West 28th Street, between 7th and 6th Avenues (I always work eastward in my mental map, especially in Manhattan. Mad props to the West Side, yo.), between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m., between april and october, transforms into a...
When the SpikeTV first aired The Ultimate Fighter in the spring, our first thought was what an awful house. The show had two primary sets. Home base, where all the fighters lived, was an ugly (yes, Tropolism means all...
Tropolism means taking the entire end of the week off from blogging when the city releases a watered-down design and they try to sell it as a feature, because you are pouty and just don't feel like it. Tropolism means...
Tropolism means occasionally not sitting at your desk and hoofing it for material. On yesterday's flaneur-tour, the first stop was one I've been anticipating for a long time: the re-opening of Canal Park. It's going to reopen in the...
No one really believes anymore that the city is like a human body, with every component represented. Particularly in New York, despite the fact that Central Park was created out of the idea that New York needed lungs. Yet...
We like to think of sites like Tropolism as what the Nolli Plan of Rome of 1748 would have been if they had IEEE 802.11g: as a way to look at the city from a lot of different angles,...
Greg, the artwork you're looking for is called "Food", 1971, corner of Prince and Wooster, Soho. Run by Gordon Matta-Clark, Carol Gooden, and someone whose name I cannot remember (Tropolism's fact checker left my copy of the book about...
Back from the dead: Robert Smithson's project "Floating Island To Travel Around Manhattan" is set to begin, er, floating around Manhattan September 17th through the 25th. We choose to set aside issues of authorship (so 70s) and history (80s)...
David Shrigley, which is like Robert Smithson, but with a lot less thinking. Smithson is my favorite artist, but there's something more free about Shrigley. Calmer, less directed, easier to access, easier to contemplate for long periods. (Thanks to...
Tropolism means talking about how you feel about facts, dahling. We would never be caught telling you how we feel about gossip, rumor. Conjecture and second-hand information, however, is one big gray area. Our friend Aric Chen is giving...
Two of my favorite buildings are pictured here, at the corner of Sixth Avenue and 39th/40th Streets. For the longest time I thought they were both the Milliken Building. Yet I let the fact checker loose and they turn...
Okay, I'm the first to say it: Why would anyone want a back issue of ANY? After all, the magazine was over-designed by 2x4: confusing layouts, illegible ink choices, labyrinthine page-folding strategies/tactics. The journal was neither academic nor journalistic:...
A servicable but uninspired building: the new Alvin Ailey Dance Theater building in Hell's Kitchen. I used to live around the corner from this, and I watched the site slowly develop from an old theater to a pit to...
Just when you thought the WTC site could not get less interesting, more bloated by rhetoric, more misguided by people enthralled by arcane sentimentality and not memoriality (is that a word?), this happens: Ms. Burlingame, who attended yesterday's board meeting,...
Although your editor prefers to spend his summers on intercoastal sand bars, and so totally not the Hamptons, I applaud the owners of this house for creatively restoring it. It's a pleasure to see a simple cottage grow into...
Also from y2000: Mr. Beller's Neighborhood. When I bookmarked it, it was an idea. Now, it's a whole library of writing, a written version of NYC....
I'm a sucker for projects like this one. The New York Times sponsored this, and sometime in '99-00 I bookmarked it. I know it's incredibly sappy, and that there are a zillion other projects like this. I like all...
Chicago can always rely on its single-minded devotion to Modernism, as it was in 1972, to pull it through. In many instances, this is a perjorative. At other times, it is exciting. The history of New York Skyscrapers vs....
Tropolism means discovering that construction is not mystical, just time-consuming. While we prefer to let our friends over at The Gutter plumb the depths of the New York Times' House and Home/Garden section, today's how-to Q&A, while clearly intended...
Deitch Projects has two shows which are bringing the city inside. Swoon and Barry McGee both have large installations in the two SoHo locations. What makes projects like this of interest to architects, particularly architects like myself who work...
