Mittell: Strategy for Ukraine

Posted on March 22, 2022 by David Brussat

Building in Kyiv hit by Russian rocket on third day of attack. (Daniel Leal/AFP). Although it matters very little, it is my impression from TV coverage that while Russian air attacks have damaged cities extensively, little damage has been sustained so far by the more beautiful examples of Ukraine’s architecture.

This is another guest post from David Mittell, my former colleague from the Providence Journal. He has agreed with my desire to point out that his two guest posts (and maybe more) are published as a favor to a dear friend. This blog has not suddenly become the Ukraine Here and There blog.

Nor, for what it is worth, do I fully agree with the negotiating strategy David suggests. I could be wrong, but I think that if President Zelensky heeds some of the voices David mentions coming (at least) from some Americans, then perhaps it might be more likely that a cease-fire could be arranged and Russian troops withdrawn from Ukraine. To my mind, this would be a victory for Ukraine, not for Putin’s Russia.

***

Politicus No. 1454

Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory

By David A. Mittell Jr.

In America one hear’s voices saying, “Zelensky should give up on joining NATO, give up on getting Crimea back, give up on Russian-speaking Ukrainians” – and so forth.

Such thinking is understandable. But it is quite wrong. Ukrainians are winning this terrible war of one man’s misguided egomania. When the war is over Ukraine must be secure in her borders, east and west, and by no means is it reckless to hope that Georgia and Moldova – two countries currently without the protection of alliances – will have their territorial integrity restored.

These are the outcomes victory should assure. Anything less bespeaks the outcomes of defeat. In the case of America it also bespeaks weariness with watching the war on television. Shameful stuff, and inconsonant with the bravery Americans are capable of and usually demonstrate.

Posted in Architecture | Tagged , , | 4 Comments

Christopher Alexander, R.I.P.

Posted on March 20, 2022 by David Brussat

Buildings designed and built by Christopher Alexander and associates at the campus of Eishin University, near Tokyo. (Photo by Sophie Elizabeth Alexander)

The great architectural and computer design theorist Christopher Alexander, born in Vienna and of British and American citizenship, died at his home in Binsted, Sussex, U.K. this past week after a long illness. He was 85. His more than 200 works of architecture were deeply natural, springing from the order and processes of nature that were the study of his lifetime.

Christopher Alexander

His books, primarily Notes on the Synthesis of Form (1964), A Pattern Language 1977), The Timeless Way of Building (1979), A New Theory of Urban Design (1987), and his four-volume The Nature of Order (2002-04), to name a few, show his interest in systems, natural and manmade. He felt that systems that do a better job replicating those of nature work best and could most easily be made both useful and beautiful in architecture and urbanism.

Wikipedia quotes this seminal passage from The Timeless Way of Building:

There is one timeless way of building. It is a thousand years old, and the same today as it has ever been. The great traditional buildings of the past, the villages and tents and temples in which man feels at home, have always been made by people who were very close to the center of this way. It is not possible to make great buildings, or great towns, beautiful places, places where you feel yourself, places where you feel alive, except by following this way. And, as you will see, this way will lead anyone who looks for it to buildings which are themselves as ancient in their form, as the trees and hills, and as our faces are.

He was a key figure in the New Urbanist movement – basically the old urbanism that was replaced by the sprawl criticized by Alexander in his article “A City Is Not a Tree” (1965). What many admirers don’t realize is the centrality of his ideas on order in the development of computer programming and software design. Noting Alexander’s passing, software strategist Ryan Singer wrote of his perhaps even more profound legacy (in today’s world) that “A Pattern Language inspired a generation of influential software programmers who created working methods and wrote widely-read books using Alexander’s theory of patterns.”

Alexander’s ideas in A Pattern Language led directly to the development of “wiki” design and the Wikipedia phenomenon. They may seem to be in separate and even distant fields from architecture but are in reality closely tied. Computer technology did not really take off until its systems theorists (including Alexander) discovered how software replicates nature’s generative processes. Research by the mathematician Nikos Salingaros, who has worked closely with Alexander for decades, has disclosed major similarities between neurobiological processes and the human brain’s instinctive preference for traditional building and city designs that seem to reproduce according to the same patterns as plant and animal life.

Business and data architect Richard Veryard notes that “it is possible that some software practitioners understood his work better than most architects.” That may be the understatement of the week. In fact, it is fair to say that computer theorists have been much quicker than have architects or planners to embrace the connection between the living and the manmade. It is more than fair to say that modernist architects, most of whom tend to disdain Alexander’s work, are not advocates of what he called “living architecture.”

