Like everybody else in the New York art and architecture community, we went to see Sejima's New Museum this weekend. I have never been to Japan (or Asia for that matter… hint to readers with lecture series… invite me!), but on my recent cross-country drive I had seen Sejima's Glass Pavilion at the Toledo Museum of Art so this was my second Sejima building in a month.

Urbanistically speaking, both museums seem to be calculated to produce the Bilbao-Effect. Toledo is a post-industrial Rust Belt city—glass was one of its major industries—with a declining population. Not far from the museum, I passed plenty of boarded-up buildings. The New Museum is in the Bowery, a couple of doors down from the Bowery Mission.

It's hard to imagine the Glass Pavilion re-activating Toledo. On the evening that I visited, admission was free and there were only about twenty or thirty visitors there. The Pavilion is well done but certainly not exciting enough to warrant a trip to Toledo unless one was already driving down the I-80 from Chicago to the East. Nor does it appear to be part of a larger urban redevelopment. Here the Bilbao-Effect has run out of road. Will small cities continue to produce cultural buildings like this?

In contrast, the New Museum is an intervention that, calculated or not, will put the Bowery past the tipping point toward gentrification. Goodbye CBGB's, hello contemporary art. Chic boutiques and restaurants lurk just around the corner. 

But what to say about this condition? Barring some major economic change, it seems like Manhattan is becoming more and more a global playground of the senses. Situationism for the very rich: amazing food, the coolest stores, the best museums. What's not too like? Well, maybe the fact that Manhattan is following Paris into becoming a "classic city," full of money but void of potential? If Donald Judd, George Maciunas, or Gordon Matta-Clark were 25 today, they wouldn't live there.

What of the architecture? Where the Glass Pavilion is carefully refined in its details, the New Museum is rough, reflecting its surroundings. Sometimes, the roughness seems to slip past the architect's control. A badly cracked concrete floor marred one of the galleries. The drywall didn't always seemed finished well. But there were also missteps. The nosing on the stairs seemed off. You had a sense of pitching forward that was distinctly unwelcome. Don't put soap on your hands prior to using the sinks in the bathrooms. The motion sensors on the sinks—always a bad idea—are inscrutable. If you're lucky, the janitor will come in to show you how to do it (as he did for us).

It was a dark, cloudy day and the much-vaunted skylights did little for the art. In the galleries there is a deliberate move to return to the white cube. Certainly this is better than some of the attention-grabbing moves that architects have made recently, but the galleries were relatively uninteresting. Windows were few and far between and gave the viewer a feeling of complete disconnect from the environment.

The Unmonumental Show was timid. This didn't seem like New Art to me but rather like a get-together of followers of Kienholz, Wasserman, and Beuys. The best works were in the lobby by Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries or in the basement, where Jeffrey Inaba and C-Lab (disclaimer: I share an office with C-Lab) did a wall graphic on philanthropy and Francis Alys put you in the position of being a dog encountering a pack of feral dogs. 

Those works were welcome and, no doubt, if the museum had catered to my tastes throughout, I might have felt very differently, but the dominance of the show by Unmonumental and my sense that Manhattan had finally met its gentrified end on the Bowery made me wonder just what new meant to us anymore.    

Thanks to Archinect for this Psychology Today article on the importance of diversity in cities. Today, the conventional wisdom points to the unpredictability and creativity that one finds in cities as essential for network culture. Outsourcing may work, but not for work demanding innovation.

Alas, as I've been suggesting for quite some time now, we have a new kind of urban blight emerging in places like New York, San Francisco and Boston. In "The Embers of Gentrification" at New York Magazine  Adam Sternberg suggests that the fires of gentrification may be self-perpetuating, but they may also be self-extinguishing.

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I ran across this story on artist and agitator Peter Missing this morning. Missing was a key player in the anti-gentrification movement in New York's Lower East Side in the late 1980s, arguably a last stand against the eventual turning of the island into a giant stock broker dormitory-cum-shopping mall. I was living in the city in those days and in many ways it was a far more interesting and certainly more provocative place than it is today.

Where are the Peter Missings of network culture? Where is today's Lower East Side? People don't seem to have an answer to these questions which, in itself, is disturbing...

Welcome to Spook Country.

The view from my desk at Studio-X today.

The morning began with bagpipes at the Watchung Plaza station marking the two moments the towers collapsed. The names of the people who didn't come back to Montclair six years ago remind me of what happened every time I pass by, running to catch the train or exhausted and relieved to get back home.

If there is anything that has struck me the most about coming back to the Northeast after a decade of exile in Los Angeles, it is the nature of sociality here.

In what would no doubt come as a massive surprise to any Angeleno reading this post, New York and its environs are intensely social. Whether hyper-scheduled playdates for kids in suburban Montclair (or the city for that matter) or a relentless barrage of events in the city (I swear that you could go to one super-cool architecture event every night of the year), the area is relentlessly filled with a pursuit for activity. In contrast, L. A. is a city that exists virtually without any social interaction. This is a city which in the eve of the millennium could do little more than turn the Hollywood sign green, after all.

