She says that today she had the first panic attack. The whole architectural community is crying. Michael Sorkin has died of complications from Covid-19. Images of medical workers calling for equipment has become the façade of this sick architecture. For all the loss of barriers with contemporary media and surveillance, cameras everywhere, a huge center of our attention is completely veiled.
You feel it in the dense air of the streets. Not even reporters, usually on the front lines of the most brutal wars and disasters, are allowed inside hospitals. But now what is striking is what we don’t see. We saw things that never appeared on any screen. The engine of the second plane landed on the sidewalk just below our bedroom window. Image © Mark Wigley, March 29, 2020.īeing in New York right now is like being in the privileged position of a reporter on the front lines, as we were already on 9/11, when we were living only 200 meters away from ground zero and felt, heard, and smelled everything even before seeing anything. Save this picture! Beatriz Colomina at Washington Square Arch with an almost empty 5th avenue. The metropolis smile-as-mask has been replaced by surgical masks. No smiles are possible, and yet the acknowledgment you receive from passing gazes is much more profound than the nervous smiles from before, when strangers accidentally encountered your eyes in the streets or in the subway. Everything is suddenly all about the eyes. It is probably more dangerous to live here than in some other places, but even now, with all of us isolated in our apartments, nobody can deny you the immense feeling of being in this together, not isolated in some cabin in the woods-the solidarity with all those eyes you meet in the street, eyes above the masks. But all of that felt like a tax that you now-and-then randomly paid for the enormous privilege of living in a city like this. Of course, I was robbed in the streets many times, and once someone even broke into my Columbia University apartment and held me at knife point. New York was still dangerous when I first arrived in 1980, but I didn’t feel that way, riding the subway in the middle of the night after partying downtown. “Damn! We missed it,” she screamed, and everyone around burst out laughing. We were on vacation in Spain and saw it on the evening news. I am reminded of the blackout in New York of 2003 when she was a teenager. We arrange to meet halfway across the bridge on a shockingly clear day. I am mesmerized, glued to this place with some kind of hypnotic fascination. Besides, they may close the city soon and you will have become involuntary prisoners.” They think we should leave too: “It is too dangerous to stay. Related Article Sick Architecture: CIVA Exhibition Explores the Relation between Architecture and Disease
Could that beautiful abandoned New York return? The character of each one jumps out, etched in astonishing detail, constantly changing with the light. But it is the buildings themselves that have become the main actors again, the real occupants of the streets. You see them in the little Korean grocery store on the corner, with their masks on, carefully selecting their vegetables, or walking slowly in the street with their dogs, or picking up take-out from restaurants. These same artists, at least some of them, are still around and now much more visible with all the newcomers and tourists gone. But maybe they came in as residents packed up their cars and left for their houses in the countryside or the beach-leaving behind a neighborhood of empty streets just like in the 1970s, when artists occupied abandoned, barely habitable lofts and there were no stores, no restaurants, and hardly anybody in the street. Who knew there were so many birds downtown? There are not even parks around here and only a few trees. Even the ambulances are mostly silent without cars to fight against. No traffic, no construction noise, no annoying car alarms, no random screams in the middle of the night. The news is terrifying and at the same time completely at odds with the day-to-day experience of the city, which has become so strangely quiet, so peaceful. New York has always been excessive, so why not now? More cases, more hospitalizations, more ICU admissions, more intubations, more deaths.
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March 20, 2020: I am in New York, “the epicenter of Covid-19,” the news on TV keeps blaring, as if proud of the achievement. Sustainability and Performance in Architecture The Future of Architectural Visualization