Well, I'm back from New York and now catching up on all the better coffee and significantly less polluted and overall greener environs of Portland.

But New York does have great architecture and museums. I'll have lots of interviews, reviews and pictures for you later but below is a di-opical summary of my trip:


Steven Holl's psychology building staircase at NYU


Arthur Segal's wonderful and still fresh Strasse auf Helgoland II (1924) at the Met.


Also, here are a few links that caught my eye while away:

Jen Graves likes Matthew Picton's city maps... I've always loved the guy's work, curated him into quite a few things and I like how he schematizes space. Even his studio in Ashland Oregon is a wonderful space.

Catching up, I noticed Tyler Green noticed Peter Plagens noticing just how good a writer Dave Hickey is over a decade ago. Now The Invisible Dragon has been reissued for around $15, so now I can stop fetishing my photocopied version given to me by Jacqueline Ehlis, one of Hickey's old UNLV alums (btw I think Hickey has long moved past the beautey discussion these days).

Returning to The Invisble Dragon and Plagens old review of it let's note the discussion is "around" beauty not just beauty. Beauty is like gravity, it brings things into orbit around it. It's a difficult to define attractor. Furthermore, in this era of fetishing the half-assed, Hickey's writing is a thing of beauty itself, agree with the guy or not... he's unequivocally gifted. More than a decade after The Invisible Dragon, Hickey remains useful... how else are you going to describe Steven Holl's NYU staircase above? Seeing it before taking in MoMA only made me sadder that Holl didn't win the MoMA commission. ...but I digress, much more on that all later.