Category Archives: Books and Culture

For readers in Portugal

Posted on June 7, 2015 by David Brussat

Readers in Portugal and elsewhere who are enjoying my post about the Coach Museum in Lisbon might also enjoy the post published after it on styles of the two horse-racing trophies won yesterday, and the two previous posts: “7 brides … Continue reading →

Posted in Architecture, Books and Culture | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Enigmatic at Bletchley Park

Posted on June 3, 2015 by David Brussat

My ongoing investigation of the alleged widespread dislike of Victorian architecture at some point in the past – which I dispute – led me to this passage from Enigma, by Robert Harris, a novel about the quest to decipher the … Continue reading →

Posted in Architecture, Architecture History, Book/Film Reviews, Books and Culture | Tagged , , , , , | 3 Comments

Speer’s Berlin described

Posted on May 18, 2015 by David Brussat

Here is another passage from Fatherland, a novel whose plot unfolds almost two decades after Germany has won World War II in 1946. The Fatherland stretches east of Moscow; most of Western Europe that is not part of the new … Continue reading →

Posted in Architecture, Architecture History, Books and Culture, Urbanism and planning | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Michael Palin on London

Posted on May 17, 2015 by David Brussat

Here’s another passage, this one from Diaries, 1969-1979: The Python Years, about development trends in London. Sadly, this is from 43 years ago. I wonder what Palin would think about the same subject today. Friday, Oct. 27, 1972. From the … Continue reading →

Posted in Architecture, Architecture History, Books and Culture, Development, Humor | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Your computer’s architecture

Posted on May 15, 2015 by David Brussat

I have a difficult time finding user-friendly architecture to write about, so let me write about the user-friendliness of computer word programs. In fact, the writing has already been done, not for me but by me, back in 1988, the … Continue reading →

Posted in Architecture, Books and Culture | Tagged , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

The Fountainhead of Youth

Posted on May 7, 2015 by David Brussat

Padriac Steinschneider, honcho of the New York chapter of the Congress of the New Urbanism, was as miffed as I was by the reflections of the Dallas Morning News architecture critic Mark Lamster on the CNU proceedings at Dallas last … Continue reading →

Posted in Architects, Architecture Education, Architecture History, Books and Culture | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

A dream to soothe the breast

Posted on April 29, 2015 by David Brussat

Who has not claimed to have said that architecture is music frozen in time? Perhaps music is architecture floating into our ear. Anyway, I was just now introduced to the French composer Gabriel Fauré (1845-1924). A blogger on music whose … Continue reading →

Posted in Architecture, Art and design, Books and Culture, Video | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Bless the landscape architect

Posted on April 27, 2015 by David Brussat

Julie Iovine, the Wall Street Journal’s post-Huxtable architecture critic, has written “The Landscape Architecture Legacy of Dan Kiley.” Her piece on an exhibition of the work of the late Kiley, who died in 2004, earns a place in my collection … Continue reading →

Posted in Architects, Architecture History, Art and design, Books and Culture, Landscape Architecture | Tagged , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Mark Anthony Signorelli: The poetry of architecture

Posted on March 16, 2015 by David Brussat

Nikos Salingaros, the theorist of architecture’s debt to biology, has sent me an essay by his sometime collaborator Mark Anthony Signorelli. Nikos describes “The Soul in the Temple” as “very insightful and very poetic (well, Mark is a poet!).” I … Continue reading →

Posted in Architecture, Art and design, Books and Culture, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

Fashion and coquetry, 1807

Posted on March 14, 2015 by David Brussat

My last passage quoted several posts ago from William Hazlitt was followed merely a page later by this passage, which rivals if it does not quite repeat the endlessness of its predecessor. Whereas the prior passage limns the hopelessless (at … Continue reading →

Posted in Architecture, Art and design, Books and Culture | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment