‘The Brutalist’ Delivers a Bold Revision of the American Dream
The American Dream promises that anyone can build a better life through hard work. The Brutalist demolishes this notion.
architecture
‘DREDD’, Peach Trees, and the Architecture of Oppression
Dystopian cyberpunk film DREDD may unfold within a single building, but that building is a microcosm of how power, poverty, and architecture intertwine to brutal effect.
Plattetopia: The Prefabrication of Utopia in East Berlin
With the fall of the Berlin Wall came the licence to take a wrecking ball to its nightmare of repression. But there began the unwritten violence of Die Wende, the peaceful revolution that hides the Oedipal violence of one order killing another.
The Eternal Snow of Frozen Tears: Saving Melting Landscapes
Zürich's Institute of Landscape Architecture explores the fragile connection between mankind and nature in a multimedia project that merges science with art, turning sounds and images of a changing alpine glacier into a moving call to action.
Graphic Novel ‘The Structure Is Rotten, Comrade’ Is at War with Itself
Blurgits—the drawing of multiple limbs to suggest motion— is effective in Yann Kebbi's artwork for The Structure Is Rotten, Comrade, creating a world teetering on carefully crafted incoherence—which is well suited to Viken Berberian's script.
‘The Manhattan Nobody Knows’ Guides You Through the City at Eye-Opening Level
New York trekker William B. Helmreich's latest urban walking guide, The Manhattan Nobody Knows, can feel like a series of bite-sized Joseph Mitchell essays, and as such is great fun to read.
‘Global Undergrounds’: The Lost, Forgotten, and Hidden Places Beneath Our Feet
Readers may use their own backgrounds and interests to frame the 80 underground sites surveyed here, but the differing storytelling styles allow a few rich stories to shine through.
The City as Autobiography in Darryl Pinckney’s Black Deutschland
Leaping from one fragmented city to the next, Pinckney’s narrator uses history to simultaneously define and obscure himself.
‘Imaginary Cities’ Is a Book to Enjoy Getting Lost In
In charting the cities of human fancy, Darran Anderson has created the opposite of an atlas.
Modernity, Rising: ‘Lifted: A Cultural History of the Elevator’
Lifted is an absorbing exploration into how the introduction of elevators into buildings transformed cities and the experience of living and working in them.