Jeff Byles

Iceland's Drunken Painter

To get to Ragnar Kjartansson’s countryside studio, I flew to Reykjavík, drove to a scarcely inhabited fjord called Borgarfjörður an hour north of the city, splashed across a tidal waterway in a four-wheel-drive vehicle, and pulled up to a bluff overlooking the glacial river Hvítá. There, in a small cottage, I found the artist fixing a proper Icelandic repast of dried haddock and headcheese and bottles of Egils Gull beer. Little did I know what the prodigy of Icelandic performance art had in store for me.

Image credit: Wolfgang Träger

In the Swim

Thanks to New York City's deadening zoning rules, public waterfronts have often been dullsville: unbending bulkheads, forbidding railings, and nary a spot to quaff a beer. A new proposal now under review by city officials would, for the first time in 15 years, revamp the way developer-built public waterfront spaces are designed, owned, and managed. The Williamsburg, Brooklyn waterfront (above) has been something of a test case for the city's new rules, and while the result has been generally deemed a great leap forward, the zoning could still take a few tweaks to get us beyond high-and-dry.

Image credit: Courtesy FXFowle

Built for the People of the United States

Some of my colleagues at The Architect's Newspaper have written a lovely ode to the old New Deal, one sadly not destined to be reprised in the Obama administration's first round of stimulus spending. Use it or lose it, indeed.

Image credit: Jet Lowe/Courtesy Library of Congress

Greening the O.C.

In Orange County, the car-centric heart of the American dream, New York landscape architect Ken Smith is creating a complex, urban-scale public space that promotes ecological and social sustainability. Orchards? Check. Urban farms? Yes. Botanic gardens, canine frisbee competitions, and a gigantic helium balloon? All in. This ambitious Central Park for the 21st century even comes with its own custom-carved, two-mile-long canyon. Take that, Olmsted.

Image credit: Great Park Design Studio

Here Comes Everybody

"For everybody, being in New York's streets can be a way of being at home. Can we count on our city planners to be there?" So asks Marshall Berman in The New York 2030 Notebook, a new collection of rants, raves, reflections, and ruminations on New York's future from a rousing confederation of urbanists, thinkers, and critics. Edited by Jeff Byles and Olympia Kazi and published by the Institute for Urban Design, the notebook takes up the gauntlet thrown down by New York's forward-focused PlaNYC 2030. Will the Gotham of tomorrow spring from "voodoo demographics" and a misguided agenda of growth? Will it offer environmental and economic equity? Will it have bike racks, for god's sake? Check out constructively zinger-filled essays from Richard Sennett, Winka Dubbeldam, James Wines, Miquela Craytor, Klaus Jacob, Michael Sorkin, and many more. As the crypto-urbanologist Damon Rich aptly writes, the last great master plan of New York (circa 1969) reads "like a science fiction novel about earth written by aliens." Beam us up, Mayor Bloomberg. But first, boldly go buy this book!

Red Hook Reloaded

When the Swedish furniture company Ikea took over the 22-acre Todd Shipyard property along Brooklyn’s Erie Basin, it inherited piles of ropes, winches, a forgotten shipyard log, and a hefty chunk of Red Hook history. Six years later, that swath of salutary grit has been reborn as Erie Basin Park, a nearly mile-long stretch of newly accessible public waterfront. Built and paid for by Ikea, the park is both a tribute and a tombstone to the industrial past—and a surprisingly optimistic statement about Brooklyn’s future.

Image credit: Colin Cooke

Hanger, No Starch

Designed by Tadao Ando, Stone Hill Center isn’t your typical new museum building. It sits up a winding footpath amid enveloping stands of birch, beech, and sugar maples. When you reach this mountain redoubt—the latest addition to the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, in Williamstown, Massachusetts—you’ll find no soaring atrium, no signature reflecting pool. What you will find is a lavishly appointed, $25 million, art-sudsing laundromat.

Image credit: Richard Pare/Courtesy Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute

House of Hues

The Copenhagen-born artist Olafur Eliasson creates complex optical effects with the simplest of means: light, reflection, and our passage through space. In the exhibition Take your time: Olafur Eliasson, on view at MoMA and P.S.1 through June 30, three large-scale installations blur the boundaries between art and architecture, film and design. Room-sized color fields create strange, new social spaces; chromatic events turn light into landscape. In Eliasson's often surreal spaces, spectrum is structure.

Image credit: Matthew Septimus/Courtesy MoMA and P.S.1

Taking Back the Streets

New York's streets are as gritty as the city's reputation, traffic-clogged canyons of concrete where jaded foot-travelers and cyclists jostle and growl, exulting all the while. (Stared down a Hummer lately?) Yet street reformers from around the globe are increasingly turning to the city's 5,800 miles of streets, sidewalks, and highways, dreaming up ideas -- be they modest or unbound -- to radically transform the urban experience. Here are ten mutinous proposals.

Welcome!

Welcome to the new, improved website for author Jeff Byles.

Jeff's book Rubble: Unearthing the History of Demolition is the first-ever biography of the wrecking trade, and a riveting, character-filled narrative of how lowly demolition grew to become a multibillion-dollar business, an extreme spectator sport, and a touchstone for what we value, what we disdain, who we were, and what we wish to become.

Named to the "Best of 2005" lists of Time Out New York and The Village Voice

Rubble rides the wrecking ball through centuries of firehooks and skull crackers, barmen and implosionists. From powder-kegged old London to Las Vegas, this book rummages through the ruins and surveys the blasts that—for better and for worse—shape our cities and our souls.

"Engaging."
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

"A live-wire, multilevel study...the demolition of buildings inspires complex emotions—shock, horror, even awe—and those responses are well worth thinking about."
Time Out New York

On this site you’ll find other published work in the article archive. Read more about the book. And subscribe to this blog's feed to keep current on readings, events, and more.

Strap on your hard hat, enjoy your visit—and don’t hesitate to send a message via the email link on this page.