I don’t generally look to discuss breaking news here, but sometimes a news item is just sitting there waiting to be poked. The news item in question is the speculation that the federal government will be pushing architects designing new government buildings to “default” to classicism. This may or may not actually happen, but it’s …
Marie and I have each taken a stab at discussing the fire at Notre Dame, but it seems there’s more to discuss. The implications of the damage and restoration may well be news for the next twenty years. Even as people are trying to stabilize the masonry and remove the tangled mess of scaffold from …
The first thing that came to mind when I read “A New Idea in Architecture? No New Buildings” by Thomas de Monchaux was that writers for periodicals, whether published on paper or the web, don’t usually choose their own headlines, so Mr. de Monchaux might not be responsible for the somewhat misleading title. He is …
Sometimes my reading creates accidental synchronicity. “The real answer is ‘maybe’” by Karrie Jacobs is, like all of her writing, a thoughtful examination of both a physical issue and its social context. “New York City will take steps to combat the problem of ‘zombie homes’” by Valeria Ricciulli is, on the other hand, a tightly-focused news …
It’s not often that I read a newspaper op-ed and a scholarly essay by the same authors on the same topic, but Andrew Russell and Lee Vinsel had “Let’s Get Excited About Maintenance!” in the New York Times in the summer of 2017 and then “After Innovation, Turn to Maintenance” in Technology and Culture the following January. …
