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.

Kennedy Plaza reopens

Kennedy Plaza reopened this morning. Bus passengers are waiting in the newly sanitized bus hub. The view above shows the blank sterility achieved by its redesign. Wind-swept vastnesses of unused space greet us now, no longer the elegant Art Nouveau … Continue reading

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Justin Lee Miller: Architecture and the operatic angst

Justin Lee Miller, the opera singer, actor and playwright, has sent me a fascinating essay that elucidates the parallels between opera and architecture, especially in regard to the handling of traditional works by their modernist interpreters. Here is the passage … Continue reading

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See London before the Fire

Six students (of history? architecture? illustration?) have produced a 3½-minute video imagining what London before the Great Fire of 1666 must have been like. The animation is lifelike but the buildings are figments of their historical imaginations, variations of the … Continue reading

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Potent rowhouse poetics

The three sets of rowhouses that I posted in “Survey: Your preferred row” a couple of days ago elicited from William Carroll Westfall among the most evocative lines I’ve read on the differences among types of architecture. He refers to … Continue reading

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Mr. Moses’s Jones Beach

Since I expect that my reading of The Power Broker (1974), by Robert Caro, about Robert Moses, New York’s master builder, will summon up more to criticize than praise in its 1,162 page vastness of biography, I will begin with … Continue reading

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Driehaus for David Schwarz

Congratulations to David Schwarz, the classical architect headquartered in Washington, D.C. I first encountered him in person on a trip to see his new concert hall in Las Vegas, and learned that he was the architect of no small number … Continue reading

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Film of foreign cities, c. 1920

Here is an amazing series of clips filmed around 1920, apparently during the travels of a U.S. Navy fleet to various port and other cities around the world. When the sailors get out of the way (as they do quite … Continue reading

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Survey: Your preferred row

Matthew Johnson, writing in ArchDaily of the furor aroused by the recent Bingler/Pedersen oped in the New York Times, the response by Aaron Betsky as mouthpiece of the American Institute of Architects, and the tart wrap-up of the brouhaha by … Continue reading

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Brewer rocks in Fayetteville

Gary Brewer of RAMSA designed a beautiful new wing for an old academic building, the Honors College (imagine that!) at the University of Arkansas, in Fayetteville a while back and I am remiss to have allowed readers to wait so … Continue reading

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Milwaukee ex-mayor on 195

I am gratified to post the comment of former Milwaukee Mayor John Norquist, who revitalized the city’s downtown in the 1990s before spending a decade, I think, as president of the Congress for the New Urbanism. Responding to my post … Continue reading

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