"‍I can tell you, and I tell you now, that I am prepared to veto any bill that has as its purpose a Federal bailout of New York City to prevent default.‍" -Gerald R. Ford This statement, delivered on October 29, 1975 at the National Press Club in Washington DC on the subject of financial assistance to New York City, materializes the following morning into the front page headlines of The Daily News as “Drop Dead,” a message to the city which brings fiscal conflict into focus as a federal abandonment of the municipal body (Loverd 251, Figure 1). Inscribed into New York CIty as an inflection point in its historiography, the headline signifies the cathartic termination of a progressive ideology which began with the New York Statutes 1896. In its place a more conservative fiscal method arrives as the city’s modus operandi, one that adapts its policies with capitalist interests, coordinating itself along the lines of a new, globalizing economy, and optimizing its fiscal functions for budgetary maintenance amidst the ebbs and flows of emerging international trade networks. Manfredo Tafuri, in his 1975 book Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development, elicits the role which ideological thinking plays such a shift.‍“For ‘progressive thought,’ on the contrary, every single thing receives its significance only from some other thing that is ahead of it or above it, from a Utopia of the future or from a norm that exists above being. ‘Conservative thought,’ on the other hand, deduces the significance of the particular from something that stands behind it, from the past or from that which already exists at least in embryonic form (Tafuri 53).‍In the case of New York City, the “progressive” or “utopian” policies modeled on the1960s rhetoric of “The Great Society” dissolve in the 1975 budget crisis, giving rise to new conservative attitudes which align themselves with the market behavior of the Late Capitalism: immanent realities “which already exist” within the city as the “embryonic form” of emerging globalization (Brecher 41). The origins of Progressive ideology in New York City governance are traced back to Chapter 488 of the New York Statues of 1896, as the unification of formerly autonomous yet interdependent regional municipalities: “the consolidation act joined New York City, which then constituted Manhattan and the western Bronx, to the cities of Brooklyn and Long Island City, the towns of Newtown, Flushing, Jamaica, and the Rockaway part of the Hempstead in Queens, and the towns of Castleton, Middletown, Northfield, Westfield, and Southfield on Staten Island” (Bruce-Biggs 6). Formerly a set of townships and administrative archipelagos, each with its independent structures of economics and demographics, the new totality of New York City at the turn of the century has its future laid out for it as a single, albeit montaged entity, organized around Manhattan as the gravitational center for capital concentration and administrative action. The scale and figure of the city limit begins--with Chapter 488-- a process of entropic expansion, creating the definition of the metropolis as a regional arena for episodes of crisis in 20th century New York City.As an indicator of the national shift from the laissez-faire economics of 19th century agrarian America towards more the governmentally federally regulated processes of 20th century metropolitan areas, Chapter 488 is read as the nested instance a deeper, national ideology which co-evolves with industrialization and abandons the country’s foundational structure as an “agricultural economy, [defined by] local and regional autonomy as pivots of the democratic system” (Tafuri 26). The liberation from the time-consuming processes of direct subsistence from nature of course allows the American subject to engage in other secondary and tertiary economies--thereby increasing the potential for the worker becoming bourgeois, or at least middle-class-- but in doing so the previously compact reciprocity of the subject and nature is dissolved. If there can be said to be a crises of the subject in 20th century American cities, it is precisely this loss of reciprocity which is its cause, forcing the subject to coordinate its body with the rhythms of an urbanizing and environment unknown to previous generation. Replacing the reciprocity of agrarian self-governance is a commensurability between the subject, centralized administrative structures, and patterns of normalization. The interplay of demographic distribution and boundary play a key role in the functioning of such structures: sufficient revenue from the bourgeois must be gained within the limits, to leverage the working class into a middle class (Currie 15). Or at the very least, the city must keep the working class working through provisional employment. Should it fail to do so, the productiveness of the dialectic of capitalist development ceases, resulting in phenomena of economic malfunction seen in the 1975 budget crisis: as the