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Why is the physical world slowly, inexorably turning into an airport? a thread about elite narrowness Take the subway from Grand Central to the Hudson Yards station and you will wonder: who the hell is any of this for?pic.twitter.com/kNvxotzcEd
Some point to the likes of the Chrysler Building and see a bygone, antiquated system of patronage and noblesse oblige. But this is mistaken: Major civic architecture will always reflect the tastes of the cultural elites who facilitate its design and creation—including today.
And today’s Rockefellers show their tastes in the tumorous sterility of Hudson Yards. The ever-expanding airport that one encounters increasingly often on days out in the city reveals those tastes as a blind narrowness of imagination.pic.twitter.com/n9ti8kD632
Cosmopolitanism and technology should make possible unimaginable forms of architectural beauty. Instead, we are told that airport hegemony is what is modern, that it is pregnant with a connected globe. Such a view could only arise from a class that only talks to each other.pic.twitter.com/S9yedj435t
At the newly-expanded MoMA, even ~architects who attend events there regularly~ cannot find their way around. And these are the plutocrats! It’s gotten to the point that, save for the original architect himself, the airport is for no one at all.https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/12/05/megalo-moma/ …
This inward turn is most visible in the rise of doctor’s-office urbanism, but examining the current media landscape too will lead to the same conclusion: these people are only talking to each other! A Life Magazine of 2019 is as unimaginable as a new Grand Central Terminal.
Throughout history, elites have often turned inward and squandered immense societal surpluses on luxury, palace intrigue, the decadence of Versailles, etc. Though our particular plutocratic binge may not even attempt to engage with beauty, it is nothing new.
As @SamoBurja points out, in letters between elite Roman patrician friends, peppered among the gossip and promises to visit next year are offhand remarks that, hmm, the roads seem to be getting worse lately.
That’s how the fall of Rome felt.
I fear that, should this closing continue to deepen, and should elites continue their drift from public life, as the airport closes in around us we will start to remark that, hmm, the Ubers seem to be getting expensive lately.pic.twitter.com/FT03pcU3Gm
won’t be able to unsee this on my commute now
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