H&dM, 56 Leonard Street, 2017 © Hufton+Crow /  Foster+Partners, Sede de JPMorgan, 2025 © Nigel Young

Two days after hosting the planet’s biggest marathon, New York elected a 34-year-old Muslim socialist as mayor. On that same day, 4 November, the country that is the cultural center of the Islamic world inaugurated the Grand Egyptian Museum, a controversial work by Heneghan Peng that is the largest museum dedicated to a single culture, injecting a huge dose of self-esteem into the Arab nations and the African continent. The son of an Indian filmmaker and a Ugandan anthropologist, Zohran Mamdani was born in Kampala and won the election after a campaign that avoided any ideological or identity-based debate to focus on rents, buses, and daycare centers. In a 1939 lecture in Buenos Aires, José Ortega y Gasset said: “¡Argentinos, a las cosas!” – translating Husserl’s phenomenological call in political terms. The mayor-elect of the capital of capitalism has called for people to get down to basics, and this demand deserves to be heard in other spheres and other geographical areas. The financial news company Bloomberg, owned incidentally by his predecessor in City Hall between 2002 and 2013, warns that the city, fractured by the extreme inequality expressed by its profile of ultra-slender skyscrapers, is now experiencing what they call a Jenga economy, referring to the popular board game.

The tower of wooden blocks from which pieces are removed and placed on top until it collapses is a good image of a system that makes life increasingly difficult for the humble, who are progressively stripped of their possessions to increase the wealth of the ultra-rich – with the extreme example of Elon Musk, whom Tesla will pay a trillion dollars to run the company – those who occupy the social summit, a place that is both symbolically and physically elevated in luxury penthouses. In fact, Jenga Tower is the nickname given to the 57-story building completed in 2017 by Herzog & de Meuron at 56 Leonard Street, described by the architects as “houses stacked in the sky,” and where a penthouse sells now for $50 million. In 2023, Anish Kapoor placed at its base a version of his legendary Cloud Gate from Chicago, popularly known as ‘The Bean,’ which on Leonard Street appears as a gleaming pulse crushed by the weight of the apartments. It is possible that the Swiss architects were not aware of the association of their building with a tower about to collapse, and it is also likely that the British sculptor’s ‘squashed bean’ responded to the limited space available at the skyscraper’s base, but artists work in the realm of the unconscious, and it is there that they generate the images that define our time.

At the end of October, another skyscraper opened in the city, the headquarters of JPMorgan, America’s largest bank, designed by Norman Foster at 270 Park Avenue, whose spectacular shape as it reaches the ground conveys the idea of a fragile balance, perhaps like Barnett Newman’s Broken Obelisk. Built after the demolition of SOM’s Union Carbide Building, in a good illustration of Schumpeter’s ‘creative destruction,’ the tower has a stepped profile reminiscent of New York Art Deco buildings such as Rockefeller Center, and rises above steel fans that create a monumental entrance and defy gravity, in an unexpected unstable image of capitalism with dazzling architecture that both portrays and warns. Perhaps for this reason, instead of paying attention to Trump’s efforts to turn the White House into Mar-a-Lago North, we should look to New York as an extreme example of inequality and also of the effort to alleviate it giving attention to everyday life. Knowing that we are today in Spain between Lux and Vox, between female spirituality and male frustration, perhaps it is worth to recall Aristotle’s maxim “Primum vivere, deinde philosophari” to remember that, beyond generic, ideological, or political issues, it is the materiality of things that makes life possible.

Escultura de Anish Kapoor en 56 Leonard Street