IAN ADELMAN & CALVIN SEIBERT

Here Today, Gone Today

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ONE DAY AT LUNCH Ian Adelman took out his phone and showed me a picture of a sandcastle he’d built. Ian and I had worked together for years He’d designed the universe of New York ’s digital publications, each with its own original feel, each its own theme park. He was a world-builder like pretty much everyone else in this book but in the corner of the web that made journalism, he was also a pioneer, the best anyone had ever been in a medium that leaned more towards utility than art. In my view, he was the first true artist in the field. But that’s not why I wanted to talk to him. He’s a creative polymath, and a true obsessive. Once I saw his sandcastle, which looked like an elaborate architectural model and was very beautiful in my view, I thought it would be interesting to talk about making art – a kind of art – as an all-consuming hobby, not a term he liked because it trivialized the effort, but still, as something he did just for the love of it. He was an Elizabeth Diller of the sand. At that point he was building sandcastles feverishly. During the pandemic he’d moved to Water Mill, a beach town in eastern Long Island. Mornings he’d get up early and set about creating another modernist structure, one that would more or less disappear by day’s end. That seemed interesting to me too, creating something meant to perish. So I went to his house one day, and we talked about sandcastles.

An Arty Kid His mother was a painter. He grew up largely without a television. He built forts from materials he found in the woods. “I made models, scale models, this whole diorama thing. Even before I thought about it as a term, urban planning, I was interested in shapes, roads, how everything interacts.” He used fabric paints to make rock t-shirts –his friends asked him to draw on their jeans. He designed the lettering for his yearbook. He was just an arty kid, restless at the beach so when his father, a scientist, made drip castles in the sand, he would join him. But it wasn’t as if making things in the sand interested him that

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