Futurism is the ultimate art movement for boys who love their technology toys. I made my way up the curving ramp of the Guggenheim Museum to consider the legacy of art and architecture obsessed with speeding cars and gliding biplanes. Manifesto-loving Futurists spewed overheated sexualized paeans to locomotives, weaponry, and brawny workers stoking fires roaring within vast smoke-belching factories. Women were at best inconvenient necessities in the society imagined by what I read as … [Read more...]

Texans, the cliche goes, knows how to do things big. These days that includes vandalizing what could be a 20-mile-long version of Central Park with -- what else? -- a highway.The Trinity River Project is a $2.2-billion visionary effort by the Trinity Trust, a private advocacy group, to unite the city with its long-neglected river. The Trust’s plan has begun to turn a sterile landscape of mown grass and power lines in the river floodplain into a chain of recreational ponds and lakes that open … [Read more...]

Rippling layers of ice grew on the inside of an ancient window in our apartment as waves of Siberian cold assailed us repeatedly this winter. It was very Dr. Zhivago. Now I feel like an idiot for not replacing that window, which isn’t so much artfully distressed as rotting in its frame. Repeated encounters with my Siberian bathroom reminded me of our building’s recent energy audit, which showed that replacing our relic would pay back in 20 years or more. That struck me even at the time as … [Read more...]