2023
Open House New York Weekend
What if I stayed on the C train to Lafayette, what if we never met
While I normally attend both days of Open House New York Weekend, this is the second time in the last three years (or, to make it sound even worse, the second time in the last two years) that I was only able to attend on one of the days. This year’s excuse is that most of Saturday I was on a day flight from Las Vegas to JFK after attending a U2 concert at the MSG Sphere. Despite the jet lag, I still went full throttle, hitting seven sites, most of them in Brooklyn. First up was here, the Brooklyn Grange Farm at Sunset Park, a working rooftop garden with killer views.
The next Brooklyn site was Powerhouse Arts, a project by Herzog & de Meuron that converted an industrial building to an arts facility, something that the name Powerhouse Arts kind of explains itself.
In East Williamsburg on a side street was Amant (or Samantha if you believe autocorrect), a gallery building designed by PS1 Warm Up veterans SO-IL, who also designed the terrific Kukje Gallery that you can see in the 2023 Seoul Slideshow.
Architecturally less interesting but almost on the same block as Amant is Chemistry Creative, where the star attraction was an immersive video projection room that was a great place to take a break from all that walking all around Brooklyn.
One of the star attractions (for me at least) this year was a visit to 25 Kent Avenue, an office building in Williamsburg designed by HWKN and Gensler. It’s an especially fun building, and for Open House New York we we able to visit a coworking facility, a high unoccupied floor and the roof.
The views from 25 Kent Avenue’s roof were spectacular and even came with free drinks, but there is another thing you should know that you can’t really see in the pictures. That afternoon there was a hellacious wind coming off the East River, once so bad that it made just standing there incredibly unpleasant and borderline dangerous.
Still in Brooklyn, we’re now at National Sawdust, a performance space that included a live demonstration of their sound system, designed to help transform the space based on the performance type. A really impressive presentation.
Ok, we’re no longer in Brooklyn and instead technically in Manhattan where we’re visiting the lobby of the Graduate Hotel on Roosevelt Island, a quick ferry ride away from Williamsburg and National Sawdust. The reason to go to the Graduate Hotel isn’t to eat in their lobby restaurant (although that’s not bad) but instead to gape at the sculpture next to the desk and marvel at how much it seems to completely destroy all sense of scale, which I most definitely mean in a good way.
Keep going back in time. Open House New York 2022 is next.