Another colleague of Alexander’s was the urban theorist Michael Mehaffy, who today wrote:

There is a narrative within the modern architectural establishment that Alexander started out as “one of us” – a hard-nosed modern theorist – but then drifted into something gauzy and mystical. Actually this is not true at all; if you study the man’s work as I have, you will see a straight line from the very beginning to the end. It was always about mereology, about part-whole relations. It may have taken him to some surprising places, but that was only because of the evidence he found – not his own whims.

Anyone who achieves Alexandrian levels of cogitation probably tries to reach above their own pay grade, let alone that of most who are reading this obituary, including its author. Alexander’s concepts of architecture and design reflect and entwine with the concept of life itself, and beyond. Salingaros sent me a blurb from Eric Buck, in the philosophy department of the University of Kentucky, from his blurb on the jacket cover of the fourth volume of Alexander’s The Nature of Order, The Luminous Ground, which he described as “one of Christopher’s favorite quotes”:

I believe Alexander is likely to be remembered most of all, in the end, for having produced the first credible proof of the existence of God.”

God is in the details, as someone has noted. Salingaros adds: “Architecture today is situated so far away from life and metaphysics that it will not know what to make of this.” It may be hoped that Alexander knew what to make of this, and that his readers, students, architects and many others will bring that knowledge to their work long after the passage of Christopher Alexander. That will certainly make the world a more beautiful place. R.I.P.

Reprinting the rest of Mehaffy’s quotation that followed from the one above is irresistible:

In fact there’s a great story about how Alexander earned his scholarship studying math and physics at Cambridge. He was required to reproduce a famous electromagnetic experiment, and he kept getting the wrong result. All the other candidates, knowing the right answer from the textbooks, fudged their results to match – but not Alexander. It turned out that a strong electromagnet one floor below was skewing the result, and Alexander alone was observing the reality, not the preconception. On that basis, he was awarded the scholarship. From that moment on, he later said, he decided never to trust the conventional narrative, but only what he himself observed. So he did – and on the evidence, the results were incredibly useful.

[The first version of this post incorrectly attributed the Eric Buck quote to the Eric Buck who is a director at Google.]

[Urban theorist Michael Mehaffy has just published a lengthy and comprehensive obit/assessment of Christopher Alexander. Also, architect Duo Dickinson has written an obituary at Common/Edge. Finally, an excellent obituary from the New York Times.]

Posted in Architecture | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Mittell: Diplos, return to Kyiv

Posted on March 16, 2022 by David Brussat

U.S. Embassy to Ukraine, completed in 2012. (Fox News)

This is a guest post by David A. Mittell Jr., a veteran of many visits to Lviv, whose beauty he described vividly in a guest post in 2016, which I recently republished. In today’s post he admonishes the U.S. ambassador and her staff to return to Kyiv from Lviv, where they have presumably been since being ordered by Washington to evacuate the U.S. embassy. (This is the 1,452nd column written by David in his illustrious journalistic career.)

***

Politicus No. 1452

Our diplomats do not belong in Lviv
.
by David A. Mittell Jr.
.
In 2016, I published a piece titled “Why I love Lviv,” which was the starting and the end point of the 27th of my 28 trips to Ukraine (the 28th included several wonderful days in Kyiv). The 2016 piece was recently republished by David Brussat, my former colleague at the Providence Journal, in his architectural blog.
.
My point is that I do love Lviv, where I have many valued friends. But although I am happy that the world is newly aware of Lviv’s multiple beauties, I do not believe that America’s diplomats belong there. In wartime, a nation’s diplomats should be in the capital near its leadership. They belong in Kyiv, or as close as possible to it.
.
Ordinarily a high diplomatic assignment entails a soft landing. But on infrequent occasions it entails real danger. Currently, the acting U.S. ambassador to Ukraine (since January 2020) is Kristina Kvien. Whatever the risk, it is her duty to be as close to Kyiv as possible – not 500 kilometers away in Lviv. She has the duty and the privilege of risking her life for two countries.
Posted in Architecture | Tagged , , , , , | 3 Comments

More shots of lovely Ukraine

Posted on March 14, 2022 by David Brussat

Recently built luxury apartment houses in the Vozdvyzhenka neighborhood of Kyiv. (Bored Panda)

Today I had to kill a post because because it contained a major mathematical error that could not be corrected. Fortunately – or unfortunately – I am able to substitute for it a post featuring more photographs of poor Ukraine, mostly from before the invasion, and forwarded to me by my dear mother-in-law, Agnes Somlo, who in 1956 with her husband Laszlo became a refugee of an earlier Russian invasion, that of Hungary – which is on the border of Ukraine and is receiving its refugees.

