Category Archives: Architecture

Gaudi’s Manhattan tower

Posted on July 3, 2016 by David Brussat

That Gaudi had considered erecting a New York skyscraper is not widely known. William O’Connor writes of it in “Gaudi’s Lost Manhattan Tower” for the Daily Beast. O’Connor prates absurdly of Gaudi’s modernism – more than any other major architect, … Continue reading →

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Who owns Europe’s night?

Posted on July 1, 2016 by David Brussat

Videographer Luke Shepard and a companion traveled through 36 cities in 21 European countries to film “Nightvision: The Brilliance and Diversity of Euoropean Architecture.” It captures buildings of both chief types, old and new, traditional and modernist They are different. … Continue reading →

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Lucas, return to Light Side

Posted on June 30, 2016 by David Brussat

George Lucas, having been rejected in efforts to build a museum with his own money first in San Francisco’s Presidio and then on the lakefront of Chicago, is back in the Paris of the West with a third proposal, but … Continue reading →

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Musical skyscrapers afloat

Posted on June 29, 2016 by David Brussat

Here is a passage from The Nutmeg of Consolation, the 14th volume of Patrick O’Brian’s 20-volume naval novel, set in the Napoleonic era. Capt. Jack Aubrey and his surgeon friend Dr. Stephen Maturin, one evening in the South China Sea, … Continue reading →

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Yale’s ‘edifice complex’?

Posted on June 28, 2016 by David Brussat

Hartford Courant architecture critic Duo Dickinson has written a fine piece on Yale’s two new residential colleges, under construction in New Haven. Yale’s expenditure of more than half a billion (b) to recapture the work of architect James Gamble Rogers’s … Continue reading →

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Library of place in Newport

Posted on June 26, 2016 by David Brussat

Ronald Lee Fleming, an internationally recognized expert on placemaking, has a modest cottage on Bellevue Avenue that masks a series of interlocking gardens – each focusing on a “folly” or architectural toy, of no real utilitarian use but to set … Continue reading →

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Brexit and architecture

Posted on June 24, 2016 by David Brussat

British voters’ startling decision to opt out of the European Union dismayed many British architects. Dezeen found no one to quote supporting Brexit in a story just before the vote. “We love EU, declare UK architects and designers ahead of … Continue reading →

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Betsky’s Venice Biennale

Posted on June 23, 2016 by David Brussat

Architecture is … more than just pretty buildings. – Aaron Betsky If you follow Aaron Betsky, the chief critic for Architect, the mouthpiece of the American Institute of Architects, to the Venice Biennale, you get to experience the absence of … Continue reading →

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Lighting London bridges

Posted on June 22, 2016 by David Brussat

Kristen Richards’s indispensable ArchNewsNow.com website today has a cry of outrage (“Are They Serious?”) from a lighting designer who is disturbed by that profession’s exclusion from a panel of judges for a design competition to light up 17 bridges crossing … Continue reading →

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Downtown’s apt. bandwagon

Posted on June 21, 2016 by David Brussat

The Case-Mead Building, erected in 1859 and one of my favorite buildings downtown, is joining downtown’s microloft bandwagon. The building is still fondly known by some as Paolino World Headquarters, though the Paolino family’s property development company moved out to … Continue reading →

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