A new performing arts center in New York’s Financial District demonstrates the problem with the city’s beautiful, expensive buildings.
The only time I visited Milan, I emerged from a narrow street onto the Piazza del Duomo. As soon as I saw the ornate cathedral presiding over the open square, I started laughing—so much I couldn’t stop. The sight was so overwhelming, absurd even, that I couldn’t look at it for more than a few seconds at a time without bursting into a nervous, incredulous chuckle. I felt like I was looking at something forbidden, scandalous even. Over the course of my stay, I walked by it, next to it, behind it, and across it. I even paid to go inside.
It strikes that the point of the church’s grandeur is to do exactly what it did to me: bowl people over, command the space around it, and summon onlookers inside. Its ability to do that came at a cost, though. Over the more than 600 years that it took to build, the Duomo held something of a monopoly on architectural grandeur, and the members of the poor and working classes who participated in its construction—many of whom never got to see the building completed—likely went home to squalor.
Read Full Article »
