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.

The sad primacy of Unite

Regarding the minimal-security affordable housing project in Harlem by David Adjaye, this morning I have received a trenchant email from Malcolm Millais, author of Exploding the Myths of Modern Architecture: How strange, by coincidence I saw this Horror in Harlem … Continue reading

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Against Adjaye’s agitprop

Adding to the widespread perception that British architect David Adjaye’s affordable-housing project in Harlem looks like a prison, architect Marc Szarkowski offers, on TradArch, this pertinent riposte to the recent mass exercise in droolery from the commentariat: Let’s see, from … Continue reading

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Bad Scupture Park Hotel?

A new proposal has arisen for Parcel 12, the triangular Capital Center District land at the northeast corner of Kennedy Plaza that I’ve long called Bad Sculpture Park, in honor of its cast of uninspiring works of art. The Journal’s … Continue reading

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Attack on Kennedy Plaza

My last post may have unintentionally dissed Burnside Park and Kennedy Plaza, leaving readers with the impression that they were failures, and that Providence civic leaders and city officials, along with the state transit authority, were valiantly riding to the … Continue reading

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Jane Jacobs and KP

Jane Jacobs had some interesting things to say in The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) about parks, and while Kennedy Plaza is not a park (though it has Burnside Park right next to it), some of it … Continue reading

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Tra La Corboobier

I take your pants away! Seriously, this recollection in The Guardian of a British journalist, Taya Zinkin, seeking to interview Le Corbusier in India in 1965, including a long, obnoxious quotation, is totally unbelievable – in short, totally believable.

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Radiant Garden City Beautiful

If wizards like Henry Hope Reed can be wrong on occasion, so can Jane Jacobs, who in our era is even more famous for her own pathbreaking book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Its chief claim to … Continue reading

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Photographs in action

This ad for Leica, obtained from the website Sploid, commemorates the pathbreaking German camera firm’s 100th anniversary by splicing together a series of famous photos that have gone live through some sort of animation technology. Very interesting. There is some … Continue reading

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Henry and ‘the Heterodox’

Henry Hope Reed was such a perfectionist that his detractors, and perhaps even some of his friends, called him Henry Hopeless Reed. What he sought was too perfect, too unlikely ever to be built. Hopeless. Since classical architecture is the … Continue reading

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Pedestrian pedestrian bridge

A bridge project I’d hoped and prayed was dead has risen to become, for lack of more ambitious possibilities as yet, the likely first part of the Route 195 development project to move forward in Providence. The streets and utilities … Continue reading

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