revenue generating population loses confidence in the functioning of the municipal totality, they relocate outside of its limits and in doing so exit the system and deprive it of the capital which it requires. The dialectic , in these terms, has as its “positive” the property-owning bourgeois as the main beneficiaries of capitalism’s processes, and as its “negative” the laborers which are subjugated to make such processes possible. The role of Progressive ideology is to set forth a set of values within the capitalist system that reconciles its contradictions without resolving them. That is, the dialectic must be maintained--in a sort state of semi-crisis--if production is to continue, balancing between the egalitarianism of the total normalization on the one hand and the state of crisis of total polarization on the other. The totality of the 19th century agri-egalitarian archipelago becomes the totality of the 20th century metropolitan area suspended in productive tensions of semi-crisis, synchronized by the song of technological progress of the bourgeois ideology . The teleological underpinnings of this technocratic incantation, recited by leaders on both the municipal and federal level throughout most of America’s 20th century, promises the abolishment of poverty, but the reality of the persistence of the negative and the shortcomings of ideologies balancing act unfolds into episodic ruptures in the system, expressed as crises in a variety of mediums and degrees of acuteness.As waves of minorities and immigrants flood the urbanized regions of the northeast during the Great Migration, the federalization of capital (e.g. The Interstate Commerce Act of 1887, The Federal Reserve Act of 1913, and The Federal Trade Commission Act of 1914) establishes on the national level economic centralization as the principal apparatus of Progressive political ideology, one which seeks to moderate the divergence of the bourgeois/working-class dialectic. In this sense, legislation as a regulatory device is understood as a technology of Progressive ideology, surmounting the unstable “nature” of a rapidly expanding working class with the tools of legislative procedure. This perspective comes most into focus with the policies of FDR’s New Deal, which sought to surmount the socio-economic catastrophe of the Great Depression by calling into action centralized entities such as the Tennessee Valley Authority: modulating technology and crisis into a productive cycle, the TVA was optimized for the modernization of the region. Through economically stimulating infrastructure projects, the TVA deploys both technology as law in the abstract sense and technology as the subjugation of nature in the common sense as solutions for both ecological and financial crisis (e.g. the crisis of the crisis of the poverty and the crisis of the flood are surmounted with the funding and construction of a dam). This platform strives to standardize the low-income laborer into a middle class citizen by re-distributing the revenue of capitalist production as an investment aimed at stabilizing the system through an abolishment of poverty. This normalizing ideology seeks to avoid crisis through a regulation of the components of the dialectic, limiting the oppositional vectors of the capitalist and the laborer. It requires a vested interest from the purses of the bourgeois into the welfare of the working class, and idea which is problematized by the regions of polarized demographics found in American cities following WWII. The solutionism of ideology in this case suggests the conflation of a dysfunctional municipality with another, in hopes that the combined capacity for capital production floats the cumulative labor force. This is the scalable constitution of Progressive ideology, one which decrees an absolute and pre-figured quality of living set in advance as an immutable standard for all participants. Unification of administrative structure allows for a distribution of capital which minimizes poverty and maintains a critical bottom-line. The quantitative definition of such a standard quality is arbitrary, and set loosely within the interpretation of what is meant by the nationally ubiquitous constitutional mantra “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” The ideology contained in this cornerstone phase is a datum through the nested scales of Progressive policies in the years directly leading up to New York’s crisis. The Food Stamp Act of 1964, The Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 (popularized as “The War of Poverty”), The Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, and The Social Security Amendments of 1965 (Medicare and Medicaid ) establish an interconnectedness between the city and the federal government. As the various branches of municipal government restructure themselves in conformity with the federal status quo, they are able capitalize on opportunities for subsidizing their budgets. Leaders and politicians align their ideologies