The gentleman who introduced architect Kevin Roche at the Museum of the City of New York earlier this week, where there’s an exhibit honoring his work, did so with a bang, like this: “Kevin Roche studied with Mies van der Rohe and worked with Eero Saarinen."  And Roche, who’s 90 years old and still runs his own office, ended the whole affair with a bang, like this: "I’ll retire when I die."  Roche is famous for the corporate office complexes he built around the world and for two prominent New York City projects, the headquarters for the Ford Foundation, and a four-decades-long renovation of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

This exhibit is the first time I’ve looked closely at Roche’s work.  I’d always associated it with that generation of corporate postwar American architecture offices, including SOM and KPF, that churned out handsome, inoffensive office towers and campuses.  But much of Roche’s work has a distinctive granular, cellular quality.  It’s as if he’s building up immense structures from a basic, irreducible, spatial unit, incorporating eccentric rhythms that allow a complex organic order to take hold.  While the facades of his buildings have a moneyed gloss, their plans and sections often reveal faint, alluring asymmetries.  In old black-and-white photos Roche looks like a classic Mad Men-era Modernist, with pleated wool trousers, a skinny black tie, and crisp, white dress shirt folded back to the elbow.  In person he’s suitably charming.  But there’s real mystery in the deep structure of his architecture.  It recalls utopians like Buckminster Fuller and the Metabolists and, more indirectly, the work of contemporary, biologically-bent architects like Philippe Rahm and R&Sie(n).  There’s another creature-like force lurking within Roche’s buildings.

Last week, after lunch at a purposefully disheveled Brooklyn restaurant serving artisanal junk food (mac-and-cheese sandwiches pan-fried in butter, deep-fried chicken topped with coleslaw and hot sauce, collards stewed in maple syrup), I walked back home over the Williamsburg Bridge.  The Williamsburg Bridge is an ugly stepsister to the city’s historic interborough bridges.  A pragmatic, unadorned structure, it lacks the romantic grandeur of the Brooklyn Bridge and the surreal grace of the Verrazano Narrows Bridge.  It’s a workhorse, carrying cars, subways, bikers and pedestrians between the hippest hipster precincts of the Lower East Side and Brooklyn.  Its walkways are paved in asphalt and its steelwork is painted a flat red, as if it were treated with a primer coat and then abandoned.  The bridge is a splendid walk at night.  The walkway is close to the subway tracks, so every few minutes there’s a thundering train to one side and, to the other, the serene spread of water below.  And when you arrive at the midway point a dreamy, twinkling, panorama of Manhattan takes shape.  It’s a gritty, glamorous image.

My friend, an architect-turned-photographer who lives on the Lower East Side and walks the bridge frequently, laments that the city hasn’t made more of the structure.  There could be gorgeous arcades at the long, sloping on and off pedestrian and bike ramps.  There could be lighting that flatters the structure and made the walk feel more secure at night.  And there could be uniquely crafted railings, gratings, paving and signage.  At both ends of the bridge there are communities bristling with bohemian energy, and with artists and designers.  Why doesn’t the city get some federal infrastructure improvement funds, get some community artists on board, and give the bridge a more artful appearance.

When I was in younger I looked to Eva Hesse, just as I looked to Virgina Woolf, as a symbol more than as an artist.  The facts of this artist’s life and death made more of an impression on my fevered college-girl mind than her actual work.  A German-born painter and sculptor who emigrated with her family to New York City as a child, Hesse lived and worked in the city through the 1960’s, during the heyday of conceptual art.  She made sculptures from malleable, sometimes translucent, materials like latex, fiberglass, and mesh.  Her pieces have a biological, tissue-like character, and were embraced by my young self (and a lot of feminist scholars, too) as a powerful, mythologically “female” response to the hard-nosed, heroic sculptures of Richard Serra, Donald Judd and other contemporaries who were working in metal and wood.  Hesse died in 1970 at the age of 34 from a brain tumor.  She’d had only one solo show of her sculpture, but left behind a powerful body of work that’s still discussed today.

The recent show of Hesse’s student paintings at the Brooklyn Museum, Spectres 60, complicates the Tragic Lady Sculptress myth.  These canvases, turbulent and not-so-pretty, are the work of a young painter who’s wrestling with form and materials to pin down a subject.  The canvases are all figural and many, like the bride and groom above, are referential, so they can’t be linked in any facile way to her dreamily abstract sculpture.  And the paintings are dark, rendered in a palette of muddled green-greys.  They’re dense and earthbound in a way that her sculpture is not.  If I’d seen these canvases in another context I wouldn’t have believed that they were Hesse’s; they’re different in spirit to her sculpture.  I’m disappointed that there was none of Hesse’s sculpture in the exhibit.  Taken along with these paintings, they fashion a rich, multi-dimensional identity for the artist.

File under “Wish I’d Kept Mine."  It’s socially acceptable now, for the first time in fifteen years, for women to wear plaid flannel shirts.  (Although it seems that they never fell out of fashion in some parts.)  It’s not the first time that I can remember a trend from its most recent incarnation (neons, boyfriend jeans, camouflage), but it’s the first time a trend seems to have returned so quickly, and in a virtually identical form.  Maybe the fabric and fit in the new flannel shirts are more sophisticated, but they look like the same flannel shirts we were wearing in 1992.  That was when Vogue published their iconic "grunge” spread, featuring a glammed-down Naomi Campbell and a Goth-punk Kristin Mcmenamy (curiously prefiguring Lisbeth Salander) lounging around a meadow in drab, unformed dresses and knits.

In an essay in last month’s Vanity Fair Kurt Andersen laments that our style evolution has stalled.  People today, he says, are wearing the same clothes, listening to the same music, and driving the same cars they did twenty years ago.  The circuits of progress have somehow gotten jammed.  At the same time cycles of fashion design, production and media have become accelerated, our way of dressing has also changed.  Fashion now is less about dressing in a prescribed look from head to toe than than about assembling an outfit from specially-curated individual pieces.  So, for a lady, the return of the plaid flannel shirt isn’t about grunge, but about finding the perfect plaid flannel shirt for herself and knowing what jeans and boots to wear it with.  And it’s about holding onto that shirt so that the next time it comes back into fashion she’ll be ready.