ImagineConey Exhibit Opens with Sword-Swallowing, Coin-Bending, Live-Tweeting
February 4th, 2009
Last night, the Municipal Art Society’s new exhibit ImagineConey: Bold Ideas for Coney Island opened with a party at our Urban Center Galleries, featuring Miss Cyclone as the evening’s MC, with sword-swallower The Great Fredini and Steve the Strongman providing sideshow entertainment that was both fascinating and gruesome at the same time.
Check out the slideshow above for photos of the opening, and visit our Facebook page to watch two short videos of the Great Fredini performing. We also took the opportunity to “live-tweet” this captivating event on Twitter, so please check out our tweets after the jump to learn about some of the more intriguing points of the evening. Continue Reading>>
Join architectural historian Francis Morrone this Wednesday, January 28, for the second in his four lecture series Architecture and Changing Lifestyles. New Yorkers’ lifestyles have changed continually over the years, constantly reinventing our notions of what it means to be a New Yorker. This lecture will take attendees beyond tenements to the many apartment houses the middle & upper classes constructed for themselves in New York City during the 1870s and 1880s.
When I. M. Pei — one of the world’s most celebrated architects and a master of light, space, and geometry — was awarded the Pritzker Prize in 1983, the jury said he had “given this century some of its most beautiful interior spaces and exterior forms.” Janet Adams Strong’s new book, I. M. PEI: Complete Works attests to this statement by showcasing Pei’s transcendent, sculptural forms from more than 50 years of work.
PIDGIN, a magazine publication of the graduate students of the Princeton School of Architecture (SOA), features the work of students, faculty, staff, & friends providing a “snapshot” of what is going on in the minds and hard-drives at SOA. It is an incubator for emerging ideas and includes papers, photographs, film stills, projects, tips, provocations, critiques, drawings and almost anything that communicates architectural ideas and transports them into the larger world.
Due to emergency surgery, architectural historian Francis Morrone will be unable to give the first of his four lectures on Architecture and Changing Lifestyles this Wednesday, January 7. Instead, his short course will begin on Wednesday, January 14 and end on Monday, February 9. Apologies for the short notice. It was unavoidable.
Architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable was born and raised in New York City. She attended good schools, but believes that “being in New York was the education.” In 1963, Ms. Huxtable became the first architecture critic at The New York Times (indeed, the first architecture critic at any daily newspaper in the United States). She won the first Pulitzer Prize for criticism and was a MacArthur Foundation Fellow. Above all, she is a writer who knows what she thinks and says it.
Irascible and caustic, tender and enthusiastic, more than a mercurial innovator, Le Corbusier was considered to be the very conscience of modern architecture. At tomorrow night’s book program and lecture, Nicholas Fox Weber author of the new biography of the man, Le Corbusier – A Life, will discuss Le Corbusier the precise, mathematical, practical-minded artist whose idealism — vibrant, poetic, imaginative; discipline; and sensuality were reflected in his iconic designs and pioneering theories of architecture and urban planning. Weber’s engrossing, entertaining portrait of his complex personality is full of provocative insights and welcome surprises.
Join MAS on Monday, November 17, 6:30 p.m. at 
On Tuesday, November 18, at 6:30 p.m., Urban Center Books and the MAS Planning Center will co-host a book talk by author, planner, academic, and activist Tom Angotti on his latest book, New York for Sale, chronicling the rise of grassroots planning in New York, and drawing heavily on the 