with the promise of “The Great Society,” rolling out subsidized programs under the auspices of altruistic democracy, taking the negative component of the capitalist dialectic--the worker--as the foundational feature of society. President Lyndon B. Johnson articulates the collective “courage” and “compassion” immanent in Progressive ideology as he addresses the graduates (i.e. future bourgeois) of Ohio University in Athens in a 1964 commencement speech : “And with your courage and with your compassion and your desire, we will build a Great Society. It is a Society where no child will go unfed, and no youngster will go unschooled.The dangers inherent in the “compassion” of welfare and its associated economic centralization did not go unnoticed in New York, as many analysts who foresaw the crisis arriving suggest that the city adopt policies of decentralization. One such suggestion, outlined in an article by Bruce-Biggs entitled “Abolish New York” proposes simply that Chapter 488 is repealed, thus “abolishing” the centralized structure of the city and its associated ills. Such an appeal, critics argue, will render large portions of the outer boroughs c.1975 bankrupt and without potential for economic recovery. The response, given by Bruce-Biggs and other supporters of decentralization, underscore that if Manhattan’s were permitted to retain all of its capital, which in its concentration could accumulate--over time--an economic inertia large enough to provide the outer boroughs recovery in the long-term. The figurehead of this perspective is Roger Starr, described in his obituary by the New York Times as an “outspoken thinker on urban affairs who blended a lifetime of intellectual analysis with hands-on public service.” Starr proposes a less radical, more politically-involved process of “planned shrinkage.” Circa 1975 however, he is met by accusations of racism and cruelty by the officials carrying on the ideological torch of The Great Society until the moment that it extinguishes (Starr 26).It could be argued that - as privileged property-owners - the bureaucratic leaders which protest Starr and insist on their Progressive policies do so only because they are not subjugated by the markets that they manipulate. They see no impetus for change because they see no crisis from the windows of their Midtown condos. The contemporary terminology of the 99% and the 1% emerges here, illustrating a disproportionate and polarized social structure which will become, at a certain point, irreconcilable (the nature of the Occupy movement is surprisingly passive in this sense). The fiscal policies of Progressive ideology, in this sense, has as its main focus not in the “compassion” to provide welfare, but rather the financially founded wherewithal to realize that the lifting of the lower class to the middle class is a way to ensure the longevity of his/her wealth, otherwise threatened by abject poverty. The blackout of 1977, and the looting that occurred in poverty stricken neighborhoods, register as an index of progressive ideology’s inability to maintain the status quo. Aimed at maintaining wealth and power, the status quo is reveals, through phenomena such “white flight,” the false pretenses of the humanitarian language found in the New Deal, the Great Society, and the “War on Poverty.” Should the bourgeois lose confidence in their ideology to normalize the dialectic, or more to the point--maintain their capital interests--the likelihood that progressive ideology will implode is increased (Chatterjee 1799). It is precisely the realization of this likelihood that is the crisis of New York in the 1970s: not a crisis of ideology, but a crisis of confidence in the ideology. This distinction underscores the constructedness of ideology and its adaptability. This crisis of confidence unfolds as mid-to-high income earners--mostly Manhattanites--lose faith and abandon Progressive ideology which regulates the dialectic, opting instead to take flight to the conservative financial climates of the suburbs. In their absence they create a rapid deprivation of municipal revenue, compounded and explicated by OAPEC’s oil embargo of 1973, leaving the city unable to maintain not only its welfare and employment programs, but the basic necessities of public, health, and safety (Starr 12). In refusing to federalize New York City’s fiscal functions, Ford’s message to “Drop Dead” elevates conflict into crisis, forcing upon the city an accelerated adaptation of a new ideology which necessarily integrates itself into the complex realities of Late Capitalist development. Described here in terms of ideology becoming ethic, this evolution is described by Tafuri as:‍“The integration of the subjective moment with the complex mechanism of rationalization, but at the same time the identification of an "ethic of rationalization" completely directed upon itself. The processes of the concentration of capital, its socialization, and the constant rise of its organic composition make such an ethic necessary. This is no longer presented as an external value; it is removed from the relativity of ideological invention. The ethic of development has to be realized together with development, within development's processes (Tafuri 57).”