Category Archives: Architecture

London in 25 hard minutes

Posted on January 4, 2017 by David Brussat

By hard I mean compared with the soft gray focus of the video in my last post, “Fifty soft minutes in Paris.” This is the Rick Steves tour of Britain’s capital. Steves’s voice is mellow enough, and the photography, unlike … Continue reading →

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Fifty soft minutes in Paris

Posted on January 3, 2017 by David Brussat

Here is Paris, silent, with street noises and children noises, just shots of the City of Light for nearly an hour. Almost a little vacation there. No bad music, no irksome narrator, in any tongue. Just sit back and relax, … Continue reading →

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Passages and lessons, 2016

Posted on January 1, 2017 by David Brussat

The passages referred to in the title of this post are from Home Free, a 1977 novel by Dan Wakefield, who earlier had written Going All the Way about the “free” lifestyle embraced by many in the late ’60s early … Continue reading →

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Wolf von Eckardt’s critique

Posted on December 29, 2016 by David Brussat

Yesterday, into my email inbox, there came a 1966 Harper’s critique of the original World Trade Center by Wolf von Eckardt, the first architecture critic at the Washington Post. I was age 10 in 1963 when he was hired. In … Continue reading →

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E.U.’s new Tower of Babel

Posted on December 28, 2016 by David Brussat

Pairing the European Union’s new facility in Strasbourg with the medieval painter Brueghel’s Tower of Babel has occurred to not a few on the Internet, and not without very good reason. You can almost assume that the designer intended to … Continue reading →

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When there’s no there there

Posted on December 27, 2016 by David Brussat

The headline on this post is supposed to refer to Gertrude Stein’s famous line about Oakland – “There’s no there there.” The Huffington Post has an essay that tries to show, rather absurdly, that Stein did not mean to denigrate … Continue reading →

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The good cheer of beauty

Posted on December 26, 2016 by David Brussat

Vanity Fair, by William Makepeace Thackeray, was published as a serial novel of 20 monthly parts in issues of Punch magazine from January 1847 to July 1848. So next month will be the 170th anniversary of its appearance in print. … Continue reading →

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Dull (not!) parody of Dwell

Posted on December 23, 2016 by David Brussat

Michael Mehaffy, the urbanist creator of the Sustasis Foundation, in Portland, Ore., has sent a divine parody of a Dwell magazine cover to his friends on the TradArch list. I offer it to my own friends and readers for (fill … Continue reading →

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Deconstructing Villa Savoye

Posted on December 21, 2016 by David Brussat

In the center of the photo above is the Villa Savoye, possibly the most famous work of Le Corbusier, the most influential of modern architecture’s founders. He inspired so much of the poor quality and deadening allure of the built … Continue reading →

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‘Miestake’ at Charnel-House

Posted on December 20, 2016 by David Brussat

For someone who writes about Marxism, Ross Wolfe, author of the blog “The Charnel-House,” appears to be quite unusually frank in his discourse on modernism. Modernists are compelled by the obvious fallacy of modern architecture to confuse issues but often … Continue reading →

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