I watched Woody Allen’s “Manhattan” last night for the first time since I moved to New York over ten years ago.  The opening, a montage of shadowy, black-and-white views of the city, is lovely, but this shot of the Guggenheim made me gasp.

It’s shockingly simple and conveys so much: the slight slope of the ramp as you’re walking it, the relaxed voyeurism of the open balconies, and the jewel-box feeling of the museum at night.  It’s the gentlest, least heroic image I’ve seen of the museum, and the one that I want to keep with me.

Friday night on a panel about housing for the homeless two architects, Michael Maltzan and Jonathan Kirschenfeld, presented two very different approaches.

Jonathan Kirschenfeld, who works in New York, approaches city agencies and non profits to find suitable plots of land and secure funds to develop them.  The shelters he’s completed are simply, pragmatically conceived and finished in ordinary materials.  They are like the finest, most intelligent diagrams.  It’s as if he’s saying, This is all it takes to make housing.

Michael Maltzan, who works in Los Angeles, treats the city agencies and non profits he works with like any other clients, and the housing he builds for the homeless like any other housing.  The shelters that he’s completed have the same volumetric complexity and cinematic effects that his high-end houses do.  And why not?

I first saw Damien Hirst’s cabinets ten years ago, in London, at Barmacy on a Friday night.  They were the perfect, kitschy and ridiculous background to the happy energy in the lounge. 

Seeing them again, this time at L&M Gallery on East 78th Street, they seemed awfully sinister.  The cabinets are constructed with unnerving precision, and the generically-labeled medicines and supplies inside are arrayed with a devastating, lifeless elegance.  There are half-gallon-size jars of codeine and sudafed, and boxes and boxes of prescription painkillers.  These are the things that keep us healthy. 

(Damien Hirst, The Existence of Nothing Causes Nothing, 1999.)