Occasionally the extremes of the Manhattan real estate market makes things that are implausible possible.  Before being razed six years ago, a Morris Lapidus building on Fourteenth Street was taken over, briefly, by Odd Job.  And ten years ago a portion of the Bridgemarket, a Guastavino-vaulted space under the Manhattan entrance to the Queensboro Bridge, was taken over by Food Emporium.

The ceiling is a full story higher than the fixtures are, and nowhere in the store do you get a wondrous, all-encompassing view of the space.  When you look straight up the vaults seem shadowy and oppressively church-like.  But as you’re moving through the narrow aisles the height is luxurious and liberating, as if you’re in a supermarket in California.  I was there on a weekday evening and the after-work crowd at the check-out lines, with twelve-packs of toilet paper and salad-by-the-pound, seemed lifted, just a bit, by the exalted environment.  Guastavino vaults for a supermarket?  Why not.

In 1985 architect Michael Graves designed a flat-bottomed stainless steel teapot for Alessi, with a powder blue plastic handle and a sweet, red, bird-shaped stopper. The design is handsome, whimsical, and entirely functional. The teapot is one of those objects that seems both indelibly of its time – a postmodern icon – and timeless – as if it has been around, in our imaginations and in our homes, forever.

It seemed special then that an architect was designing a teapot that someone could go into a department store and buy. That same object, I think, would not have the same power now.  Because consumers are more design-savvy, less awed by the status of an architect-designed object (or an architect-designed building, for that matter), and also because retailers like IKEA and Target consistently offer high quality design at low prices.  The relationship between retail and architecture, a fascinating, symbiotic one, is something I explored recently in AIArchitect.  The only thing for certain is that the entanglement of these two spheres is strengthening a popular design culture, which is good for everyone involved.

In 2005 the tram to Roosevelt Island made headlines when seven passengers were stranded in a stalled car for six hours.  Although I know people who live on the island and rely on the tram to get back and forth the whole system seems inefficient and overblown, an outmoded nineteenth-century contraption.

But when walking cross-town along 59th Street one night last week the spectacle of the red cars crawling along the tracks overhead and then hovering in mid-air over First Avenue stopped me.  New York isn’t a hyper-modern city (super-dense, sprawling, ravaged) in the “Bladerunner” mold; it’s too porous and too orderly.  But for just a few minutes this stretch of the Upper East Side seemed implausibly futuristic.

Do people grow up, or do they get older and stay the same?  The work of Brooklyn artist Nils Karsten suggests that we never let go of our childhood fantasies, and that they become more elaborate over time.  Karsten explores the dream-imagery of youth and adolescence in his artwork, which is populated with toys, dolls, stars, rocket ships, farm animals, rock stars, and album covers.  His drawings, collages and woodblock prints are on display right now at two New York galleries: Ubu and Illuminated Metropolis.  And, while the artist’s themes remain constant, his most recent works are executed with more sophistication.

I’m drawn to the collages, especially those on small, letter-sized sheets, which have a special intimacy.  Karsten uses powdered graphite to create smudgy, dreamy backgrounds, and clipped pictures from magazines and newspapers to compose scenes.  The figures in the collages have human, animal and machine parts, and often try to connect with one another in strange, unfruitful ways.  In their unexpected juxtapositions the pieces evoke surrealism.  This landscape isn’t a post-Freudian one, with established, collective symbols, but a private one, rich with idiosyncratic remembrances.