Mimi Zeiger

Critic, editor, curator and instigator.

Let’s get this bit out of the way: Mexico City is dense, Mexico City is colourful, and Mexico City is a place of contrasts. That is to say, in a haze of pollution you can eat tapas on the roof of a boutique hotel designed by Enrique Norton – or scoff down quesadillas on the street, sheltered by a tarp hung between a fence and a lamp post. The city’s famous outdoor markets sell local crafts and produce alongside imported Chinese sundries. Icons of Mexican modernism are tangled in an urban fabric dating back centuries. For a number of young architects, designers, and curators practicing in its colonias (neighbourhoods), Mexico City is more than clichéd observation; it’s an opportunity to refashion the narrative. Read More …

At Broadway & W. 218th Street there are only a few blocks left of Manhattan Island. 219th. 220th – the vestigial tail of 9th Avenue. Marble Hill and The Bronx are just across the Harlem River but this neighborhood, Inwood, is the narrow end of the landmass, the point where the accumulated capital (real and cultural) of the Big Apple goes to seed. It’s here, on this inauspicious corner in the nosebleed north of the borough, where we find Steven Holl Architects’ first ground-up building in New York City. Read More …