‍This analytical proposition, to redefine the ideological in terms of the ethical as a coordinated and reflexive machinery within the dialectic, is a means of eradicating the inefficiencies and efforts of ideology, and is only of marginal interest here. The ethical is understood as the ritual repetition of an ideology subjugated to the dialectics mechanisms of rationalisation, its forms nothing more than the beating of its drum on the waves and “constant rise” of capital’s “organic composition.” Taking the destruction immanent in capitalist creation as the basis for a skepticism in any ethical rationalization of its processes, a contrary emphasis is placed on the richness that lies within the limits of ideology--its political functioning, regulatory mechanisms, modalities of engaging crisis--on the one hand, and the limits these ethics--its reflexivity, modes of repetition, shortcomings in criticality--on the other . Aesthetics come to play a privileged role in this search for critical practice, suspended in between the ideological-ethical spectrum, yet capable of polarizing to reinforce one or the other, as a sort of elastic free agent. Investigating the real bases of the interrelationships of these components and articulating their significance is the imperative of the architect: an action that is more elaborated than ethical technique and more articulated within situational particularities than the purely ideological, critical practice motivated by purposeful desire towards meaningful impacts and and outcomes.Honing in on the potential for action and engagement within the mediums of crisis in 1970’s New York CIty, the Museum of Modern Art is posited as an institution which contains in its administrative structures and works of art a negotiation of ideology, aesthetics, and ethics. It is proposed that a critical intervention into the institution necessarily entails the taking apart and putting back together of the conflated and ambiguous mechanisms which underscore its institutional foundations. Two figures, Nelson Rockefeller and Gordon Matta-Clark, are identified as the principal characters through which a process of analysis, disassembly, and reassembly is conducted. Nelson Rockefeller’s legacy as an eminent Progressive Republican, on the national, state, and municipal level, had significant impact on the ideology, aesthetics, and ethics in 20th century America. Some of the most notable vehicles for contribution include: on the national level, the 41st Vice President of the United States (Ford Administration, 1974-1977); and on the state level, the 49th Governor of New York State (1959-1973). In New York City, his emphasis on mass transit and mobility is exercised through the establishment of the State Department of Transportation, through which he absorbed among others the Department of Public Works, and “reformed the governance of New York City's transportation system, creating the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) in 1965.” Under his guidance, “the MTA merged the New York City subway system with the publicly owned Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, the Long Island Rail Road, Staten Island Rapid Transit, and later the Metro North Railroad.” In a controversial use of state funds, the Metro North Railroad was “purchased by the state from private owners in a massive public bailout of bankrupt railroads (Wikipedia).”His role at MoMA includes positions as first Chairman of the Advisory Committee (1932), Trustee (1932-1979), Treasure (1935-1939), and President (1939-1941). The foundational nature of his operations within the institution are transcribed in a press release distributed to the public on May 8, 1939, the day following his election as President:‍On the occasion of the change in officers, the retiring President, Mr. Goodyear, said: The idea is that a museum such as ours can remain truly modern and wholly abreast of the times only by bringing into its board of trustees and to the principal offices of the institution young men and women whose outlook is forward… Now that the Museum at the end of ten years of activity has entered a permanent home, the property of the Corporation, it is particularly appropriate that there should be a change of officers. With the wider service to the public that the new quarters will permit, we are fortunate in having Mr. Stephen Clark as Chairman of the Board and Mr. Nelson Rockefeller as President. They have both been very active in the affairs of the Museum. Mr. Clark became a Trustee within a few months of its founding and Mr. Rockefeller as first Chairman of the Advisory Committee, Trustee and Treasurer - has been for years closely in touch with our plans. Under their leadership of the efficient staff that has been brought together under Mr. Barr and Mr. Mabry, we can look forward to increased activity and greater service to the public.