Two Community Board 5 meetings this week, in two different available spaces in Mid-Midtown. This is not the equivalent of the infamous public hearing procedures well-known in Budapest. Community Boards are formal groups representing a certain district and articulating the consensus reached among the community members. The CB expresses its opinion about each development projects in its neighborhood and approves or disapproves it. CBs have no right to veto – but they are influential in emphasizing the problems and weaknesses of the projects, and thus affecting the further procedure.

The recent developments plans in the CB 5 are very illustrative. Jean Nouvel’s MoMA extension in the 53^rd Street and Norman Foster’s new Lexington Avenue tower will both change the Midtown skyline, and will significantly charge the area with people, deliveries – traffic. The Board is not intimidated by the star architects: its membership includes Rockefellers and prominent real-estate attorneys, ie. professionals who are totally aware of the area’s development potentials and have their own vision about it. The nimby-attitude is also represented, of course. But the point is elsewhere: on debate and the public clash of interests and ideas.

“In London his look seems to be about wearing many thousand pounds’ worth of garments that appear to have never been worn before having been slept in, the night before. In New York he prefers to look as though he’s just been detailed by a tight scrum of specialists. Different cultural parameters” – írja William Gibson 2003-as, Pattern Recognition című regényében.

Another uninteresting house party in an intersting house. A brownstone on the Eastern Parkway, Olmstead’s great axis. A bizarre wooden interior, and difficoulties of walking the stairs.

Egy kanapé váratléan felbukkanása tökéletessé varázsolta a kényelmet nálunk, a Madioson utca 41. legfelső emeletén.