Category Archives: Art and design

A Thanksgiving foto feast

Posted on November 24, 2016 by David Brussat

Give thanks for Lee Juskalian, my West Coast friend who continues to avidly follow development news in Providence (occasionally letting me in on some of it). He has sent me these marvelous photos. Thanks, also, to the unnamed artists whose … Continue reading →

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No fine center for fine arts

Posted on October 13, 2016 by David Brussat

Colleen Kelly Mellor asks a fine question on today’s Providence Journal oped page. (Her name is a fine art!) “URI should make its fine arts fine,” her piece suggests. The University of Rhode Island is becoming a high-class institution in … Continue reading →

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Hark, a noble local Nobel!

Posted on October 5, 2016 by David Brussat

Congratulations to Brown University for the Nobel won by one of its physics professors, Michael Kosterlitz. Moreover, congrats to Kosterlitz himself. His Nobel threw me for a loop. It was, I thought, for a discovery in topography, as if he’d … Continue reading →

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From Bauhaus to Coolhaus

Posted on October 3, 2016 by David Brussat

  The definition of “to brand” must be to promote a product as the opposite of what it is. For example, take Coolhaus Ice Cream. It riffs on the Bauhaus, the Weimar German cult of artists from which emerged modern … Continue reading →

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The saga of plaster casts

Posted on September 4, 2016 by David Brussat

Andrew Reed, nephew of the late, esteemed Henry Hope Reed, the nation’s first bare-knuckled (yet elegant and erudite) opponent of “the Modern,” has sent in some remarks regarding a story in the New York Times, “Move Over Marble: Plaster Gets … Continue reading →

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Hellblog: To quoin a frieze

Posted on August 29, 2016 by David Brussat

I am about to place a new blog on my “Blogs I Follow” list. It is the blog of the British architectural cartoonist Louis Hellman, called “Hellblog,” and comes to me from Malcolm Millais, the irrepressible author of Exploding the … Continue reading →

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Big bear barely Brunonian

Posted on July 6, 2016 by David Brussat

Just off the Main Green at Brown, a mounted Marcus Aurelius presides over Lincoln Field, now called Simmons Field after the university’s most recent former president. Or at least the Roman general used to preside. And Ruth Simmons is now … 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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Why art is not progressive

Posted on June 9, 2016 by David Brussat

William Hazlitt, the British essayist and critic of the early 19th century, wrote “Why the Arts Are Not Progressive” for the Morning Chronicle, of London, in 1814. He argues that science is progressive but art is not: What is mechanical, … Continue reading →

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Hitler’s revenge on America

Posted on June 8, 2016 by David Brussat

The journal Places has published, as the inaugural installment in its Future Archive series of forgotten writing of the past century, a 1968 essay for Art in America by Sibyl Moholy-Nagy called “Hitler’s Revenge.” The essay is introduced by Despina … Continue reading →

Posted in Architects, Architecture, Architecture Education, Architecture History, Art and design, Development, Preservation, Urbanism and planning | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments