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.

To be cont’d in Charleston

Posted on March 11, 2015 by David Brussat

Beach Company, which had submitted what I thought was an elegant proposal to replace a midcentury modernist clunker of an apartment tower with three shorter but larger mostly residential buildings of seemingly high design on the edge of Charleston’s historic … Continue reading →

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An attitude, not a material

Posted on March 9, 2015 by David Brussat

Patrick Webb, of the American College of the Building Arts, in Charleston, delighted the TradArch list today with examples from Saint Augustine, Fla., of concrete used without brutality. They are the Hotel Acazar, above, and Grace Metodist Church, below to … Continue reading →

Posted in Architecture, Architecture Education, Art and design | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments

New Urbanism’s easy choice

Posted on March 8, 2015 by David Brussat

It is often said that New Urbanism is “agnostic” as to style. Even the charter of the Congress for the New Urbanism says so. Rob Steuteville, who edits the urbanist journal Better Cities & Towns, has written an essay, The … Continue reading →

Posted in Architecture, Development, Urbanism and planning | Tagged , , , , , , | 10 Comments

Ancient Hatra, Iraq, at risk

Posted on March 7, 2015 by David Brussat

It is hardly to be believed that the ancient Parthian city of Hatra, more than 2,000 years old, in Iraq, is being demolished by ISIS. Nimrud, older still, was just bulldozed. Recently I wrote of the curious forces destroying ancient … Continue reading →

Posted in Architecture, Architecture History, Books and Culture, Preservation | Tagged , , , , , , | 3 Comments

The architecture of dessert

Posted on March 7, 2015 by David Brussat

The resurgence of interest in Nathaniel Robert Walker’s essay on food and architecture, called “Architecture and food,” which ran here on Jan. 8, and the host of comments and, it seems, new followers of my blog it has inspired, has … Continue reading →

Posted in Architects, Architecture, Art and design, Humor | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Amazing: N.Y. in 1896-1905

Posted on March 6, 2015 by David Brussat

I didn’t even know they had movies that far back, but here are film clips of New York City in the decade that straddles the turn of the 19th Century. Said to be the oldest surviving film of the Big … Continue reading →

Posted in Architecture, Architecture History, Blast from past, Photography, Urbanism and planning | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments

“Clock ticking” for brutality?

Posted on March 6, 2015 by David Brussat

Originally posted on Architecture Here and There:
Passage leading into Orange County (N.Y.) Government Center, by Paul Rudolph. (NTY) So says the New York Times’s Michael Kimmelman in “Clock Ticks for Rudolph’s Orange County Government Center.” By the time you…

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Cret’s wandering WWI shaft

Posted on March 6, 2015 by David Brussat

Warren Lutzel has kindly sent me a portrait of architect Paul Philippe Cret’s monument originally erected in 1929 at Providence’s Memorial Square to commemorate World War I. The square looks almost bucolic in the painting above but in time grew … Continue reading →

Posted in Architecture, Architecture History, Art and design, Landscape Architecture, Providence, Urbanism and planning | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

“Clock ticking” for brutality?

Posted on March 5, 2015 by David Brussat

So says the New York Times’s Michael Kimmelman in “Clock Ticks for Rudolph’s Orange County Government Center.” By the time you read this, the bye-bye birdie may well have chirped its demise. I had not realized that demolition was still … Continue reading →

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More modernist parents stuff

Posted on March 4, 2015 by David Brussat

Prof. Jan Michl, of Oslo, saw my post “My Modernist Parents,” with its trailers of a short Norwegian animated film Me and My Moulton, which was up for an Oscar this year for portraying the trials and tribulations of being … Continue reading →

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