The 50 photos were collected from the internet and a text was added by Akvile Petraityte 🇺🇦 and Ieva Gailiūtė for the website Bored Panda. It is not clear (to me at least) that they are all – or mostly – taken by Alina Kisina, a Ukrainian-born photographer who lives in the U.K. They are mostly lovely shots of buildings and urban settings in Kyiv and Lviv, although many are located in the countryside.

The photo atop this blog pictures buildings in 19th-century styles built in the 21st century in the Vozdvyzhenka neighborhood of Kyiv. The text notes that when the shots were taken “back in 2017, they were mostly still unoccupied due to the high price and low demand.” The low demand was certainly the result of the high price. Ukrainians are proud of their beautiful architecture. No doubt, were it not for the invasion, they’d be fully occupied by now. Let us hope that a negotiated settlement of the war – or a victory by the brave defenders – occurs before any (or many) of these photos are rendered valedictory.

Posted in Architecture | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

College Hill settings preserved

Posted on March 10, 2022 by David Brussat

Final versions, reverse clockwise from top, of 59 Williams St., 67 Williams St. and 6 John St. (PHDC)

Three battles pitting neighbors and applicants for new construction on Williams and John streets appear, after recent meetings of the Providence Historic District Commission, to have been preservationist victories.

What? How can three new houses (one actually a new addition to an old house) be victories for preservation? Well, it is the historic character of one of the city’s oldest neighborhoods that has been preserved. All three proposals – 59 Williams, 67 Williams, and 6 John – could easily have been partly or wholly modernist, as early renderings suggested. This would have seriously diminished the historical setting in this southern section of College Hill, near Fox Point.

That did not happen.

The first battle involved adding a new addition and garage to a modest if elegant Italianate cottage, circa 1880. Swooping roof lines, vertical (board and batten) rather than horizontal (clapboard) façades, large undecorative treatments of fenestration and other non-traditional touches dominated. The designs for the addition kept getting more modernist. After months of dithering (strategic, it may be hoped) by the commission, the developer seems to have thrown up his hands and got architect Friedrich St. Florian to do a traditional design, which he did. Opponents did not all seem fully aware that what they were opposing was the very idea of modern architecture, but their persistence paid off anyway.

The second battle involved a proposed house for a family on a never-built plot of land at 67 Williams, just east of the cottage. The architects initially displayed a convoluted three-level house with no windows or doors on its drawings. This gave rise to concern that something fishy – that is, modern architecture – was afoot. Subsequent committee meetings revealed the emergence of traditional treatments for windows and doors, but no let-up in the design’s barrage of porches, terraces and widow’s walks. PVC and other composite materials only added to anxiety. The committee and the neighbors worked together to calm things down, the developer promised a more natural set of materials, and a distinctly traditional design prevailed.

The final battle involved a proposal that had reared a very ugly head as the first proposal at 59 Williams was unveiled, on the other side of this block, for a duplex at 6 John. It originated with a vaguely traditional design, also by St. Florian, but swiftly and unaccountably transitioned into an overtly modernist design clearly contrary to opposition sentiment and yet in sync with the troubled modernist 59 Williams addition. Eventually, weighed down, it seems, by the growing cost of that proposal, with multiple postponements of “conceptual” approval by the commission, both were abandoned. A new developer hired the architect J.P. Couture to design 6 John, and he pitched a traditional house that immediately satisfied both the commission and the neighbors. It looks as if it will fit right in. Given the diversity of nearby houses, Couture’s design will look as if it is part of the same historical family.

Lesson: See how easy this can be?

More can be learned. A friend has sent me pages from his upcoming book about the mid-20th century architectural illustrator, graphic artist and photographer Samuel Vance Chamberlain (1895-1975). He quotes the folklorist Henry Glassie on the sources of Chamberlain’s traditionalist sensibility:

[A]rt is a consequence of yearning. … We are born into an environment made of a near infinity of interlocking traditions, but [can] never pick them apart. … The Turks say you are born into an “air.” That air is redolent with tradition. Inevitably you breathe it in, and every breath provides influence. There is no escaping influence, so the wise artist must choose among them.

