The Changing of the Seasons

AHHHHH ITS DECEMBER ALREADY AHHHHHH

This would be less of an issue if I didn’t have, oh, all of the semester’s work to finish in about two weeks.

Plus, the snow is coming.

In honor of the fact that we won’t see these for a while….

Fall mums, Central Park

And speaking of Central Park – saw this plaque on a bench near one of the playgrounds on the southeast border (no idea what the cross street was).  Yes, it’s that Madoff.

Saul Alpern bench, Central Park

Awkward!

NYC Views, Part 2

On Saturday (last month) I spent a lot of time in Midtown Manhattan, seeing the big sites, and some smaller ones as well.  More photos from the trip.

Plaster Detail, Manhattan

Graffiti, Manhattan

Hot Dog Vendor

Palm Room, Some Bar

Madison Avenue and 42nd Street

Grand Central Station

Grand Central Station

Grand Central Station

Buildings in Midtown

Times Square

Times Square

Vogue Covers

Chrysler Building, Lobby

Chrysler Building

Hooray for William H. Whyte

Omigosh.

William Hollingsworth (“Holly”) Whyte.

This will require further investigation, but I think I found one of my new favorite people.  A few words on the man, from a collection of his work, The Essential William H. Whyte (Fordham UP, 2000):

“William H. Whyte, known to friends and family as Holly, was a prophet of common sense.  He did not approach the city with a preconceived vision; he came to it as an observer, and he based his philosophy of open space, his prescription for the civilized way of making cities, on what he saw.  He was in every way an urban anthropologist, and he had the objectivity of a great scientist, prepared to gather the evidence and be guided by it.  He cared more than anything about how people used the spaces they were given, and he told us more than we had ever known about that.  Where architects and planners had been designing by intuition, Holly Whyte gave them facts.” (Foreword by Paul Goldberger)

“Whyte was an astute observer who reported how people actually behaved (rather than how we assume they behave).  A charitable critic with a real moral bent, Whyte was cheerful by nature, ever the optimist; even if his observations about postwar American life were laced with warnings, some of them quite ominous, Whyte was always thinking positively, and he was clearly a patriot.  His affable personality and the agreeableness of his prose permitted him to go further in his social criticism than was typical in the popular media of the day, and people listened.” (Introduction by Albert LaFarge)

I just picked up this book and will have to reflect more on his work at a later time – partly because I should actually be reflecting on it in my Physical Planning project.  But just browsing through “The Class of ’49” from The Organization Man, I realized that he describes an institutionalization of young male America as a result of military service in World War II – a desire for structure, hierarchical management, and stability in a large organization (e.g. AT&T) rather than the messy riskiness, and sometimes inefficiency, of small businesses.  This is interesting for so many reasons:

• Profound influence of the experience of war, particularly of soldiers, on the structure of society
• Changing social organizations and ideals and desires and goals
• The (possible) fundamental shift in thought post WW2 in American culture
• The desire for stability, commoditization, sameness, as a response to war
• The rise of what we are currently dealing with, and its potential decline and/or change (that is, big corporations; widespread suburban developments; a culture of sameness; hierarchical vs. collaborative structures; dependence on certain resources; what it means to be a worker and contribute to society)
• The physical/spatial implications of these values, and how we interact with where we live

Something to throw out there:  the Internet (with accompanying ideas of digital information, non-hierarchical or spatially-based networks, networks in general, new communication patterns, more fluid identities, information overload, etc etc etc) is on par with World War 2 in terms of its level of influence on our culture and society – how we value and organize our world and each other.

Whereas postwar American culture was built on the desire to rebuild a better society out of mass cultural hardship and trauma,

Contemporary culture is being built by our attempts to deal with a torrent of information we’ve created … but major ideological/value conflicts also need to fit in there somewhere … hmm.

Holy crap.

I need to think about this a lot more.

I’m so intellectually flipping out right now.