good to be with you, i m katy tur, and welcome to the opportunity of five lifetimes. five lifetimes, truly. if you were to sit down in any place on the earth, maybe it s a lawn chair in your front yard, it would take on average 360 years for a total solar eclipse to pass right over you. now for more than 30 million americans, this is their year, and this is the hour. it s already starting in eagle pass, texas, where in 27 minutes the moon will completely block out the sun. the first moment of totality over the continental u.s. from there, the path darts upward and to the right, like a sash from the country s hip to its shoulder. while only those this that specific band will experience totality, all of the lower 48 will get some portion of the eclipse. giving nearly all of us a chance to step outside of ourselves and into the only experience the whole of humanity has ever shared in exactly the same way, the same as our grandparents, as galileo and aristotle, as the mayans, the
Scribbled in marker on a postcard-size slip of paper in 1973, the anarchitect Gordon Matta-Clark wrote: “Making the right cut somewhere between the supports and collapse.” The tenor of this note is duly reflected in two recent New York building developments: the Whitney Independent Study Program space, now permanently housed at the newly renovated Roy and Dorothy Lichtenstein former studio and home, and the multidisciplinary fabrication facility, Powerhouse Arts, located in a converted early-twentieth-century power plant in Brooklyn.