New York Bachelor Pads Update American Dream

Hit hard by the recession and perhaps a change of values, New York men are redefining and reimaging the bachelor pad.

The New York focus on bottles of $1000 Cristal champagne is evolving into living large with a roommate or two and washing clothes in the bathtub? Come on now! It’s feeling like the Seventies.

If the NYTimes “The Decline and Fall of the Bachelor Pad” is correct, many more New York men are ‘roughing it’ than we might imagine.

When imaginative, talented people go into poverty, creative design juices often go into high gear. Ideas happen.

Downward spiraling Bilbao, Spanish architect Urtzi Grau is a partner in a Brooklyn design firm Fake Industries Architectural Agonism. The collective includes Mr. Grau’s girlfriend Cristina Goberna (Pesudo) who is an intellectual heavyweight, based on her CV.

I quote from the Fake Industries website

To give you a flavor of the evolving “American dream”, Goberna and Grau lectured last April at Princeton University on foreclosure fantasies, real estate nigtmares and credit dreams presenting the FINAL COLLECTION ever to be reproduced, renovated o redesigned, of the immature, generally ill-conceived and fairly sentimental DESIGN EFFORTS crafted by the architects, who none the less, despite their youth, really tried hard to create something of modest value and genuine emotion, and ever since have tried to stay interested enough to assemble, again, once and for all this EXHAUSTIVE SURVEY of the documentation regarding the famous works: Free NYC Apartments, House for Cesar, Khlebnikov’s (musical) Boxes, The Illegal Hotel, Chunks!, Golf!, Superphosphates!, DCR Department of NYC Citizenship Recruitment, Circuit 9 Move (on), Circuit 8 Shine, Reijkiavik Up Circuit 7, Circuit 6 Acuatic, The Log-In Prject, I Love Japan, The Invisible Monument, Ay Caremelles! and other selected projects to finally satisfy the requests of the audience.