This passage reflects the instinct that gives rise to opposition among neighbors to modernist projects in their neighborhoods. They feel it intuitively, even if they cannot put their finger on its origins. They feel it strongly but often don’t quite have words to express it. They want to protect the historic character of the place where they live. Architects, members of design commissions and developers should be able to feel the same feeling, but their training has often purged its expression from their vocabulary, leading to their willingness to entertain, and often approve, proposals that obviously do not fit into their setting, and are in fact designed not to fit into their setting. They are intended as “challenges” to history and tradition, new examples of which are supposedly inappropriate in our modern era and hence to be rejected, indeed dismissed, as invalid.

Until such experts learn to see and feel again, projects will always be consumed by an unnecessary and expensive churning that nobody seems to understand. And until then, the opponents of modernist buildings, especially in historic districts, should seek to challenge those proposals every way they can. These local actors are almost always right, and their opponents are almost always wrong. Just keep on hammering as best you can until the modernists cannot take it anymore. They are temporary actors, interlopers. You are there for the long haul. Persist. That’s the ticket, and that’s the lesson that the inhabitants of Williams Street and its dear old vicinity have taught to the citizens of Providence and beyond.

Modernist version of addition (right) to cottage at 59 Williams St. (PHDC)

Posted in Architecture, Preservation | Tagged , , , , , , , | 5 Comments

A somber look at brave Kyiv

Posted on March 5, 2022 by David Brussat

Independence Square, formerly Maidan Nezalezhnosti, in central Kyiv.

I feared last night that in posting photographs only of Lviv, and for describing Ukraine’s capital of Kyiv as a “mixture of old and new” (in my book, a quasi-dismissal), I might be properly rebuked, and so I have been. A friend writes:
.
Bombing Kyiv is comparable to bombing Venice or Paris. There has not been enough coverage of this immense loss that the Ukrainians are suffering of their centuries of heritage. I’m glad you have covered Lviv, please do more coverage.
.
Kyiv – Kiev under the late Soviet era – is now under attack by Russian forces unleashed by Vladimir Putin. The capital’s defenders have bravely slowed and even halted the attack outside of Kyiv as a lengthy convoy of military equipment tries to deploy around the embattled city. As I pointed out in “Holding our breath for Lviv” last night, “the beauty of Ukraine, and especially of its cities, girds the courage of its soldiers and citizens in the defense of their independence and sovereignty.”
.
So here are some photographs of Kyiv drawn from the internet, mostly from websites devoted to touring the Ukrainian capital.
.
Posted in Architecture | Tagged , , , , | 3 Comments

Holding our breath for Lviv

Posted on March 4, 2022 by David Brussat

Lviv’s beautiful architecture is worth defending.

My friend and former colleague on the Providence Journal editorial board, David Mittell, once wrote me a guest post called “Why I love Lviv,” a city he has visited dozens of times and hopes to visit again, even though he is laid up in a sort of convalescent home. “Lviv in Ukraine is the least-known most beautiful city in Europe, maybe in the world.” Looking at some pictures online of Lviv – including the one above – I am sure he is correct.

For now, Russian forces invading Ukraine have not attacked Lviv as they have the capital, Kyiv, and Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city. Lviv seems to have more lovely buildings than Kyiv and Kharkiv. The capital is a mixture of the old and the new, the latter probably built mostly during the decades of Soviet occupation that ended in 1991. Kharkiv appears – again, from online images – to be predominantly in the blockish, stultifying Soviet style.

At some point and in some degree, those two cities will be rebuilt after the vile Russian attack ends, as may end up the case also with Lviv, whether Vladimir Putin manages to defeat the Ukrainians or not. News reports and commentary offer some hope that Ukraine’s brave military and civilian resistance has slowed the Russian assault and may already have degraded the likelihood of the criminal Putin’s accomplishing his war aims. We are all rooting not for Vlad the Impaler but for brave President Zelensky.

Having never been to Ukraine, or even to my knowledge spoken to a Ukrainian, I nevertheless feel that the idea of independence must be uppermost in the minds of Ukrainians’ resistance, family and friends aside. And yet I also believe that the beauty of Ukraine, and especially of its cities, girds the courage of its soldiers and citizens in the defense of their independence and sovereignty. It is surely easier to rise to the defense of a beautiful homeland. Here are some images grabbed off the internet to show some of the beauty that Ukrainians are defending.

The photos below are of Lviv, and I apologize for not recording the source information. They are mainly from tourist websites.

