Suburbia is almost all right. That’s the guiding idea, anyway, behind “Worlds Away: New Suburban Landscapes” at the Walker Art Center through Aug. 17. Echoing the populism of Robert Venturi’s hugely influential declaration in his 1966 book “Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture” that “Main Street is almost all right,” the exhibition sets out to convince the museum’s sophisticated, largely urban audience that the American suburbs are more dynamic and endearingly odd than they ever would have guessed. [LA Times]
With the possible exception of certain underwater adventures and outer-space stories, pretty much every movie relies on architectural symbolism, finding in the house where the hero lives, the saloon he drinks in or the city streets he caroms through in his getaway car some useful ways to sharpen its thematic message. This year’s Oscar nominees for best picture, though, exploit that symbolism to an unusually effective degree. [LA Times]
If you want to know what Gotham’s twenty-first-century skyscrapers ought to look like, go over to 15 Central Park West and gaze at the brilliant apartment building Robert A. M. Stern is just completing. [City Journal]
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