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.

Column: Garden suburb as “Paradise Planned”

I had planned to take the bus to work on Tuesday morning, lugging the new book “Paradise Planned: The Garden Suburb and the Modern City” in my trusty Penguin bag, hauling it in from our house in the suburbs — … Continue reading

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“That was too easy” — Anonymous

I posed a challenge, more or less, in my last blog, “Zaha ‘Ha Ha’ Hadid’s thing.” I wrote, “Even I don’t have the London City Halls to photomontage the People’s Daily into Qatar’s proposed World Cup Stadium, designed by Zaha … Continue reading

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How modernism got square

The title of this post harks back to one from this blog’s Providence Journal days, when I linked to a long piece in Metropolis magazine by Michael Mehaffy and Nikos Salingaros, and then did a column about it called “How … Continue reading

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Zaha “Ha Ha” Hadid’s thing

Even I don’t have the London City Halls to photomontage the People’s Daily into Qatar’s proposed World Cup Stadium, designed by Zaha Hadid. I refer, of course, firstly to Norman Foster’s London City Hall, called the “glass gonad” by London … Continue reading

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Column: The ground game against modernism

Little noticed amid last month’s shutdown in Washington was Congress’s shutdown of funding for the Eisenhower Memorial Commission’s proposed modernist monument for the 34th president, designed by Frank Gehry and expected to cost $142 million, mostly in federal tax dollars. … Continue reading

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Column: Buildings scrape the sky’s eye

One World Trade Center, the 1,776-foot-tall “kick-me” sign nearing completion on New York City’s skyline, is 991 feet shy in height of the world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa, which rises 2,717 feet above the Dubai desert. But thanks to … Continue reading

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Column: Small future for tall buildings in D.C.

Like much in the District of Columbia, the Hotel Dupont Plaza has undergone change. For one thing, it is now called the Dupont Circle Hotel. But it looks much as when it was completed half a century ago. Beige brick … Continue reading

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Column: The rise and fall of Guastavino tile

About 600 buildings in the United States, including 200 in New York, 29 in Boston, 22 in Washington and 7 in Rhode Island, feature a tile vault system perfected by a native of Valencia, Spain, brought by him to America … Continue reading

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Architecture Here and There really begins anew

Architecture Here and There hereby, henceforth and forthwith migrates to WordPress. This is your correspondent’s first blog post. It is very preliminary, though not as preliminary as my first blog post on WordPress.org, a blog I created by accident (not … Continue reading

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