Author Archives: David Brussat

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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.

Fallen angel in Charleston

As mayor of Charleston, S.C., for some 40 years, Joe Riley was a hero to the preservation movement. But lately he has hopped in bed with preservation’s nemesis, modern architecture. An article from 2015 on the website Next Cities, “Southern … Continue reading

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Slowing Prov’s 6/10 Big Dig

A state transportation agency used to routinely grabbing buckets of federal money was probably taken aback last week when the U.S. Department of Transportation rejected its bid for a $175 million FASTLANE grant to help it rebuild Providence’s 6/10 connector. … Continue reading

Posted in Development, Providence | Tagged , , , , | 3 Comments

Self-driving auto-da-fe?

Auto-da-fé has come to mean, in common lexicon, the burning of a heretic. Give it more time and the phrase will mean self-immolation. Let me push it along a bit. The recent first death in an accident involving a self-driving … Continue reading

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The 4th w/out the Overture

I am still suffering from Tchaikovsky’s Retreat from Providence. Last year the Rhode Island Philharmonic gave a bravura performance of “The 1812 Overture” for the city’s Fourth of July celebration at India Point Park. Not this year. I have no … Continue reading

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Big bear barely Brunonian

Just off the Main Green at Brown, a mounted Marcus Aurelius presides over Lincoln Field, now called Simmons Field after the university’s most recent former president. Or at least the Roman general used to preside. And Ruth Simmons is now … Continue reading

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Less is more … or a bore?

Happy belated birthday (it was June 24) to Robert Venturi, avatar of the postmodern movement in architecture and the self-appointed rebutter-in-chief to arch-modernist Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and his infamous dictum. In the battle of slogans, “Less is more” … Continue reading

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Independence architecture

The classicism of the Jefferson Memorial, inspired by the Pantheon in Rome, a design beloved of Jefferson, is by John Russell Pope and was dedicated in 1943, during the Second World War. The monument’s classicism was pecked at by modernist … Continue reading

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Gaudi’s Manhattan tower

That Gaudi had considered erecting a New York skyscraper is not widely known. William O’Connor writes of it in “Gaudi’s Lost Manhattan Tower” for the Daily Beast. O’Connor prates absurdly of Gaudi’s modernism – more than any other major architect, … Continue reading

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Who owns Europe’s night?

Videographer Luke Shepard and a companion traveled through 36 cities in 21 European countries to film “Nightvision: The Brilliance and Diversity of Euoropean Architecture.” It captures buildings of both chief types, old and new, traditional and modernist They are different. … Continue reading

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Lucas, return to Light Side

George Lucas, having been rejected in efforts to build a museum with his own money first in San Francisco’s Presidio and then on the lakefront of Chicago, is back in the Paris of the West with a third proposal, but … Continue reading

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