New Yorkers with elevator phobia share how they've coped with their lifelong fear

2018-10-05T18:26:00-04:00

The elevator-phobic people of New York City are almost our own subculture [...] I’ve fantasized at times about a kind of utopia: a gleaming glass city free of elevators. But for now I, just like Gabriella and Rachel and Kevin and Nakia, still live in New York, and still constantly have to force myself to enter slim or squat boxes of despair. Why haven’t we left? What strange fate have we dealt ourselves, to live in a place full of hellscapes.

Having a deeply ingrained fear of elevators while living in a vertical landscape like New York City — which has over 60,000 elevators, by the way — isn't easy for some folks, like writer Amos Barshad. He and other fellow New Yorkers he interviews talk about how their phobia began, their search for answers to why they still have this fear, and how they manage it in their everyday lives.

Harvard Design Magazine's newest issue, "Run for Cover", probes the relationship between architecture and fear

2016-10-06T12:54:00-04:00

“Can we think our way out of fear? Design our way through dread?” ask the editors of “Run for Cover”, Harvard Design Magazine’s Summer/Spring issue. The 42nd edition of the journal questions the relationship between architecture and fear, troubling the normative expectation for architecture to act as shelter.

After all, architecture already is weaponized, serves as a mechanism for control, a target for attacks, a tool of segregation. This is increasingly true in the “age of terror”, when “we blind ourselves to the regimes of control enacted in the name of safety which ultimately encroach on our civil liberties.”

Run for Cover features writing by Geoff Manaugh, Jennifer Sigler, Interboro Partners, Blair Kamin, and Oliver Wainwright—among many others. You can read select articles online now, or purchase the whole thing for € 18.00.

Archinect has previously included the Harvard Design Magazine in our Screen/Print series, which is an experiment in translating written work on to the screen....

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New Yorkers with elevator phobia share how they've coped with their lifelong fear

Harvard Design Magazine's newest issue, "Run for Cover", probes the relationship between architecture and fear