I’m going to take a short break and then return to intuition’s place in engineering. Meanwhile…there are two books I’ve been looking at that are worth mentioning for fans of NYC history and trivia.
The first is Codex New York by Stanley Greenberg. He’s a photographer and this is a book of photos of the city, but they are far from the normal glamour shots of buildings. He has arranged hundreds of photos by the type pf subject that caught his eye. There’s a bunch of photos of empty lots, for example. And there’s another bunch of the underside of overpasses and elevated trains. The publisher uses the word “quirky” and I guess that’s inevitable, but it felt to me like he was searching for an underlying order to our city’s visual chaos. Whether or not such order exists is open to debate.
The second is New York Rising edited by Kate Ascher and Thomas Mellins. This seems at first glance to be a more traditional one-volume history of the New York. The thing that distinguishes it visually is the use of a lot of illustrations from the Durst collection, which is the mother lode of NYC visual imagery and trivia. But what really jumped out at me is how the authors of the various chapters and the editors use real estate development as the general theme of the city’s entire history. The more traditional answer is trade and its attendant businesses, but it’s hard to deny the presence of development in every aspect of our history.
