Tale of two library entries

Screen Shot 2016-08-02 at 10.25.12 AM.png

Clockwise from upper left: Library at Northwestern; Brutalist library at NWU; Washington entrance of Providence Public Library; Empire entrance at PPL.

Here is last month’s blog post for Traditional Building magazine. It applauds a recent Palladio Award winner, HBRA Architects of Chicago, for reopening a library entrance at Northwestern University that was closed in 1970 after a Brutalist new library was built. I compared this righting of a historic wrong to the as yet unrighted wrong of closing the beautiful Washington Street entrance to the Providence Public Library. Maybe someday the firm that rights that wrong will win a Palladio award.

Traditional Building has run a monthly blog post by me since January, and I’ve been running these a month later on Architecture Here and There. I have not run posts taken from AHAT because its readers have already seen them. For the last couple of months my posts for TB have been either from AHAT or a combination of AHAT and other material that readers have already seen there. The Palladio Awards, which are sponsored by Active Interest Media, which publishes TB out of Boulder, Colo., were celebrated in New Haven, Conn., on Tuesday, July 19. Here are the winners.

About David Brussat

This blog was begun in 2009 as a feature of the Providence Journal, where I was on the editorial board and wrote a weekly column of architecture criticism for three decades. Architecture Here and There fights the style wars for classical architecture and against modern architecture, no holds barred. History Press asked me to write and in August 2017 published my first book, "Lost Providence." I am now writing my second book. My freelance writing on architecture and other topics addresses issues of design and culture locally and globally. I am a member of the board of the New England chapter of the Institute of Classical Architecture & Art, which bestowed an Arthur Ross Award on me in 2002. I work from Providence, R.I., where I live with my wife Victoria, my son Billy and our cat Gato. If you would like to employ my writing and editing to improve your work, please email me at my consultancy, dbrussat@gmail.com, or call 401.351.0457. Testimonial: "Your work is so wonderful - you now enter my mind and write what I would have written." - Nikos Salingaros, mathematician at the University of Texas, architectural theorist and author of many books.
This entry was posted in Architecture and tagged , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.