Jeff Byles

House of Hues

The Copenhagen-born artist Olafur Eliasson creates complex optical effects with the simplest of means: light, reflection, and our passage through space. In the exhibition Take your time: Olafur Eliasson, on view at MoMA and P.S.1 through June 30, three large-scale installations blur the boundaries between art and architecture, film and design. Room-sized color fields create strange, new social spaces; chromatic events turn light into landscape. In Eliasson's often surreal spaces, spectrum is structure.

Image credit: Matthew Septimus/Courtesy MoMA and P.S.1

Taking Back the Streets

New York's streets are as gritty as the city's reputation, traffic-clogged canyons of concrete where jaded foot-travelers and cyclists jostle and growl, exulting all the while. (Stared down a Hummer lately?) Yet street reformers from around the globe are increasingly turning to the city's 5,800 miles of streets, sidewalks, and highways, dreaming up ideas -- be they modest or unbound -- to radically transform the urban experience. Here are ten mutinous proposals.

Welcome!

Welcome to the new, improved website for author Jeff Byles.

Jeff's book Rubble: Unearthing the History of Demolition is the first-ever biography of the wrecking trade, and a riveting, character-filled narrative of how lowly demolition grew to become a multibillion-dollar business, an extreme spectator sport, and a touchstone for what we value, what we disdain, who we were, and what we wish to become.

Named to the "Best of 2005" lists of Time Out New York and The Village Voice

Rubble rides the wrecking ball through centuries of firehooks and skull crackers, barmen and implosionists. From powder-kegged old London to Las Vegas, this book rummages through the ruins and surveys the blasts that—for better and for worse—shape our cities and our souls.

"Engaging."
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

"A live-wire, multilevel study...the demolition of buildings inspires complex emotions—shock, horror, even awe—and those responses are well worth thinking about."
Time Out New York

On this site you’ll find other published work in the article archive. Read more about the book. And subscribe to this blog's feed to keep current on readings, events, and more.

Strap on your hard hat, enjoy your visit—and don’t hesitate to send a message via the email link on this page.