Category Archives: Art and design

Column: World roses and raspberries for 2013

Here, from around the globe, are roses and raspberries for buildings, people and events that moved the world as we know it closer to or further from the world as we’d like it to be: • A raspberry to Lisbon … Continue reading

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See sequestered salacious montage here!

An anonymous donor responded to a challenge in an earlier post about the Chinese newspaper headquarters and the proposed soccer stadium (read it here), and sent me the above image, exclaiming that the challenge was “too easy.” The image is … Continue reading

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Save NYC’s Rizzoli bookstore

I don’t see many petitions I’m inclined to sign but I signed one just a few moments ago. It was a petition to save the building that houses the publisher Rizzoli’s flagship store in a glorious old building on West … Continue reading

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Curse of the ‘Creative Capital’

The rebranding of the Rhode Island Economic Development Corporation (RIEDC) as the Rhode Island Commerce Corporation (RICC) is complete, and a complete dud. This is the government agency that’s supposed to get the state economy growing again to produce jobs … Continue reading

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“The Monster-Builder” – A play

Nikos Salingaros, the University of Texas mathematician and architectural philosopher whose most trenchant book is Anti-Architecture and Deconstruction, has sent me news of a new play by Amy Freed called “The Monster-Builder,” a play (on words) of Ibsen’s “The Master-Builder.” … Continue reading

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A kiss is just a kiss … right?

One of the late Cy Twombly’s untitled paintings, a canvas entirely white, was kissed by French artist Sam Rindy, 30, leaving on the work the red imprint of her lips – the only arguably artistic thing about the painting, which … Continue reading

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MoMA angst in the modernist world

The Jan. 9 announcement that New York’s Museum of Modern Art would indeed at last tear down the twee Folk Art Museum embedded in its (MoMA’s) glassy skin has brought to the cozy little world of modern architecture a high … Continue reading

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Helluva Helvetica

Helvetica is a 2007 documentary about the Helvetica typeface that is brutally honest about its subject. After half an hour drooling over its simplicity and how it took over the world in just a couple of minutes after its introduction … Continue reading

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The birth of classical architecture

Theories of how classical architecture sprang from a wood hut seem plausible enough. Some gradual progression was obviously involved. But somehow, when rendered in the form of a step-by-step history, however evocatively illustrated, it seems to lose all plausibility, elucidating … Continue reading

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April 7, 2005: Architecture and haute couture

A comment from Thomas Hayes about my last post, “‘Wrong Way’ Corrigan Public Library,” called to mind that I’d once compared, in my Providence Journal column, architecture and fashion design. Here, as a “Blast from the Past,” is that column, … Continue reading

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