roman mars
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Barbed Wire’s Dark, Deadly History
In the mid 1800s, not many (non-native) Americans had ever been west of the Mississippi. When Frederick Law Olmstead visited the west in the 1850s, he remarked that the plains looked like a sea of grasses that moved “in swells after a great storm.” Massive herds of buffalo wandered the plains. Cowboys shepherded cattle across…
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Why New York’s Penn Station Sucks
New Yorkers are known to disagree about a lot of things. Who’s got the best pizza? What’s the fastest subway route? Yankees or Mets? But all 8.5 million New Yorkers are likely to agree on one thing: Penn Station sucks.
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The Problem With The Chair
“A Chair is a difficult object. A skyscraper is almost easier.” — Mies van der Rohe. Van der Rohe, as with Eames, Gehry, Hadid, Libeskind, Corbusier, and Breuer: if they have designed a big building, chances are they have designed a thing on which to sit.
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The City Pipes And Stairways That Get Left Behind And Lead To Nowhere
Cities, like living things, evolve slowly over time. Buildings and structures get added and renovated and removed, and in this process, bits and pieces that get left behind. Vestiges. Just as humans have tailbones and whales have pelvic bones, cities have doors that open into a limb-breaking drop, segments of fences that anyone can walk…