‍Speaking for himself, Rockefeller outlines an ideology of the plan. Formatted as question and answer session with the press, Rockefeller responds with an emphasis on the socialization of art and its role in “modernizing taste”‍"What is your particular Interest in modern art, Mr. Rockefeller?" the interviewer asked."We are all interested in the appearance of this modern era in which we live. We are all concerned in having our present-day surroundings more attractive. And that in the broadest sense is modern art." "How does the Museum of Modern Art help to do this?" "The Museum," he answered, "encourages the development of new ways of art to fit the changing conditions of the contemporary world, and displays the new principles of art to the public, thereby making them available for use and for the modernization of taste...”‍In this record Rockefeller is established as a “forward looking” administrator which drives the ideology of the Plan with the expressed aim of “modernizing taste” to “fit the changing conditions of the contemporary world.” Rockefeller’s ideology reveals an ambition to normalize, a reading which is fortified by Hume’s definition of taste as the “Standard of Taste; a rule, by which the various sentiments of men may be reconciled.” Rockefeller seeks to not only to regulate the dialectic of capitalist development by proffering aesthetics as an instrument for the normalization and modernization of the Standard’s of Taste, he seeks reconcile the “various sentiments of man” along the lines of his individual subjectivity--his Standard of Taste. The rhetoric echoes that of Futurist manifestos, Dadaist mechanicalism, De Stijl elementarism, and international Constructivism: “but what is really striking in this ideology of unconditional consensus is its ingenuous radicalism. These invitations to become a machine, to universal proletarianization, to forced production, in revealing the ideology of the Plan all too explicitly, cannot fail to arouse suspicion as to their real intentions (Tafuri 86).” These real intentions are materialized in the discovery that in 1973, during his last year as Governor of the State of New York, when Rockefeller reverses the decision of state legislature to not allow the construction of Museum Tower over the Museum of Modern Art (see Figure 2, Figure 3). The tower, designed by Pelli Clark Pelli, was built mainly as a financial instrument to generate revenue for support of the museum’s operating expenses, containing 240 apartments which contribute funds in the form tax provisions. The building permit, issued in 1977, indicates that the lot was zoned as C5-2.5 (central commercial district), however the building is governed by R10A regulations, as a standard adaptation of residential zoning law within a commercial district. The significance is that R10A is limited to a Floor Area Ratio of 10.0 and height of 210 ft. Museum Tower--consisting of 55 storeys and 384,000 sq ft--stands at 495 ft tall: that is, 285 ft of its vertical height was built using air rights over the Museum’s galleries. In this sense, Museum Tower’s signifies a twofold extinction of Progressive ideology: first, Rockefeller’s reversal of state legislation; and second, the manipulation of zoning to maximize rent revenue. Together, these episodes compound the revelation that Law--as the magnus opum of ideology's capacity to control development--is an outmoded technology, no longer capable of stabilizing the dialectic of capitalist production. A reconfiguration of the terms of ideology thus becomes imperative if a productive dialectic is to be maintained. The role of the MoMa as an institution, and the ideology of its plan, is complexified into a new territory where capital reigns supreme and breaks ideology’s regulatory chains:‍No longer Hegel but Keynes, not the ineffectual ideology of the New Deal but post-Keynesian economy. Ideology, become concrete and stripped of any trace of utopianism, now descends directly into the fields of endeavor; which is to same as saying that it is suppressed… The plan, on the one hand, tends to be identified with the institution that supports it, and on the other, to be a set forth as a specific institution in itself. The dominion of capital is thus realized strictly in terms of the logic of its own mechanisms, without any extrinsic justification, absolutely independent of any abstract “ethical” end, of any teleology, or any “obligation to be.” (Tafuri 62).