... Of course, Lower Manhattan has remained an axis for all these activities in one way or another. And yet the status of this artistic staple was perpetually under reconsideration; for instance, the Lower East Side this year became even more established—home to major institutions such as the new New Museum on the Bowery (as well as any number of contemporary art galleries) at the same time that the New York terrain, more broadly speaking, seemed totally saturated (the frontier logic of finding the city’s “next” bohemian neighborhood becoming a thing of the past). In fact, such circumstances constituted a specific subject of inquiry for common room, an architectural collective started in 2006 by Lars Fischer, Maria Ibañez de Sendadiano, and Todd Rouhe. Operating out of the modest, modernist Emigrant Bank Building on the far east end of Grand Street, what is now a “firm” was initially nothing more than shared office space for a group of independent architects. Before long, however, Fischer, Ibañez, and Rouhe started to take on joint projects, many of which addressed the ways in which social bodies come to inhabit built structures differently over time...
