To return to any place is, associatively or figuratively, to reconstruct any event that happened at that place—especially if it’s a personally or universally defining event. To acutely mark that spot with an architectural artifact like a monument or memorial makes it impossible to miss, but also denies us the architectural setting of everyday life that enabled—or witnessed—that event in the first place. And such monuments can also seem, all too easily, to relieve us from our duty of further recollection and reflection. To demolish whatever stood at a place may seem like erasing that place’s defining event from history. But, conversely, to restore a place too completely to some earlier state can become a form of erasure, a denial that any disruption has ever happened. 
…

Shootings, events defined by immediate sightlines and ballistic trajectories, are an especially spatial and architectural kind of violence, and some ineffable part of their violence is to space itself—to the very airspace or geographical coördinates at which shots were fired or taken. The architectural task in the long aftermath of such shootings is not only to repair structural damage but to calibrate a balance between remembering and forgetting sufficient for daily life to continue nearby—and to figure out how the shapes, materials, and details of buildings can participate in that calibration. The architectural task is not only to provide actual security and defensibility but to figure out how the ways you see and move through buildings can affect your feelings of being at risk or at home.

Thomas De Monchaux talks to Erlend Haffner of the Oslo design firm Fantastic Norway, who has been hired to rebuild the summer camp on Utoya Island, which was the site of a mass shooting in July, 2011, about the process of rebuilding violent places: http://nyr.kr/16c0vKo

Photograph: Courtesy Fantastic Norway.

(Source: newyorker.com)

Time is running out to enter the Sixth Annual Eustace Tilley contest! Show us your take on our iconic dandy for a chance to be featured on newyorker.com. Click-through for contest details, and to see past winners: http://nyr.kr/UQaJew

I’ve never met the architect Richard Rogers, but this past Yom Kippur, I stopped to pee at his house in London, and, like the Beatles post-Maharishi, I was permanently altered….

Deborah Copaken Kogan on what she learned from a surprise visit to Richard Rogers’s house: http://nyr.kr/WHAbGa

(Source: newyorker.com)

In the current issue of the magazine, Nathan Heller explains how the Technology/Entertainment/Design (TED) conference franchise has turned ideas into an industry.  Part of the reason, Heller claims, are certain elements common to many of these talks.  In this video, we break down the arc of TED talk.

Click-through for more: http://nyr.kr/L6uM0i

(Source: newyorker.com)

In This Week’s Issue

Ezra Klein on how making a good speech can actually keep a President from reaching his goals; James Surowiecki gives two reasons for why the recovery may start gathering speed; Louis Menand on the lessons of Mitt Romney’s business career; Emily Nussbaum on the art of the dirtbag sitcom; and more.

Sex, Figs, Italics: A Visual History of Menus

Food is sex you can talk about, a wise friend said recently. (In Seattle, where cake-baking is the new S. & M., food is also apparently sex you can’t talk about.) And now that Taschen—of the deviant, beautiful, nostalgic books—has published a book called “Menu Design in America” ($59.99), food is sex you can look at.

The 2012 Eustace Tilley Contest

Eustace Tilley appeared on our first cover, in 1925. To celebrate our 87th anniversary, we invite readers to create a book-bag version of our iconic dandy. Twelve winners will be featured in a slide show curated by The New Yorker’s art editor, Françoise Mouly. One grand-prize winner will get their design printed on a Strand Bookstore tote bag and a $1,000 Strand shopping spree. The deadline to enter is midnight on January 18, 2012.

Above, a selection of winners from 2011. For more contest details and rules, and to see the winners from 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2011: http://nyr.kr/xBHKtH

Maurizio Cattelan’s Toilet Paper

On opening night of the Maurizio Cattelan retrospective at the Guggenheim (read Peter Schjeldahl’s review of the show), a Hummer stretch limo with the words “TOILET PAPER” printed on the side was not-so-discreetly parked outside the museum. The insignia referred to Toilet Paper magazine, a bi-annual, picture-based publication co-created by Cattelan and the photographer Pierpaolo Ferrari.

- Concept and images by Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari. Click through to read more and to see the full slide show: http://nyr.kr/sEwpzD

An inside look at the creative process behind Christoph Niemann’s representation of the Japan disaster on this week’s cover.

Above: an early iteration of the cover, without its black background.