A little Lady Liberty defends her iconic status. (photo: Diego Lynch)
What do tourists have to show for their trips to New York City?
Selfies and souvenirs, usually.
The moment visitors step off the plane, they’re greeted by ranks of Statue of Liberty miniatures, skyline snow globes, and Yankees paraphernalia. However, does everyone Heart NY?
(Photos: Daniel Maurer)
In October of 1929, a New York Times headline announced: “Odd-Type Buildings to Overlook Church.” Those odd-type buildings would’ve been New York’s first glass skyscrapers, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright to surround St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bouwerie. Starting Monday, a meticulously restored model of his East Village towers will be exhibited for the first time in over 50 years, as part of a new retrospective at MoMA.
Jan Palach Memorial at Cooper Union (Photo: Anaka Kaundinya)
Cube, meet spikes.
The Alamo returned in November and now another piece of monumental art is being installed outside of Cooper Union’s Foundation Building. The sculpture, a nine-foot-by-nine-foot cube with spikes mounted on top, is by John Hejduk, an artist, architect and former Dean Emeritus of Cooper Union.
The Idealist by Justin Peters
The Idealist: Aaron Swartz and the Rise of Free Culture on the Internet
Tuesday, January 12 at 7:00 p.m. at The Strand, 828 Broadway
When 26-year-old computer prodigy Aaron Swartz committed suicide in 2013, the tech community was shocked. A founding developer of Reddit and the Creative Commons, Swartz was an important figure for those who supported open information online over an increasingly atomized and commercial internet model. In the aftermath of his death, Slate’s Justin Peters traces the history of the Internet free culture movement and examines Swartz’s legacy as a “data moralist.”
Rendering of Knickerbocker Commons.
The last thing you’d expect from affordable housing is energy efficiency and forward-thinking design, but two new buildings in Brooklyn are aiming to reduce the cost (monetary and environmental) of things like heat and gas.
Knickerbocker Commons, in Bushwick, and a yet-to-be-named building on the Ridgewood border will employ an eco-friendly design that has become increasingly common in Europe but is relatively untried here.
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