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.

Romancing the Post Office

The New York Times reports the finalization of Donald Trump’s agreement to renovate the old U.S. Post Office Building, on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., as a hotel. This is one of my favorite buildings and I’m glad to hear … Continue reading

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Mackintosh fire update

The conversation in Glasgow about how to restore the school and its library has moved into a phase that pits faithful restorers against reinterpretive restorers, who presumably would want to apply their own aesthetic tics in fiddling with the work … Continue reading

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Blast from past: Fogarty

Today’s column involves a plan to place an extraordinarily bland extended-stay hotel (luxury, of course, and well “branded,” on the site of the Brutalist Fogarty Building, which would be torn down. Haven’t we been here before? Yes, we have! Not … Continue reading

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Don’t just shrug off horrid hotel plan

What’s that word these days that articulates a shrug of the shoulders? Meh. The day after Memorial Day, The Journal reported a proposed 170-room “premium-branded upscale extended-stay” hotel for Fountain Street, in downtown Providence. To be razed was the Fogarty … Continue reading

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Providence Opera House

I had the pleasure of foisting my viewpoint upon a captive audience at a recent meeting of the Providence Netopian Club. For the uninitiated, which is surely almost everyone, Rhode Island founder Roger Williams, the father of religious (or “soul”) … Continue reading

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Mackintosh’s ‘modernism’

The idea of Charles Rennie Mackintosh as an early modernist may seem absurd to those familiar with his work, but a few passages in one of his lectures are surely what has given rise to such an idea. Thought to … Continue reading

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Mackintosh . . . modernist? Nah.

No sadist, I open with an image of the glorious facade of the Mackintosh Building, not with the image that has eaten away at the backside of my last several posts on the fire at the Glasgow School of Art … Continue reading

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Archives saved in Glasgow

It was a tremendous relief to learn that among the treasures saved from fire at the Glasgow School of Art, designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh and completed in 1907, was the school’s famous archives, which contained the third largest collection … Continue reading

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Iron, glass, Mackintosh

From an untitled 1892 lecture by Charles Rennie Mackintosh: These two comparatively modern materials iron & glass though eminently suitable for many purposes will never worthily take the place of stone, because of this defect the want of mass. With … Continue reading

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Sad. Sad. Sad.

Indications are that after the horrible fire today in Scotland, the Glasgow School of Art’s famous Rennie Mackintosh Building has survived, with, as fire officials put it, 90 percent of the building structure considered “viable” and 70 percent of the … Continue reading

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