Email: Dianalindindex @ gmail.com
Twitter: @dianalindindex
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Diana Lind is an urban advocate and writer. She is executive director and editor in chief of Next American City.
In 2011, Diana was a Van Alen Institute fellow. She is the chair of the program committee of the Ed Bacon Foundation and an adviser to the Greater Philadelphia Innovation Cluster.
Born in Manhattan in 1981, Diana has received degrees from Cornell University (B.A., English) and Columbia University (M.F.A., Creative Writing). She is the author of Brooklyn Modern: Architecture, Interiors & Design (Rizzoli, 2008), which is in its third printing. She also edited Designing the Hamptons: Portraits of Interiors (Edizioni, 2006). She has published her writing in The New York Times, Architectural Record and many other publications.
She lives in Philadelphia’s Washington Square West neighborhood.
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.
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…
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…