When I was a grad student in architecture school in the 80s, one of our professors was on a mission. Every semester he’d give a design project in downtown Manhattan, asking his students to spend the first two weeks of the term building a beautiful wood model of the surrounding site. The next year he would move to a new site, adjacent to last year’s. Over the years his students built a humongous wood model of lower Manhattan, and each successive generation got the benefit of their predecessor’s slowly accumulating analog “database” of Manhattan architecture.
…
