Category Archives: Architecture History

Frei Otto’s Pritzker: Shhh!

Posted on March 12, 2015 by David Brussat

Frei Otto’s Pritzker exposes the jury to the charge of not having done its homework. True, his work is as ridiculous as anyone looking at it would have to conclude just by looking at it. As such, it lives up … Continue reading →

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New apartments downtown!

Posted on March 11, 2015 by David Brussat

Monday evening’s meeting of the Downtown Design Review Committee relieved concerns that one must feel upon news that a graceful old building is being renovated. Who knows what evil could be afoot. But the applicant, HM Ventures 7, of Brooklyn, … Continue reading →

Posted in Architecture, Architecture History, Development, Photography, Preservation, Providence, Urbanism and planning | Tagged , , , , , | 7 Comments

To be cont’d in Charleston

Posted on March 11, 2015 by David Brussat

Beach Company, which had submitted what I thought was an elegant proposal to replace a midcentury modernist clunker of an apartment tower with three shorter but larger mostly residential buildings of seemingly high design on the edge of Charleston’s historic … Continue reading →

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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 →

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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 →

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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 →

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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 →

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Bygone architecture criticism

Posted on March 1, 2015 by David Brussat

Here, reprinted in Architectural Review, is a long essay of architecture criticism of a sort that we never see anymore – detailed critique of a set of buildings by a famous architect, in this case Edwin Lutyens. The essay, “New … Continue reading →

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Helfand’s Boston City Hall

Posted on February 26, 2015 by David Brussat

As I remarked in my last post, “Edges, shapes and patterns!,” Boston City Hall’s famous inhumanity came up in Tuesday’s lecture by Ann Sussman, co-author of Cognitive Architecture. At her lecture was Aaron Helfand, an architect at the Boston firm … Continue reading →

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