The 5th, and newest, edition of the AIA Guide to New York City is now available. The work, designed for laypeople while remaining informative to the professional architecture community, is a "must-read" to understand New York City's personality.
My father bought an edition nearly a half-century ago. He worked in lower Manhattan at the time, and found the area's architecture intriguing. He read the AIA Guide to help him see architectural principles and nuances to which he was untutored. The buildings also served as something of a backdoor approach into the city's history.
I used the AIA Guide as a reliable touchstone when, as a teacher, I took my immigrant and refugee students on field trips to Manhattan south of Canal Street. My instructions were simple: look straight ahead at the lowest floors, and look up to the sky. The buildings' signatures tend to be in those two locations. After that, I asked them why would one build a structure in that manner. What does that say about New York, its expectations, its ambitions, its blind spots?
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