‍Contemporaneous to MoMa’s uptown extinction of ideology and Rockefeller’s institutionalisation of capital’s dominion, an alternative institution, or more precisely an an-institution, is founded by Gordon Matta-Clark downtown. The Anarchitecture group, conceived as a conflation of “anarchy,” and “architecture” engages the dialectic of capitalist along different lines, opting out of the instrumentality of ideology and the subjugated repetitions of ethics, Anarchitecture (Gordon Matta-Clark, Laurie Anderson, Tina Girouard, Carol Goodden, Suzanne Harris, Jene Highstein, Bernard Kirschenbaun, Richard Landry, and Richard Nonas). Conceding his ability to solve crises, Matta-Clark (et al.), engages the negative dialectic as it materializes in the city, ceasing upon the collateral damage of ideology’s shortcomings, activating artifacts of the inner-city and the outer boroughs as frames for articulating the excesses and entropies found in various modes of capitalist production. Hinging upon the notion that aesthetics can remain reflexive while being political, Matta-Clark articulates a form of practice for acting in the mediums of crisis which, through processes of deconstruction, constructs critical perspectives:‍The interesting thing about Gordon was that he was full of ideas and in a way highly intellectual. But, just in the same way that he broke context, he broke words and ideas. So he was playing with it, playing with the intellectualising, so this is a perfect ... Gordon thought process right here on the wall ... he did it almost as a form of analysis, you know. That was his theoretical position, that you could deal with ideas in that way.‍In his project Fake Estates, Matta-Clark participates in bourgeois ideology as a critique of its empty promises. Purchasing 15 properties, priced between $25-$75 and decreed as “unusable” by Manhattan zoning law, Matta-Clark buys into the bourgeois ideology of land-ownership as a way of illustrating its contradictions: as undevelopable tracts of land, he was unable to capitalize on his investment into the “estates.” Thus the value of his ownership--within the exchange-values of Modernity--existed only virtually on paper.Having outlined the extinction of ideology at MoMA, and the reflexive aesthetics of Gordon-Matta Clark, the guidelines for intervention present themselves: Matta-Clark is commissioned to perform a “Critical Intersect” at MoMA--or rather, of MoMa. Having observed the Conical Intersect series at the Paris Biennale in 1975, the procedure’s critique of institutionalization is noted (see Figure 4):‍“Matta-Clark’s contribution to the Paris Biennale of 1975, manifested his critique of urban gentrification in the form of a radical incision through two adjacent 17th-century buildings designated for demolition near the much-contested Centre Georges Pompidou, which was then under construction. For this antimonument, or “nonument,” which contemplated the poetics of the civic ruin, Matta-Clark bored a tornado-shaped hole that spiraled back at a 45-degree angle to exit through the roof. Periscope like, the void offered passersby a view of the buildings’ internal skeletons (guggenheim.org).”‍At the precise moment Rockefeller overturns state legislation and sets into the motion the construction of Museum Tower in 1973, the (de)construction of “Critical Intersect” begins, a manifestation of a critique of ideology in the form of radical incisions into galleries of MoMa’s original 1939 building. For this anti-architecture, or “anarchitecture,” which forces progressive ideology to encounter its own extinction, Matta bores a tornado-shaped hole that spirals forward at a 45-degree angle and exits through the roof. Functioning as a lens which focuses the contradictions of its own structures, the void frames for both the passersby and the patron a view of the Museum Tower as the materialization of capitalist (i.e. conservative) forces which drive the plan of the institution. From the perspective of the 53rd street, the pedestrian glimpse is anchored into gaze, as the radicality of the intervention’s redaction orients the fleeting pace of the city towards more contemplative parameters. As a spectacle, Matta-Clark’s intervention along 53rd street participates in the glossy surface of Midtown’s culture of consumption, confirming the city’s systems of representations and the “camp” discourses of the metropolitan bourgeois, registering as an absurd shock to be absorbed with the irony and humour of cocktail conversation at a fundraising gala (held presumably in the undamaged institutional space preserved around the intervention). The real impact hits home, however, as the bourgeois come to occupy the origin point of Critical Intersect’s cone of vision. The project’s full weight in the stakes of ideology’s extinction come crashing down as its deconstruction becomes a reconstruction, framing--from what is considered both a vanishing point and an origin point--the building up of a financial instrument which threatens the stability of value and structural integrity of the very slabs upon which their discourses stand. Hitting home with the same effect of a child’s realization that the towers at the center of Disneyland--indeed the entire basis of their worldview--are fake, the bourgeois stomach turns sick as their reality, formerly transposed by the idealization of progress and the Progressive, finally eats