Category Archives: Architects

And these are the winners!

Winners have been announced in the 2016 eVolo magazine skyscraper design competition, and they are real doozies. eVolo, which I’d never heard of, exists to discuss “the most avant-garde ideas generated in schools and professional studios around the world,” and … Continue reading

Posted in Architects, Architecture, Architecture Education, Architecture History, Art and design, Development, Humor, Landscape Architecture, Urbanism and planning | Tagged , , , , , , | 5 Comments

VidSmartRI on Providence

Grow Smart Rhode Island has produced a short video, “PVD: Personality. Vitality. Distinction,” about the charms of the Ocean State’s capital city. It begins looking downriver along the Providence from an abandoned water taxi stop near the new Crawford Street … Continue reading

Posted in Architects, Architecture, Architecture History, Art and design, Development, I-195 Redevelopment District, Providence, Rhode Island, Urbanism and planning, Video | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Breuer Whitney/Met Breuer

The Met Breuer opened today. It is the Brutalist building that the Whitney Museum of American Art left before moving last year into a building designed for it by Renzo Piano in New York’s Meatpacking District. The Metropolitan Museum of … Continue reading

Posted in Architects, Architecture, Architecture Education, Architecture History, Art and design, Development, Preservation, Urbanism and planning | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 5 Comments

Gird Penn Station’s rebuild

Connecticut architect Duo Dickinson, who writes regularly on architecture, often critical of modernism, has just written “Sprinting to the Past” in Common/Edge. He rails against Brooklyn architect Richard Cameron’s proposal to rebuild Penn Station as Charles Follen McKim designed it in … Continue reading

Posted in Architects, Architecture, Architecture Education, Architecture History, Art and design, Development, Preservation, Urbanism and planning | Tagged , , , , , , | 3 Comments

More architecture by Gaudi

My recent post “Didn’t quite get Gaudì,” criticizing a modernist supposedly won over by his architecture, has inspired me to post a few more shots of his work. Most of these are my favorites among images from Wikipedia’s list of … Continue reading

Posted in Architects, Architecture, Architecture Education, Architecture History, Art and design, Other countries, Photography, Urbanism and planning | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

Didn’t quite get Gaudi

Ayesha Khan’s essay on the Spanish Catalan Antoni Gaudí (1852-1926) in the Wall Street Journal, “How a Gaudi Building Won Over a Strict Minimalist,” doesn’t quite live up to the headline. It is not clear that she really likes Gaudí … Continue reading

Posted in Architects, Architecture, Architecture Education, Architecture History, Art and design, Other countries | Tagged , , , , , , , | 5 Comments

Fallen Rome, fallen moderns

Passages from Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve: How the World Became Modern evoke a Rome in the 15th century fallen from its imperial glory: The population of Rome, a small fragment of what it had once been, lived in detached settlements, … Continue reading

Posted in Architects, Architecture, Architecture Education, Architecture History, Art and design, Books and Culture, Landscape Architecture, Other countries, Preservation, Urbanism and planning | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment

More AIA “first issues”

My friend Steve “The Philatecstatic” Mields has sent me more “First Issue” envelopes, this time celebrating the 100th anniversary of the American Institute of Architects. They are not as funny as the first-issue envelopes of the American Planning Association, with … Continue reading

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Reflect the Pan-Am Building

Few things are, I believe, more ridiculous than the frequent claim that glass buildings “reflect their context” by mirroring their neighborhoods in their glass façades. It does not happen, or even seem to happen, except when the sun is just … Continue reading

Posted in Architects, Architecture, Architecture Education, Architecture History, Art and design, Development, Urbanism and planning | Tagged , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Archaeology at Penn Station

The website Untapped Cities has apparently been sending people out (or at least receiving reports from disparate individuals and then signing them up) to find parts of the old and beloved Penn Station in the bowels of the new and … Continue reading

Posted in Architects, Architecture, Architecture Education, Architecture History, Art and design, Blast from past, Development, Interior Design, Preservation, Urbanism and planning | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments