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Category Archives: Architecture History
Corbu’s rant at Neimeyer
Oscar Niemeyer, the Brazilian architect who died in 2012 at age 104, is best known for designing Brasília, the sterile über-modernist new capital city that arose in the Brazilian outback in something like three years in the late 1950s. Its … Continue reading
Sources of modern silliness
Nikolaus Pevsner (1902-83) wrote some of the pathbreaking works of architectural history that form the belief system of modern architecture today. The Sources of Modern Architecture and Design is one, which I am reading again for the first time in … Continue reading
Millais vs. Le Corbusier
Malcolm Millais, the author of Exploding the Myths of Modern Architecture, has written Le Corbusier, the Dishonest Architect, brought out in Britain by Cambridge Scholars Publishing, of Newcastle upon Tyne. It is a brave book and a necessary book, a … Continue reading
“Lost Prov” blasts off today
Today is the day my book Lost Providence goes on sale. At least a hundred people have already pre-ordered it from History Press/Arcadia Publishing, and that was as of two weeks ago. The official launch of the book will be … Continue reading
Out with the new, in with …
A new apartment building planned for Westminster Street outside of downtown, well beyond Route 95, is going through the design process. The Journal’s story, “5-story building gets go-ahead in Providence” describes tough going for the developer, Michael Lemoi, whose project … Continue reading
Among ye olde Victorians
Victorian architecture, seen as the architecture of the long reign of Queen Victoria, shows the absurdity of those who claim that Victorian styles fell out of favor during the 1950s and ’60s, as many observers attest, modernist and otherwise. My … Continue reading
My Jane’s Walk next week
Jane Jacobs’s 101st birthday is coming up on Thursday, May 4, so my Jane’s Walk tour along the Providence waterfront, starting at Crawford Street Bridge near Hemenway’s, will be on Saturday, May 6. Providence’s river walks were part of a … Continue reading
Pub date for “Lost Prov”!
Feel free to hoist some suds, but this post is not the announcement for a pub crawl. No. Rather, it celebrates the announcement of the publication date for my upcoming book Lost Providence: Monday, Aug. 28. The news arrived this … Continue reading
Yale lecture: Krier on Speer
Léon Krier does not seem to dislike modern architecture as much as I do, but he may dislike it with much more passion. The architectural theorist, master planner of Prince Charles’s new town Poundbury, and practitioner of his own edgy … Continue reading
Posted in Architecture, Architecture History, Video
Tagged Albert Speer, Germany, Hitler, Leon Krier, Nazi Germany, Yale
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Ruskin’s “Two Paths” speech
Among the platitudes of architecture these days is the modernist credo that innovation is the chief merit of the building arts. Innovation is important, but modernists have a narrow definition of the term that limits their vision. John Ruskin, the … Continue reading
