In 2013, Peter Buffett wrote an Op Ed piece for The New York Times entitled “The Charitable industrial Complex,” which criticized the top-down approach of many philanthropic organizations—an approach that often failed to solve the problem it was meant to help and in some cases even caused harm. He went further, lambasting the rising inequality in which “philanthropy has become the ‘it’ vehicle for leveling the playing field”…
Arriving in Vieques, the small Puerto Rican island located eight miles off the mainland, by ferry from Fajardo in late January, the island seemed well on its way to recovery.
Steven Holl Architects, a 40-person firm with offices in New York and Beijing, has built museums, libraries, health centers, chapels, university buildings, houses, and mixed-use urban complexes consisting of hundreds of housing units and retail and community space, but no matter the configuration, scale, or location, each building has the same beginning: a small watercolor sketched out by Steven Holl.
In the 1960s and early 1970s, urban renewal devastated Kingston, Poughkeepsie and other Hudson Valley cities, but Newburgh likely suffered the most, given the scale of destruction and the nature of what was lost. Approximately 1,300 buildings were demolished, annihilating the downtown commercial district, which dated back to the 1820s. Nine streets were plowed under. The city’s African American community was uprooted, with thousands of businesses and residents displaced.
Three years ago, as the rent was soaring in his longtime Chelsea studio, food photographer Aaron Rezny took the plunge and bought an industrial brick building in Midtown Kingston. He subsequently renovated it and moved his photography business up to the facility in 2016.