Diana Lind

Diana Lind lives in Philadelphia where she is the editor of Next American City magazine. She is also a journalist whose writing has regularly appeared in Architectural Record and Art+ Auction. Her book, Brooklyn Modern, is in its second printing and Lind has been featured in a Q&A on NYTimes.com and an interview on Martha Stewart Living Radio, among other media outlets. She writes fiction in her spare time.

2008
Instructor, Drexel University
Brooklyn Modern: Architecture, Interiors & Design, Rizzoli
Editor in Charge, Architectural Record Houses 2008
Winner, ACLU Stand Up for Freedom contest (co-creator, Sarah Kramer)

2007
Resident, Blue Mountain Center
Finalist, Iowa Review Award

2006
Columbia University, M.F.A., Creative Writing
Editor, Designing the Hamptons: Portraits of Interiors, Edizioni Press

2004
Founder, Work Magazine
Instructor, Columbia University Summer Session in Creative Writing

2003
Cornell University, B.A., English

2002
Arthur Lynn Andrews Award for Fiction
Einhorn Discovery Grant

1999
Horace Mann School

1981
Born in Manhattan

By photographing buildings and streets, Thomas Struth transcended the role of architectural photographer to become the creator of contemplative portraits of urbanism, globalization, and architectural spectacle. Over several decades, Struth was developed a method of making familiar sights fresh, causing viewers to look more closely at what they take for granted. While this retrospective explores Struth’s vast range of subjects, his recent images of urban architecture suggest he is returning to his original interest in photographing streets.  Read more…

During its nine years of existence, the Farm Security Administration employed some of America’s best photographers to document  the hardships of living on relief during the Depression. The project resulted in an archive of 200,000 images some of which are featured in Bronzeville: Black Chicago in Pictures, 1941-43, a show that tells the story of Chicago’s urban underbelly, African-Americans chasing the American dream, and the architecture that failed to sustain them. 

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Vito Acconci’s Island in the Mur defies definition. A convoluted mass of steel and glass connected to the banks of the Mur River traversing the city of Graz, Austria, the island houses an amphitheater, cafe, and playground, all of which flow into one another. Acconci is quick to point out his design’s metamorphic qualities: “The functions are mixed, there’s no hierarchy, no boundaries, no separation between inside and outside.” 

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Casa Poli is only a 30-mile drive from Chile’s second-largest city, Concepción, midway down the country’s coast, but it feels perched at the edge of the world: a place with limitless ocean views, a soundtrack provided by wind and pelicans, and no other human beings within eyeshot, except for local fishermen in boats, hundreds of feet offshore. Venture 45 minutes outside any major city in the United States, and you’re in an exurban tangle of highways, but here, half the roads remain unpaved. In the States, a weekend house such a quick jaunt from the city would mean high prices for land and construction, yet here, Pezo von Ellrichshausen Architects (PvE) built almost 2,000 square feet for $63,000 dollars. But if the Coliumo Peninsula, on which Casa Poli rests, sounds too idyllic, the truth about its development should be told: On the bay side of this landform, construction cranes are busily erecting weekend retreats for city residents. Only the Pacific Ocean side has remained largely uninhabited, and mostly because many people consider its terrain less suitable for building. Of course, that could change now that word has gotten out about Casa Poli. (The house garnered first prize at the 2006 Santiago Biennale, where its architects, Mauricio Pezo and Sofia von Ellrichshausen, a married couple, won the Best Young Chilean Architects Award.) Read more…

A decade after Swiss architect Peter Zumthor won a competition to design a new home for the Kolumba Art Museum, in Cologne, his building is finally set to open September 15. Best known for his Thermal Baths in Vals, Switzerland, Zumthor here puts his minimalist imprimatur on a monolithic gray-brick facade with only patches of decorative perforations and oversized windows to let in daylight. The museum envelops the Madonna in Ruins chapel, designed by Gottfried Bohm in 1949, and sits atop the remains of the 1853 St. Kolumba church, destroyed in World War II. Zumthor’s voluminous structure will better accommodate the collection—ranging from Leonhard Kern’s 1630 frieze of Adam and Eve to Josef Albers’s 1962 Homage to the Square.—Diana Lind 

When Paul Chan visited New Orleans for the first time in November 2006, the digital media and video artist expected to hear the sound of jackhammers and to see evidence of post-Katrina progress. He instead witnessed a far different scene: “The streets were still, as if time had been swept away along with the houses. Friends said the city now looks like the backdrop for a bleak science fiction movie. … I realized it didn’t look like a movie set, but the stage for a play I have seen many times. It was unmistakable. The empty road. The bare tree leaning precariously to one side with just enough leaves to make it respectable. The silence.”What the streetscape reminded him of was the setting in Samuel Beckett’s classic work Waiting for Godot. In the play, two men grapple with their nonsensical wait for a third; its philosophical reflection upon man’s uncertainty in the world seemed to Chan an apt metaphor for New Orleans’s precarious condition. Read more…