This chess machine, on display at the MoMA’s design exhibition, is not a regular one. From a given situation, it tells you all the possible steps each character may take. In this way, it’s a few steps behind me: it tells about the possible futures of the board I play in. The chess board becomes the garden of forking paths, Borges’ famous take on the co-presence of futures, and the parallel presence of choices failing to exclude each other.

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.

A New Yorkot leromboló vagy romokban látó katasztrófafilmek mellett a valóságos veszélyes is képviseltetik magukat a Város jövőjéről szóló gondolkodásban. A városháza What if New York City… című pályázatában egy esetleges (és esedékes) pusztító szélvész utáni lakások tevrezésére kérte fel a világ építészeit.

I arrived a half an hour earlier, but the theater’s café had no more places to sit. I was waiting with a magazine in my hands, leaning against a coloumn in that particularly renovated interior space, jewel of the Brooklyn Academy of Music Harvey Theater.
About a year ago, I participated at a discussion in the Center for Contemporary Architecture in Budapest. We were talking about ruins, and their perception. I happened to say something of ruins as design elements in galleries and other spaces of art. Someone objected and told me: ‘it is not because we want our spaces to be run down – not at all. We have no money to renovate them.’
BAM has money, with over a dozenh of members contributing with more than 5 million dollars, but still, its walls are uncovered, the bare bricks and other wall structures are illuminated to emphasizer the alternative character of the place. The premier cultural venue of Brooklyn, the BAM is probably seen as alternative from Manhattan. I heard people asking: ‘But what does this wonderful institution do in Brooklyn?’. Others replied: ‘Brooklyn is the new Manhattan.’
It’s Beckett in the BAM, Happy Days, Fiona Shaw plays it all, with a male actor suffering under and around her, but never joining the conversation. She is in the middle of the scene, covered by sand, apparently the debris of a building after the explosion. After some explosion, of which we will never get to know anything more. Just like the whole piece: thrown into the middle of nowhere, a couple continues its one-sided conversations until the female part is totally covered in the ground.
I could take one photo before the security staff started approaching me.

Since the release of the movie ‘I am Legend’, that is, about a month an a half, the images linking New York City with natural scenes are overwhelming us. TV series, or advertisements, they’re all drawing inspiration from the juxtaposition of two ideas of the jungle: the forest and the city. There is nothing more stimulating  in an uncanny way than seeing the buildings of one’s everyday life overgrown by plants and trees. Transforming the present into a ruined past, a certain melancholy is haunting these images.

Kedden a Cooper Union-ban Shigeru ban tartott előadást, telt ház előtt. Shigeru Ban pontosan itt, a Cooper Union építésziskolájában végzett, mielőtt karrierje meglódult. Az előadás nagy része az építész felelősségéről szólt: Ban az utóbbi tíz évben rengeteget dolgozik katasztrófa-sújtotta területeken (Ruandában, Indiában, Törökországban, Sri Lankán), ahol olcsó, könnyen előállítható hajlékokat tervez. Valószínűleg ezért időzítették így ezt az előadást. A szervező Architectural League a 2007-08-as szezonban “Reimagining Risk” (Building and Fear, Indefensible Space) címmel tartott előadás-sorozatot. Ha a katasztrófa nincs is jelen a New York-iak életében (csak a filmeken), ennek megvan a lehetősége. A városháza globális felmelegedést vizsgáló kutatócsoportja szerint a tengerszint emelkedése komolyan veszélyeztetheti Manhattant – a szigetet. Emellett a hurrikán lehetősége sincs kizárva: a magát felkészültnek tudni szerető városháza az elmúlt hónapban beindította a vészhelyzetekben történő kooordináció megkönnyítését szolgáló kommunikációs hálózatot, és építészeti pályázatot hirdetett egy modellezett hurrikán rombolása utáni tömeges szükséglakások tervezésére.