Flamboyant museum architecture has largely fallen by the wayside in America and in much of Europe in 2013, but thrives in the global hubs of new wealth in Asia and the Middle East. France (largely by coincidence) is an exception in 2014. Coop Himmelblau’s Musée des Confluences, a Sci-Fi creature of pistoning columns and bent sheets of glass hunched in Lyons will open. It was planned a couple of booms ago. Bernard Arnault’s Louis Vuitton Foundation for Creation nears completion. It’s a … [Read more...]

In the big-city hubs of innovation, the streets got cleaner and safer, and decent supermarkets opened in 2013. In New York City the gentrifiers cleared tenants (many low and middle-income) from blocks of brownstones in order to create multi-million dollar, 10,000-square-foot single-family homes. Though Occupy Wall Street has faded from memory, the income inequality it highlighted became a club wielded by Bill de Blasio in his successful bid to succeed Michael Bloomberg as mayor. Inequality is … [Read more...]

At the Queens West megadevelopment, which had largely languished since a building spree in the late 1990s, half a dozen hulking towers bristling with sharp-edged balconies lurch drunkenly down Center Boulevard. Many of these hit the market in 2013, a year that saw New York City’s residential real-estate market -- at least at the high end -- become more torrid than the pre-crash mid 2000s. In architecture, 2013 was the year great wealth transformed the urban landscape. And nowhere was this … [Read more...]

If you have not read the “Invisible Child” series in the New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2013/invisible-child/#/?chapt=1), you will find the story of a plucky child, Dasani, heartbreaking and riveting. She lives with her siblings in a homeless shelter  It is exquisitely written by Andrea Elliott. I wish Elliott had not framed her story with income inequality. Throughout, the story contrasts the enormous challenges and deprivations faced by Dasani (yes, she is named after the … [Read more...]