But let's not let the Northeast off so easy. What it has to offer instead is massive social division. If people see each other at orchestrated and semi-orchestrated social events, they see not so much individuals as representatives of micro-clusters. In L. A. whether you live in Paris-Hilton-infested Bel Air, polka-dot Silver Lake, or the pseudo-city of downtown is ultimately irrelevant, just a subtle inflection within a diffuse urban field. By contrast, New Yorkers take their lifestyles seriously…whether you live in Tribeca, Park Slope Montclair, or the Upper West Side is a decision of grave importance. Identity, it seems, is real. Or is it? in an amusing—but biting—special issue, Time Out NY addresses the "Hipster," a particular, highly contrived urban breed. A quote should entice you in...

The mouth of a real-estate agent is rarely the source of truth, but Mr. Desjadon knows his territory (and is no doubt cashing in on this knowledge). He has unwittingly explicated the transformation of the hipster into the “indie yuppie,” an avatar we might imagine as the fusion of Kurt Cobain and Adam Gopnik. The indie yuppie is (literally) the child of the bobo, and just as his father the baby boomer did, he has learned to simulate rebellion while procuring and furnishing a comfortable two-bedroom.

Read more at The Hipster Must Die.

So what interests me about this is the need of individuals to fit into certain molds and the question of whether the NY or LA model of socialization is more future-forward…

Over at architect.com, John Jourdan posted a link to an interview with historian and filmmaker Suzanne Wasserman and geographer Neil Smith on the suburbanization of New York and the recent book that they wrote essays for, the Suburbanization of New York. Go to WNYC or use the flashplayer below that I lifted from archinect (who in turn lifted it from wyc) to listen.

Tomorrow I have the honor of speaking in the PSFS building at George Dodd's ACSA session on scholarly research. If all goes well, I'll have a podcast of the talk up here (a first for me!). But first I have to prepare so there is no time for the blog post that I painfully want to make. I will, however, point my readers toward Adam Greenfield's post at Speedbird "On New York City Soul." Adam, too, asks what is becoming of the city.

So that said—and I suspect Adam and I will be talking quite a bit about this very soon—I will briefly ask what IS becoming of the city? In his seminal 1938 essay "Urbanism as a Way of Life," sociologist Louis Wirth suggested that urban life was fundamentally a question of density and diversity that produced a sophisticated, hybrid culture. Yet, by 1969, Andrea Branzi of Archizoom could suggest, in the group's project for No-Stop-City, that the colonization of the world by late capitalism together with the simultaneous spread of telematics everywhere combined to undo the city's distinct identity. Instead, Branzi suggested... and I quote from him at length here:

the social organization of labour by means of Planning eliminates the empty space in which Capital expanded during its growth period. In fact, no reality exists any longer outside the system itself: the whole visual relationship with reality loses importance as the distance between the subject and the phenomenon collapses. The city no longer ‘represents&apos the system, but becomes the system itself, programmed and isotropic, and within it the various functions are contained homogeneously, without contradictions.

AUDC, in Blue Monday (now being printed, if not already printed!) certainly reinforces Branzi's conclusion. I hope this isn't too depressing, particularly to the New Yorkers. For, if anything has been most striking about coming back to my East haunts after a decade in L. A., it's the distinction that city dwellers still make between the suburbs and the city. To be fair, New Yorkers like Adam seem well aware of the contradiction, on the other hand, there is the issue of Volume by Bostonian Alexander d'Hooghe on New Jersey that simply took the premise of the suburbs as an evil requiring destruction while a colleague who lives in L. A. (downtown L. A. to be precise, which as a fabrication of the late 90s is the least authentic part of the city, if such a condition can exist in any way anymore, perhaps better to follow Derrida's strategy of putting a word under erasure and say authentic) and commutes to teach at Columbia (is the jet stream the new highway one commutes to work on?) thought that I was living in New Jersey because it was 'ironic'...irony, of course, is a postmodern trope...there is very little irony in network culture. As Branzi suggests, we need to figure out just what this new condition is, not lament a past that was already past 40 years ago.

Well there you go, I've spent a lot of time that I didn't have to spend. But at least it gets us going on this question of urbanity today. There's going to be a lot more where this came from.

Now on realplayer, the University at Buffalo's Nees@Buffalo Testing facility is streaming video that simulates a hit by the 1994 Northridge quake. A wood-framed, stucco covered town house will be subject to a 6.7 magnitude earthquake generated by a massive shake table. See the LA Times. As the director of the center just said, this building is designed to a certain specification. This is beyond that, this is a big one.

Broadcasting began at 10.45am EST and will continue through the test at 11.30am with a post-test inspection afterwards.

The New York Observer reflects on the great class war between Grand Central Terminal and Penn Station. Connecticut vs. Jersey and Long Island, Bon Jovi vs. Mozart, the Sopranos vs. Philip Johnson.

I, of course, am partial to the last stomping ground of Louis Kahn which after two months of commuting from Montclair to Columbia is beginning to make some sense to me.

If only a well-deserved August vacation was the reason that posts here were few and far between! Alas, we were unbelievably busy as we prepared for the move from Los Angeles to New York (or more precisely to New Jersey for my residence). But the opportunities for new projects at Columbia and in and around the city are immense, so I am certainly not complaining.

Having loosened itself from its geographic ties once and for all, One Wilshire is coming too.

At BLDGBLOG, Geoff Manaugh interviews me about AUDC, the Columbia NetLab, architecture, urbanism and other matters. See The Logistics of Distance.