Category Archives: Urbanism and planning

Landmark the neighbors

Posted on March 19, 2015 by David Brussat

Many Providence residents live on beautiful streets lined with houses built before ugly architecture became almost mandatory. Few neighborhoods are dominated by midcentury modern houses, although some jackanapes might even argue that they qualify as historic. Historic, perhaps, if the … Continue reading →

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Embarrassing screen shot

Posted on March 13, 2015 by David Brussat

Above is a screen shot part way down into the online print version of an NPR interview with Renzo Piano, “The Future of Europe’s Cities Is In Their Suburbs.” In it, the interviewer says that “Piano believes it’s the architect’s … 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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New Urbanism’s easy choice

Posted on March 8, 2015 by David Brussat

It is often said that New Urbanism is “agnostic” as to style. Even the charter of the Congress for the New Urbanism says so. Rob Steuteville, who edits the urbanist journal Better Cities & Towns, has written an essay, The … 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 →

Posted in Architecture, Architecture History, Blast from past, Photography, Urbanism and planning | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments

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

Buffing the downtown fabric

Posted on March 4, 2015 by David Brussat

The expected purchase by Arnold C. “Buff” Chace of the Providence Journal’s headquarter’s building – not the old Journal building of 1906 but the “new” one of 1934, designed by noted Motor City architect Albert Kahn – is extraordinarily good … 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 →

Posted in Architecture, Architecture Education, Architecture History, Blast from past, Urbanism and planning | Tagged , , , , | 3 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