Category Archives: Books and Culture

Hazlitt’s literary skyscraper

Posted on March 12, 2015 by David Brussat

William Hazlitt, whom I’ve quoted here before on the art of painting, is a writer whose sentences evoke the architecture of English. The one below certainly suggests a skyscraper. He liked to say that he wrote in a “familiar style” … Continue reading →

Posted in Architecture, Art and design, Books and Culture | Tagged , , , , , , | 5 Comments

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 →

Posted in Architecture, Architecture History, Books and Culture, Preservation | Tagged , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Sketching my mom of moms

Posted on February 28, 2015 by David Brussat

Here’s the column I wrote in 2004 about the annual meeting in Providence of the American Society of Architectural Illustrators. I was going to write it mainly about the work of a sort of sketchy illustrator from San Francisco in … Continue reading →

Posted in Architecture, Art and design, Blast from past, Books and Culture, Providence, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Pawtucket! Woonsocket!

Posted on February 27, 2015 by David Brussat

With Pawtucket apparently about to lose its ball team, the city’s name is in the news, and it has caused me to marvel at the wonderful names cities in Rhode Island have. Pawtucket has a frankly puckish character. It’s nickname … Continue reading →

Posted in Architecture, Books and Culture, Humor, Providence, Rhode Island | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

Edges, shapes and patterns!

Posted on February 25, 2015 by David Brussat

Edges, patterns and shapes affect our perception of the built environment through the millennia worth of knowledge accumulated by our brain about our world. Only 70,000 years from the savannah and, as Ann Sussman put it last night, “your subconscious … Continue reading →

Posted in Architecture, Art and design, Books and Culture, Uncategorized, Urbanism and planning | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 8 Comments

On “Cognitive Architecture”

Posted on February 22, 2015 by David Brussat

Ann Sussman will be in Boston on Tuesday evening to discuss her book Cognitive Architecture. She will speak at an event sponsored by the New England chapter of the Insitute of Classical Architecture & Art beginning at 6 in the … Continue reading →

Posted in Architecture, Architecture Education, Art and design, Books and Culture, Urbanism and planning | Tagged , , , , , , | 4 Comments

“Design for a Living Planet’

Posted on February 18, 2015 by David Brussat

In their newly published book, subtitled “Settlement, Science and the Human Future,” authors Michael Mehaffy and Nikos Salingaros argue that human well-being, indeed survival here on Earth, requires replacing our overly mechanized, technologized way of life with patterns of living … Continue reading →

Posted in Architects, Architecture, Architecture Education, Architecture History, Art and design, Books and Culture, Urbanism and planning | Tagged , , , , , , | 5 Comments

Lurking behind this facade

Posted on February 16, 2015 by David Brussat

Behind this stern but elegant classical façade – in Bucharest! – lurks one of the most astonishing and effective mixtures of the old and the new that I have ever seen. And the fact that it is a bookstore, restored … Continue reading →

Posted in Architecture, Art and design, Books and Culture, Development, Other countries | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

‘The Hidden Light of Objects’

Posted on February 14, 2015 by David Brussat

The fragility of culture, even of culture wrought in the hardness of masonry, is one of the themes of the ten short stories in Mai Al-Nakib’s first book, The Hidden Light of Objects. The second story, “Echo Twins,” is set … Continue reading →

Posted in Architecture, Architecture History, Art and design, Books and Culture, Development, Urbanism and planning | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Modernism’s “Deflategate”

Posted on February 1, 2015 by David Brussat

The BBC documentary Vienna: City of Dreams is about as entirely marinated in modernism’s institutional bias as it is possible for a film of an hour and a half to be. And yet it is beautiful in spite of itself. … Continue reading →

Posted in Architecture, Art and design, Books and Culture, Other countries | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments