marcel breuer's Whitney/Met/Frick in new york

We've really fallen in love with Marcel Breuer, and The Breuer Building in New York City is not only one of his best, but you can dinner in it! A Brutalist masterpiece built in the heyday of International Style glass towers, Breuer was commissioned to design a home for the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1963. The New Times Times described it as "harsh but handsome' with its stepped cantilevered facade creating space for a bridged entrance and a large, protected sunken garden. The Whitney moved to another part of town into a Renzo Piano-designed space while the Metropolitan picked up the space and rechristened it The Met Breuer. 

Sadly, the Breuer Building has fended off its share of challenges, including the horribly unfortunate proposed expansion by Michael Graves and, apparently, covid since the Met announced that it won't reopen the space after the outbreak (and will be temporarily leased to the Frick Collection).

 

 

the google cometh

 

First came the hieroglyphics, and then the cores. And then came the giant street saw, carving a thin line into the subsurface for the cable. Finally, after more than seven years after their announcement on April 9th, 2013 and that Austin would be a Google Fiber City, Google contractors embedded fiber into our street.

I'm not sure when the fiber will go live, but we'll have to decide at that point whether we want to switch from Spectrum. We haven't been  unhappy with Spectrum, barring them selling us faster internet but installing a box that wouldn't let us access its full speed. Google's model of installing the last mile in the street is worrisome given the amount of new construction that occurs in our 'hood (which increases the likelihood of line severing).

It appears that Google offers 100Mbps at $70 a month and 1 gigabit at $160 a month whereas our current set-up costs  $110 a month at these speeds:

so hhhmmmmm..... We'd also have to figure out how to get the fiber from the street to the house, which will be no small affair. 

Sadly, Google's contractors littered the holy hell out of the neighborhood with hundreds of cut zip ties, half a hundred water bottle caps, a couple dozen water bottles, and dozens of adhesive labels all over just a few blocks. A request I sent to Google Fiber to request their contractors to not litter went unanswered. So much for that heralded customer service and "Don't be evil" tagline (although, admittedly, they removed that back in 2018).