California Literary Review

In Village, a Proposal That Erases History: Over the last few years the growing clout of developers has gradually chipped away at the city’s resolve to protect its architectural legacy. The agency most responsible for defending that legacy, the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission, has sometimes been accused of putting developers’ interests above the well-being of the city’s inhabitants. A proposal before the commission to tear down several buildings in the Greenwich Village Historic District is shaping up as a crucial test of whether those critics are right. [NYT]

Creating Central Park: Frederick Law Olmsted once said, of the area that would become Central Park, that it would have been hard for New York City’s leaders to choose a piece of land that possessed fewer of the “desirable characteristics of a park, or upon which more time, labor, and expense would be required to establish them.” [NY Sun]

French Architect Wins Pritzker Prize: Jean Nouvel, the bold French architect known for such wildly diverse projects as the muscular Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis and the exotically louvered Arab World Institute in Paris, has received architecture’s top honor, the Pritzker Prize. [NYT]

SANAA’s Supernatural Designs: Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, the two principals of the Japanese architectural firm SANAA, and the architects responsible for the recently opened New Museum on the Bowery, have devoted their career to the relentless re-examination of what the rest of us are apt to take for granted. Most importantly perhaps, as we now see in a show at the New Museum — “SANAA Works: 1998–2008″ — they have consecrated, indeed sacrificed, themselves to this spirit of design, to a life in which one’s appearance and appurtenances define who one is and take on the tone and attributes of a secular religion. [NY Sun]