A LOST WORLD

MoMA has mounted a 40th anniversary exhibit of photographer Nan Goldin’s 1986 book The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, that captured her bohemian Lower East Side community with anthropological clarity, and also love. The framed shots, about 8″x10″, seem loosely composed, like snapshots, but carry a stunning physical and emotional immediacy. The most famous one, a self-portrait, shows Goldin in full makeup, a month after she’s been beaten so severely by a boyfriend that she can barely open her eyes. Thirty years afterwards, in a culture numbed by internet porn, reality TV and Tinder, these images do not shock. Instead they stir up nostalgia for a time in New York City, the early 1980′s, when rents were cheap, downtown was different from uptown, and young people moved to the city to become artists and writers rather than venture capitalists and fashion bloggers. New York City served as a vital refuge those who didn’t have the freedom to act out their lives in other places.

Today, the most powerful photographs in The Ballad are those that pull back from the faces and figures to show that world itself: kitchens with battered white metal appliances, bedrooms with bare walls and windows, hotel rooms with flocked wallpaper and mismatched lamps, basement bars with neon lighting and sticky floors. The handful of still lifes on display are surprisingly moving. They capture a mood by giving a glimpse of the corner of a room, a tabletop arrangement, or the wall of an apartment hallway. The manner in which people decorate their homes reveals their values bitingly, innocently, and eloquently. For Goldin’s friends expressiveness, color, corrosiveness and humor matter far more than order.

Goldin’s most unique gift is, surely, her ability to capture the heightened emotional drama between two people – that moment that promises a vital connection or tearing apart. But when she pulls her gaze back further, to reveal these people within their habitat, her photos are even more powerful. One shows two young men sitting behind a small round table at a bar, a cluster of half-empty cocktail glasses obscuring their faces. The view is gently out-of-plumb and softly cropped, so that the entire world seems to be slowly tipping, unable to right itself. These men might be falling for one another or having a lover’s quarrel. And this might be precisely what it felt like to be a young person, in New York City, in the early 1980′s.

January 21, 2017 by Nalina Moses

As I stepped out of Grand Central Station yesterday I saw one of the city’s new prototype taxis — a Taxi of Tomorrow — roll by, carrying passengers west on Forty-Second Street. This new taxi design is part of Mayor Bloomberg’s scheme to standardize the city’s fleet. His opponents have noted that the vehicle is not hybrid and not handicapped accessible, and that city hall doesn’t have authority over the Taxi and Limousine Commission to specify what vehicles they use. What’s critical to the entire project but never really discussed is the new taxi’s image. The Taxi of Tomorrow is a big boxy tangerine-colored van. More than a machine of deisel and steel, it looks like a mobile storage shed. Stopped on Forty-Second Street behind a red light, squeezed between city buses and black towncars, the taxi looked ungainly.

Of course there’s nothing essentially glamorous about the Nissan sedans that make up the bulk of the taxi fleet now. But at least they look like cars, like instruments of motion, with a compact low-to-the-ground profile. These vehicles offer independence from the sidewalks and the subways, and they offer transport, both literal and imaginative, to some other place: to a party, to a job interview, to a rendezvous, to a mysterious unexplored corner of the city. The Taxi of Tomorrow has a sadly utilitarian profile. Rather than speed or transport, it offers space inside for stretching and storage, though not enough, apparently, to accommodate a wheelchair. From the outside the van looks like a beast of burden, a mule with which to cart old furniture to the dump, to shop for groceries, or to take small children to school. These vehicles need to be useful, but they also need a little panache. Why should our taxis, such an integral part of city life, be clunkers like this? For anyone who has, late at night, after dinner and drinks, hailed a cab in a half-dream state, and hurtled down Park Avenue, when there’s no traffic and noise, through the dazzle of light thrown from empty glass towers, a cab feels like a chariot. Why can’t a cab look like one too?

Photograph by Nalina Moses.

November 23, 2013 by Nalina Moses

At the closing reception for the 2012 Summit for New York City there was, set out right beside the bar, a site model showing a stretch of midtown Manhattan. One cartoonishly futuristic structure, stepped at the base and capped with four vertical fins, rose high above the fray of anonymous office buildings. “What is that?," a woman scowled as she walked by, heading for a refill. That, I found out later, was Norman Foster’s winning competition entry for a new office tower at 425 Park Avenue, which he’d unveiled just a few days earlier. The other architects invited to submit their designs for the plot, just a block north of the stately Villard Houses, were Rem Koolhaas, Richard Rogers and Zaha Hadid.

Their entries are hearteningly different from one another. Rogers proposed a structure with open, intermediate floors planted with pine forests. Koolhaas proposed an enigmatic, worm-like tower that twists forty-five degrees as it rises. Hadid proposed a square, metal-clad tower that swells outward at the bottom to meet the street, like an upside-down mushroom cloud. It’s the slickest and most sophisticated of the entries, and also the most fitting. The tower, symmetrical on four sides, merges her personal, idiosyncratic formal vocabulary with that of a conventional office tower. It’s distinctive – a building that looks like no other building – without being aggressively avant-garde. It has a molten, organic feeling and yet it’s constructed from standard elements. In one simple volume, Hadid has shaped a structure that projects the modern, moneyed gloss of midtown Manhattan.

November 20, 2012 by Nalina Moses

At a private talk earlier this week, I heard an executive who had led one of the public agencies that’s rebuilding the World Trade Center site praise the “non-monumentality” of the current plans. He spoke proudly of his own role in changing the tenor of the project from one of high-design fervor, inspired by architect Daniel Libeskind’s original site plan, to a more pragmatic one, which is chiefly concerned with completing construction. He listed some key decisions that the city had made with his guidance that tempered artistic ambition and made it possible to move things forward, including fast-tracking construction of the National 9/11 Memorial and simplifying the design of Santiago Calatrava’s new transit station by adding columns inside the main hall.

He was a persuasive, intelligent man, but as he spoke my insides churned. We can’t afford to be sentimental about rebuilding at this site, and we don’t need to build the world’s tallest building here to show them, but can’t we try to do something great? This is an important site at the heart of the city’s historical and financial districts that’s giving us the opportunity to build a new neighborhood all at once. Oftentimes, and especially in architecture, what we want to be great ends up going all wrong. But why are we starting out by doing something that’s deliberately less than great? Libeskind’s vision for the site would have been complex to execute, but it had been selected by both city leaders and the general public. One of Calatrava’s signature soaring, rib-cage structures might not be appropriate for this site, but why did the city commission one from him and then lampoon it by sticking columns inside? I remember the rogue scheme Donald Trump presented to the press, shortly after Libeskind’s plan had been chosen, to rebuild both original towers one story higher. As I sat listening to this other, powerful city player praise non-monumentality, the Donald’s outsized ambitions for the site site seemed perfectly sane.

September 21, 2012 by Nalina Moses