NYC #1

Why buy a crappy guide book when you can make your own?

Giving ourselves 10 days in New York should allow us to begin to get a feeling for the rhythm of the city as well as getting to see everything we want to. We’re staying in a warehouse apartment in the area of Williamsburg, which seems to be New York’s version of Shoreditch although somewhat more exaggerated. Across the road is a Ping Pong club and around the corner is “Meat Case”, where you’re given a tray with a piece of grease proof paper on and you fill it up with different types of BBQ meat ordered by the pound.

We’re exploring New York mostly by foot, the subway stations seem to have been transformed into saunas, starting off with what turned out to be a death walk in 90 degree heat following the Brooklyn queens expressway over to DUMBO. A day in midtown Manhattan seeing all the sights that are too well known to be worth posting was followed by a visit to the Diller Scofidio + Renfro Highline park in the Meatpacking District and visiting buildings by SANAA, OMA, Fosters, Denari, Morphosis, Herzog & de Meuron and Future Systems in and around the Greenwich Village area and unfortunately some Gehry, Bleurgh.

Other highlights included the Roosevelt Island Aerial Tramway, the Staten Island Ferry (I’ll cover Staten Island in a later post), a Mets Ball Game (which unfortunately was rained off), a Brooklyn Cyclones Ball Game and Coney Island (with Clint Mansell on my iPod). There was also an interesting BMW Guggenheim Lab which had a steel gantry structure that suspended all the furniture and seating above the stage area that could be hoisted and lowered to change the function of the space below.

Here I’ve posted some photos off my camera that I think are interesting (I seem to have spent a long time under bridges)