News

Photo courtesy New York Times.

Just a couple of things I wanted to mention before returning to the big stories. First of all, the New York Times did a really fantastic piece to celebrate the fiftieth birthday of Mies van der Rohe's Lafayette Park townhouses. They interviewed a bunch of residents on what the architecture meant (or didn't mean) to them. I don't happen to share Noam Chomsky's extreme distaste for the paper, likely because I don't grasp world politics nearly as vividly as he. Whatever your opinion of the Times, I thought it was a wonderful story.

Also, my Art & Architecture tour of Lincoln Center recently got a small mention in the San Francisco Examiner. The author unfortunately didn't go into very much detail about it, or even if she liked it, for that matter. But it was nice to see that.

Photo courtesy Interior Design Magazine.

Much more exciting is that I've now had the honor of meeting all three of the principals of Diller, Scofidio + Renfro. This past week I had a VIP group of ridiculously wealthy people from the Museum of Modern Art. At the end of it, Charles Renfro was there to tell them about what the firm has done to Alice Tully Hall.

He and I sort of did a combo tour, but I figured I should keep my mouth shut and let him talk. He was very cool and it was interesting to hear the story from the horse's mouth.

One thing he said that I hadn't heard in any of the hundreds of interviews or anything was that they were inspired for the inside of the hall by phosphorescent sea creatures. I always thought that the twisting wooden slats in the lobby looked a little bit like fish gills, but I just figured that I was imagining things. I wish I'd had an opportunity to speak with him at greater length, but there were twenty-five other people there, and he said he had to go to the gym.