Category Archives: Architecture

An attitude, not a material

Posted on March 9, 2015 by David Brussat

Patrick Webb, of the American College of the Building Arts, in Charleston, delighted the TradArch list today with examples from Saint Augustine, Fla., of concrete used without brutality. They are the Hotel Acazar, above, and Grace Metodist Church, below to … Continue reading →

Posted in Architecture, Architecture Education, Art and design | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments

New Urbanism’s easy choice

Posted on March 8, 2015 by David Brussat

It is often said that New Urbanism is “agnostic” as to style. Even the charter of the Congress for the New Urbanism says so. Rob Steuteville, who edits the urbanist journal Better Cities & Towns, has written an essay, The … Continue reading →

Posted in Architecture, Development, Urbanism and planning | Tagged , , , , , , | 10 Comments

Ancient Hatra, Iraq, at risk

Posted on March 7, 2015 by David Brussat

It is hardly to be believed that the ancient Parthian city of Hatra, more than 2,000 years old, in Iraq, is being demolished by ISIS. Nimrud, older still, was just bulldozed. Recently I wrote of the curious forces destroying ancient … Continue reading →

Posted in Architecture, Architecture History, Books and Culture, Preservation | Tagged , , , , , , | 3 Comments

The architecture of dessert

Posted on March 7, 2015 by David Brussat

The resurgence of interest in Nathaniel Robert Walker’s essay on food and architecture, called “Architecture and food,” which ran here on Jan. 8, and the host of comments and, it seems, new followers of my blog it has inspired, has … Continue reading →

Posted in Architects, Architecture, Art and design, Humor | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Amazing: N.Y. in 1896-1905

Posted on March 6, 2015 by David Brussat

I didn’t even know they had movies that far back, but here are film clips of New York City in the decade that straddles the turn of the 19th Century. Said to be the oldest surviving film of the Big … Continue reading →

Posted in Architecture, Architecture History, Blast from past, Photography, Urbanism and planning | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments

Cret’s wandering WWI shaft

Posted on March 6, 2015 by David Brussat

Warren Lutzel has kindly sent me a portrait of architect Paul Philippe Cret’s monument originally erected in 1929 at Providence’s Memorial Square to commemorate World War I. The square looks almost bucolic in the painting above but in time grew … Continue reading →

Posted in Architecture, Architecture History, Art and design, Landscape Architecture, Providence, Urbanism and planning | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

“Clock ticking” for brutality?

Posted on March 5, 2015 by David Brussat

So says the New York Times’s Michael Kimmelman in “Clock Ticks for Rudolph’s Orange County Government Center.” By the time you read this, the bye-bye birdie may well have chirped its demise. I had not realized that demolition was still … Continue reading →

Posted in Architects, Architecture, Architecture Education, Architecture History | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

More modernist parents stuff

Posted on March 4, 2015 by David Brussat

Prof. Jan Michl, of Oslo, saw my post “My Modernist Parents,” with its trailers of a short Norwegian animated film Me and My Moulton, which was up for an Oscar this year for portraying the trials and tribulations of being … Continue reading →

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Buffing the downtown fabric

Posted on March 4, 2015 by David Brussat

The expected purchase by Arnold C. “Buff” Chace of the Providence Journal’s headquarter’s building – not the old Journal building of 1906 but the “new” one of 1934, designed by noted Motor City architect Albert Kahn – is extraordinarily good … Continue reading →

Posted in Architecture, Development, Preservation, Providence, Urbanism and planning | Tagged , , , , | 3 Comments

Perfect critique, then … pfft!

Posted on March 3, 2015 by David Brussat

There is almost nothing that I could disagree with or add to in “Empty Gestures: Starchitecture’s Swan Song,” a critique by Peter Buchanan in the Architectural Review. Nothing, that is, except that after so much striking perception, Buchanan does not … Continue reading →

Posted in Architects, Architecture, Architecture Education, Architecture History, Development | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment