Open House New York invites you to a conversation with photographer Stanley Greenberg and novelist Kevin Baker about Greenberg’s new book Codex New York: Typologies of the City (Monacelli Press, 2019).

Observing physical characteristics that most people miss, Stanley Greenberg’s Codex New York reveals the city as a vast catalog of elements that repeat, morph, and multiply–block by block, neighborhood by neighborhood. The result of countless explorations and documentations, his array of architectural and infrastructural features– alleys, sky bridges, parking sheds, relics, little streets, water infrastructure, and more–combine to create an incomparable visual chronicle of the city. Organized into categories, the photographs prompt deeper meanings of the relationships between our surroundings and the way we use the city. They also serve as a temporal marker for the many empty spaces that have already been built upon, obscuring and replacing a former reality that now exists only in images. As a testament to the ever-changing city, this idiosyncratic field guide ultimately presents new understandings of what New York is made of and how it is remade time and time again.

Stanley Greenberg is a Brooklyn-based photographer and author of Architecture Under Construction (2010), Waterworks: A Photographic Journey Through New York’s Hidden Water System (2003), and Invisible New York: The Hidden Infrastructure of the City (1998). His photographs are held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the New York Public Library, the Yale University Art Gallery, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Greenberg is also the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and numerous arts grants.

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