At first, the “Hydrospatial City,” Argentine artist Gyula Kosice’s expansive conceptual work begun in 1972 and continuing to this day, seems firmly planted in the long tradition of floating cities. Around the time Kosice began working on his project, plans for utopian cities were gaining prominence, especially within architecture—see Kenzo Tange’s 1960 plan for Tokyo Bay, Mayor John Lindsay’s 1967 “Linear City for New York,” and Amancio Williams’s 1974 project “The City Which Humanity Needs” for Buenos Aires. The primary maquettes for Kosice’s project are hovering discs, each dotted with transparent bubbles, rings, and platters for various habitats—the regular stuff
Whenever I take a bath, I am faced with a question: To read or not to read? Of course, bringing printed matter near water is always a risk. But the reward—a transcendent moment of absorption in both liquid and text—is usually too large to forgo. And so, I have ruined numerous books and magazines, from issue after issue of the Economist to my grandfather’s first edition of Architecture without Architects.
The first thing that catches your eye about the London-based White Review’s third issue is the color gradient on the cover, which shades from a mesmerizing forest green to light burnt orange. After this, it’s what’s inside: The magazine features an impressive variety of work—from poetry and fiction translated from Japanese, Spanish, and Yiddish to reports on the extinction of whales in the Antarctic and stories of Perec and the Situationists in Belleville. In addition to producing a quarterly print publication, the White Review publishes monthly online issues and programs events in London and elsewhere. In honor of the