concept of the Golden Age was first introduced by the ancient Greek philosopher Hesiod, around 700 B.C., in a refereDesign Miami Basel (June 14–19), taking place at the Swiss city’s Messeplatz. Organized around the theme “The Golden Age: Rooted in the Pa
In her new book, Generation Dread, author and researcher Britt Wray delves into the psychological consequences of the climate crisis. Combining scientifi
May’s colors, textures, and sense of renewal seem to be essential ingredients in Paris-based artist Alexandre Benjamin Navet’s exuberant work. A self-described “spring and summer boy,” his expressive drawings—often made in watercolor or oil pas
How do the generation of Black Americans who grew up in the past 25 years reckon with the tragedies that play out in theThe Trayvon Generation (Grand Central Publishing), poet, educator, and scholar Elizabeth Alexander—who currently serves as the president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the largest humanities philanthropy in the UnEp. 52 of our Time Sensitive podcast)—explores these questions, and others, by meditating on race, class, trauma, justice, and memory, and their influences
In 1938, two years after completing one of his first realized public artworks, “History Mexico,” a sculptural, colored chis namesake museum in Long Island City, Queens, which he founded in 1985).
In the early 1860s, an advertisement in The New York Times offered $10,000 to anyone who could invent a new material for billiard balls. At the time, elephant ivory was the matercamphor, a waxy substance found in the wood of the camphor laurel tree. Though celluloid would later prove to be less than idea
Think about the last time you felt a sense of awe about the world. Perhaps you were hiking among trees in a lush forest,
Non-fungible tokens, or NFTs (one-of-a-kind digital assets created using blockchain technology), have divided the art woEp. 59 of our Time Sensitive podcast), see them as pathways to a promising future, while others express concern around the sky-high price points and carbon emissions they generate.
A sobering 2006 report by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization laid out the striking impacts industrial animal agriculture has
At 35, Maggie Doyne is the mother of more than 50 children. One is her biological child, who lives with Doyne, her husbaBetween the Mountain and the Sky: A Mother’s Story of Hope and Love (Harper Horizon), out last month. Through telling her extraordinary story, she demonstrates the life-altering power of
For most of the 20th century, breaking a sweat was seen as unladylike. Popular opinion considered working out dangerous
One afternoon in February of 1966, Stewart Brand took half a tab of LSD, sat on a rooftop in San Francisco’s North Beach
Eating ramen is a multisensory experience: the fragrant steam coming off of the broth, the slurping sound of enjoying thThe Art of the Ramen Bowl” (March 18–July 5) that’s on view at the Los Angeles location of Japan House, an initiative with additional hubs in Londonburi, the porcelain receptacles in which ramen is traditionally served, and renge, the compact, teardrop-shaped spoons that often accompany them, made by 30 leading artists, architects, and designers.
Anicka Yi’s intoxicatingly sensory installations don’t just surround the viewer—many of them literally permeate the body, their sEp. 14 of our At a Distance podcast), in which three industrial steel tanks saturate the air with an aroma concocted by fusing secretions from carpenter an
Integrative nutritionist Daphne Javitch helps people develop their versions of a healthy life—a potentially daunting tasDoing Well, Javitch, a former womenswear consultant at Theory and Uniqlo, offers private health and career coaching as well as groEp. 46 of our At a Distance podcast.)
Born in Grandin, North Dakota, in 1904, the artist Clyfford Still was among the first generation of Abstract Expressioni
In a single word, how does the future make you feel? A towering sculpture by architect Suchi Reddy, founder of the New Y
Darrin Alfred, the curator of architecture and design at the Denver Art Museum (DAM), has wrangled subjects as mesmerizi
Thick, wobbly lines branch out across a wall of Pace Gallery’s global headquarters in New York. Follow each stroke to itwomen, grandpas, and singers craning toward the ceiling, and donuts, hairs, and holes reaching into the ground. Part absurdist diagram, part heart-melting poem, and part consciousness-shifting artwork, thiDavid Byrne: How I Learned About Non-Rational Logic” (on view Feb. 2–March 19), a restorative survey of drawings the musician has made over the past two decades.
With their audacious, gravity-defying forms, skyscrapers have captured the public’s imagination for more than a century.Skyscraper Page, a zany website with a skyscraper discussion forum that has spread to some 100,000 threads. But what’s the point of obs