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New York, New York
From charming to alarming in seconds
Like all (or just about all) of the Weekend Trips slideshows, we are ignoring chronological order and jumping from the summer right to October or, to be more accurate, Archtober, the month long architecture festival sponsored by the AIA in New York. This year I was able to book only one tour, but it was a really good one. This is a tour of the new Perleman Performing Arts Center at the World Trade Center, a great big stone cube right across from the memorial.
The WTC PAC is an exceptionally interesting building, and the tour was led by its architect Joshua Ramus of REX. First is the facade, which is all insulated glass with slices of stone, so thin that it is translucent. The outside surface is also glass, but non reflective so it looks like it’s stone. It took literally years for them to finalize the bookmarked pattern alone. Structurally the building is also fascinating since it was designed to replace a Frank Gehry building (not his best) and needs to sit on top of a security entrance to the underground vehicle delivery road. And then the theatres themselves, which are super flexible but also acoustically well designed and quite innovative. The result of all of this is a pretty amazing building that gets increasingly more interesting the more and more you learn about it.
From October we leap back to the dead of January and my first visit to Eero Saarinen’s Bell Labs in Holmdel, New Jersey, now repurposed as something called Bell Works, which is kind of like a mall that isn’t a mall. There are restaurants and shops and We Work type places, but the real draw is that massive atrium which, especially on a dead January day, was alive with people and dogs and families.
If the inside of this building looks especially familiar to you, it could be because it is the filming location for Lumen, the fictional evil corporation in Apple TV’s Severance. There is no Kier Eagan sculpture and (probably) no secret basement severance floor, but also no Severance shop, a real lost opportunity. I would think there is an opening to start a counter service restaurant called Waffle Party, which hopefully would just serve waffles and be nothing like the actual waffle parties in Severance.
Our timeline whiplash continues as we jump from January all the way to December. This is Lightscape at the Brooklyn Botanic (not Botanical) Garden, a fun walk through holiday light spectacular, one that is thankfully heavy on the “light spectacular” part and light on the “holiday” part.
We’re staying in December for another light up attraction. This is Control No Control, a great big light up cube set up right outside Madison Square Park that is also interactive, although honestly it looks better when people leave it alone and it just does things on its own.
The big exhibit this fall at MoMA is the Ed Ruscha Now Then show, and while I could show you some of my favorite Ruscha paintings, instead we’re going to go with the OOF sweatshirt at the giftshop, perhaps the greatest sweatshirt in the history of sweatshirts.
