I’ve attacked the concept of “structural honesty” in architecture here more than once, but every so often I hear someone use the phrase and feel like maybe I should give it another chance. I found an actual example – in a building that was unfortunately demolished in the 1950s, but was well-documented when it stood …
During my talk as part of the General Society’s Landmarks Lecture series last night, I ended with some thoughts on modernity with regard to the city’s development. New York in 1900, the topic of my talk, was mostly a nineteenth-century city, albeit a very large, dense, and rapidly developing nineteenth-century city. There were pieces of …
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 …
