Jerry Adler

Jerry Adler is a former senior editor of Newsweek who writes about architecture and other subjects.

Articles

ARTICLES

Musical Chairs

Musical Chairs

The office of the future offers many places to sit and work, but no place to call your own.
Jerry Adler
August 1, 2016
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In the 1980s, the owner of Newsweek, Katharine Graham, reviewing plans to renovate the headquarters of the magazine, where I worked, questioned the necessity of private offices for the dozens of writers and editors.


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Creativity and the Brain
Architecture + Creativity

Creativity and the Brain

Neuroscientists keep trying to unlock the mystery of what sparks visionary thinking and artistic invention.
Jerry Adler
May 1, 2016
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It was 60 years ago, at the start of his career, but the architect and educator John P. Eberhard remembers the very moment the idea came to him for what would be his seminal creation: the modular church.


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The High Life

The High Life

The new super-slender, supertall residential skyscrapers are emblematic of high demand and new money flooding into the market for architecture.
Jerry Adler
May 16, 2015
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As you traverse the streets of Midtown Manhattan, the new skyscraper known as 432 Park Avenue pops in and out of view unexpectedly, hidden behind the Waldorf-Astoria at one moment, then looming menacingly over Lever House'a giant watchtower of blindingly white concrete with the proportions of an elongated toothpaste box stood on end. 


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Dining By Design

Jerry Adler
July 16, 2013
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Restaurants, bars, and cafés have long shaped the character of neighborhoods, cities, and entire cultures, but in recent decades, architecture took its place alongside the cuisine as a defining feature of a meal. Now, as chefs reach for local ingredients in their craft-focused cooking, designers are creating a new idea of authenticity with their food-focused spaces. In her captivating memoir, Blood, Bones & Butter, the chef Gabrielle Hamilton writes about opening her signature New York City restaurant, Prune, on a block of the Lower East Side still populated by “random derelicts” who would leave their messes behind in her side
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Design for Troubled Waters

Jerry Adler
December 17, 2012
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Cities need to grapple with complex ideas to prepare for the next superstorm. A New York City worker clears a sewer drain in Lower Manhattan after Superstorm Sandy. Two large buildings stand about a quarter mile apart in Red Hook, on the Brooklyn waterfront. One is a 19th-century brick warehouse handsomely renovated to house apartments and Fairway Market, a much-beloved gourmet grocery; the other is the local outpost of IKEA in a sprawling yellow-and-blue shed whose ground floor is mostly parking. The storm surge from Superstorm Sandy wrecked Fairway, which will take months to rebuild. IKEA, by contrast, with its
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When Business and Politics Converge in the Big City

Jerry Adler
September 19, 2011
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Roughly since the election of Andrew Jackson, American politicians have also been brands, competing for mindshare in the markets for “liberal blowhard,” say, or “Second Amendment crank.” In this field Mayor Mike Bloomberg of New York owns the trademark on “apolitical technocrat,” a Northeastern niche market in which the absence of charisma is, like the hand-printed label on a jar of farmer's market jam, a signifier of authenticity. Bloomberg’s New York: Class and Governance in the Luxury City, by Julian Brash. University of Georgia Press, 2011, 344 pages, $25. But the secretive, imperious Bloomberg is also a billionaire whose fortune
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