James Wrona
“Every age
manifests itself by some
external evidence.”
–Charles Sheeler

City with Walls:
Revisiting Manhattan's
Luxury Towers

Manhattan’s skyline might be read like a bar graph measuring the gap: as towers reach higher and housing costs steepen, the middle-class recedes and the poor are pushed further into the shadows.

Inequality has in a sense crystallized in the forms of glass and steel residential buildings carefully designed to glitter. In growing height and number, they have come to stand for a consolidation of wealth that is seemingly insoluble. Or, to use another fluid metaphor, a wealth that is unlikely to trickle down.

 

 

fall2015


From The Straddler Archives
summer2013

                                                         Sam Duket
Installations
by Ilya Kilger
“Soon the girl begins to furrow her brow, to frown; then she is moving again, an object in her hands, an empty space behind her.” 		fall2011

The Mail from Tunis, Probably
by Bonnie Costello
“Here science and poetry might align themselves to defeat the flattening forces of custom and culture, of media image and instant message.”		 winter2013

The Last Secrets: in conversation
with Trevor Paglen
“If you want to do something in secret, you have to have institutions for it. If you want to build a secret airplance, for example, you can't built that in an invisible factory.”		 summer2012

Towards the New City:
Fiat Finds a use for the Poor
“If the poor can be put to work selling cars, surely they can sell the time-honored, though presently tatterdemalion, American story that with enough moxie, and no matter the odds, every man can profit in his own land. ”