The Best Sentences of the Week (Volume 2)

"Instead, the 6.9-magnitude temblor made possible a leap of civic imagination. Repair became renewal. Callous as it sounds, the tragedy of the moment can have beneficial long-term effects." 
From "Loma Prieta quake left legacy of repair, renewal," by John King for SFGate.

"It's an unusual arrangement for an architecture critic, but then again, so is Dallas. For a number of reasons, Lamster's work could serve as a model for places like Dallas: paradox cities where the need for criticism is plain, but the means for underwriting it are nearly nonexistent." 
From "How Dallas Found Its Voice," by Kriston Capps for CityLab. 

"Of course, the best response to quarantine is to avoid the condition that necessitates it in the first place. That means, in the case of urban design, asking difficult questions about how our cities are made, and in the case of infectious disease, how we can improve public health infrastructure. And when those things go awry, as they inevitably do, to be guided by rational processes, and not fear."
From "Ebola, Quarantine, and the City," by Mark Lamster for the Dallas Morning News.

"From Central Park, Park Avenue or Park Slope, there it is. On the George Washington Bridge or Long Island Expressway, there it is. In the bleachers at MetLife Stadium or Citi Field, there it is. Everyone from cinematographers and muralists to tourists and snow globe makers must now contend with the tower."
From "New Manhattan Tower Is Now the Tallest, if Not the Fairest, of Them All," by Matt Chaban for the New York Times.

"In this light, the program of the building is a conspicuous absence in Foster’s video. While the architectural membrane becomes loaded with a series of nationalist messages, its operational aspects are omitted. Architecture here is reduced to form on the outside and well-lit void on the inside. The architects are thus recast as form- and image-makers in search of the objective correlative of a globalized Mexican state. Or to say it more simply, they’re three-dimensional publicists."
From "Air Nationalism: Norman Foster and Fernando Romero’s Mexico City Airport," by Ana María León for the Avery Review.

"The exhibition is an impeccable vacuum. The curators have worked strenuously, if invisibly, to keep at bay the full range of issues that have given the rest of the architecture world a full-on identity crisis in the last decade or so."
From "Comprehensive 'Gehry' retrospective in Paris draws sociological blank," by Christopher Hawthorne for the Los Angeles Times.

"City Hall is wide open, the receptionist who used to man the front desk having long been laid off. Though Lima does have a sparkling new civic center – host to the Lima Symphony – there is almost nowhere to grab a sandwich or a cup of coffee. One of the first things an outsider notices is that Lima and its townships lack what, for most communities, is the first sign of upward mobility, a Starbucks."
From "Where the Tea Party Rules," by Janet Reitman for Rolling Stone.