itself through, consuming a path through which we can perceive Museum Tower as the crisis of cultural value. Just as Disneyland is built as imaginary to convince us that the America which surrounds it is real, MoMa is built to prolong the innocence of a fantasy and conceal the negative of the surplus upon which it is built. Having once been the ideology which regulated the dialectic, the original MoMa building becomes the negative of the dialectic, and Museum Tower the positive. Originally built to transpose the contradictory reality of a Progressive capitalist system, the institution becomes the collateral substrate for capitalist action. To “modernize taste” through the “development of new ways of art to fit the changing conditions of the contemporary world” and make the “present day surrounding more attractive” translates for MoMa in the 1970’s as the construction of a institutional project within dominion of capital. This project’s stance--a la Rockefeller--beyond the limits of a law’s normative reconciliation, drives progressive ideology to extinguish itself in recognition of its own failure to regulate development. In an act of aesthetic reflexivity, the institution is partially excavated, carving out a space for reflecting upon the components of crisis, crystallizing itself as a historical artifact and perceiving itself, from and through itself, as an instrument of Late Capital. Critical Intersection, situated between the progressive ideology’s normalization (pre-crisis MoMa) and the ethics of conservative rationalization (post-crisis MoMA), creates in its void the absence of value in the institution and the city. Ideologies in MoMa and New York are left to view the extrusion of Museum Tower as a prophetic trajectory, the striations of its floor slabs an index to the revenue which archives the extinction of its foundations. As both false in its consciousness and tenacious in persistence through crisis, the institution is a conceptual hinge which acts in self-preservation to re-evaluate the dialectic of development precisely at the moment its techniques for thinking snap, signifying crisis and actuating the critical, the aesthetic, and the intellectual in response to tragic opportunity. The institution in crisis, seen at MoMa as the “positive thought” of Progressive ideology becomes the “negative thought” of a conservative coordination with capital. Tafuri draws the contours of an uncertain, ambiguous, and ironic future for thought in terms of post-crisis, Late Capitalist economy:‍“Negative thought" had enunciated its own project for survival in its refutation of the Hegelian dialectic and a recovery of the contradictions this had eliminated. "Positive thought" does nothing but overturn that negativeness on itself. The negative is revealed as such, even in its "ineluctability." Resignation to it is only a first condition for making possible the perpetuation of the intellectual disciplines; for making possible the recovery for intellectual work (at the price of destroying its "aura") of the tradition of its "sacred" extraneousness to the world; for providing a reason, no matter how minimal, for its survival. The downfall of reason is now acclaimed the realization of reason's own historic mission. In its cynicism intellectual work plays its cards to the ambiguous limit of irony (Tafuri 76).”‍Figure 1. October 30, 1975 morning headline in The Daily News. ‍Figure 2. Elevation of Museum Tower, Pelli Clark Pelli‍Figure 3. Photograph of Museum Tower, from 53rd Street.Figure 4. Conical Intersect in Paris.‍BibliographyBrecher, C. and Eichner, A. 1974. The Great Society--A Worms Eye View. New York Affairs, 2 (2), pp. 39-49Bruce-Biggs, B. 1979. Abolish New York. New York Affairs, 5 (3), pp. 5-9.Chatterjee, R. 1975. New York City: A Crisis of Confidence. Economic and Political Weekly, 10 (47), pp.1798-1799.Currie, B. 1963. Conflict, Crisis and Confusion in New York. Duke Law Journal, 1963 (1), pp. 1--55.Loverd, R. 1991. Presidential Decision Making during the 1975 New York City Financial Crisis: A Conceptual Analysis. Presidential Studies Quarterly, pp. 251--267.Museum of Modern Art 1939. Nelson A. Rockefeller Becomes New President of the Museum of Modern Art [press release] May 8, 1939."Nelson Rockefeller." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 12 July 2013. Web. 17 Dec. 2013.Starr, R. 1985. The Rise and Fall of New York City. New York: Basic Books.Tafuri, Manfredo. 1975. Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.ImagesFigure 1. Roberts, Sam. "Infamous 'Drop Dead' Was Never Said by Ford." The New York Times. The New York Times, 28 Dec. 2006. Web. 17 Dec. 2013.Fig. 2. West Wing & Tower Addition. Drawings & Models, Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York, United States. 1984.Fig. 3. Pelli, Cesar. West Wing & Tower Addition. Exteriors, Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York, United States. 1984.Fig.4. "Gordon Matta-Clark." Gordon Matta-Clark. artnet.com Web. 17 Dec. 2013.