Posted in Architecture | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Andres Duany at TAG 4.2

Posted on February 28, 2022 by David Brussat

Members of the TradArch list gather in Charleston for the first TAG. (photo by author)

The architect and planner Andrés Duany, who was a founder of the Congress of the New Urbanism back in the 1990s, gave the final lecture at the fourth session of TAG 4.2, this year’s gathering via Zoom of classicists, now rebranded by the Classic Planning Institute as the Stoa – an ancient Greek word for marketplace.

Duany bombarded the attendees with his patented verve, forcing many to run for cover (figuratively). He repeatedly accused classical architecture of allowing its reverence for traditional forms to thwart the need to compete with the creativity of modern architecture, declaring that “our strength is that we build on the past but our weakness is that we don’t learn from the future.”

His audience expected none of this. Nor his declaration that the treatise he had promised to write after he and his wife, Lizz Plater-Zyberk, won the Driehaus Prize back in 2009 was on its way to completion and had not been abandoned, as almost all classicists had supposed.

In his lecture, Duany complained that this generation of classicists was the only one to have never produced a treatise explaining itself and mapping its future – because, he said, classicists had done nothing new in decades. “Whatever we build must be as correct as Palladio,” he said with regret, “even more so.”

In Duany’s book (literally, and I helped edit the first volume of the treatise, called Heterodoxia Architectonica, back in 2015, for which I was generously paid), there have been four periods during which classicists girded their aesthetic loins after periods of architectural dissipation. Duany calls these periods “recalls,” and that is a good word – a call to order in the face of disorder.

The first recall was the Renaissance, in which Italian architects, having discovered the ancient Roman treatise of Vitruvius, replaced Romanesque, Gothic and other styles of the Dark Ages. The second recall tightened up the classical canon after the exuberent rise of Baroque, Rococo and Mannerist styles in the 17th and 18th centuries. In the third recall, the École des Beaux Arts reimposed canonical discipline after its dissipation in the Eclectic period, which concluded, in the 20th, with the rise of modernism.

The current fourth recall has failed to restrain modernism, but still introduced a contemporary classical revival, including its instruction in a very few architecture schools such as Notre Dame. This movement has pushed back against modernist dominance of the profession and of almost all other academies.

Duany’s treatise aims to lead a fifth recall to gird the loins of the fourth recall, in part by redirecting it toward the young, who need a mission more ambitious than polishing the pillars of past classicism. The fifth recall intends to strengthen the canon by promoting greater innovation and the inclusion of allegedly successful modernist practices, and also by recapturing innovative classical architects who have been kidnapped by the modernists, such as José Plecnik and Louis Sullivan.

Yet even as he supports classicism and condemns modern architecture, Duany gives the trads less credit than they deserve and the mods more credit than they deserve. “It is not true that modernism is bullshit,” he argues, adding that “we’re wrong that glass walls and flat roofs don’t work.” He adds that some modernists now use brick walls and punched windows, which he says were once verboten in the modernist canon, and then he decries the “asymmetry that they learn from us but we don’t learn from them.” More curiously, he claims it is a “mistake to raise the banner of beauty.”

Huh? If not beauty, what? And what, really, can classicists learn from what modernists are designing? If some modernists are learning from classicists, then let them learn some more. Duany says that modernists lie all the time, and that a modernist design proposal often bears no resemblance to what the building will look like. Are these the techniques traditionalists should embrace?

Duany certainly overstates the case that classicists are insipid and the modernists are bold. Many modernists copy the recent past, and many classicists break with a canon that they understand quite well. But classicism, frankly, is about following traditions. With its gargantuan sterility, modernism seems to be laying a template for authoritarian rule. Classicism is the architecture of freedom and of free will. Building on the past conduces to cultural stability, empowers the meaning of tradition, fortifies respect for democratic norms, and strengthens the public’s preference for architecture that they understand and are familiar with, which enables the public to join a civilized polity to address grievances peacefully, which is what the U.S. Constitution is all about, and its equivalents in other democratic societies. Modern architecture has nothing to do with any of that.

This brief report inevitably distorts Duany’s lecture and the ideas of his treatise. His analysis contains much truth, and his expression of the current discourse of architecture is vivid and compelling. But the fact is that Duany’s own discourse, however valid, is an exercise in complexity. He abandons the chief virtue and the powerful strategic advantage classicism holds over modernism, which is that of clarity. The public knows very well the difference between classical and modern architecture, and wants no part of the latter. Duany calls, instead, on classicists to mix and match traditional and modernist concepts, and expects professional and lay people to follow a convoluted discourse. Let us all memorize the Heterodoxia Architectonica, when it comes out. It will not help. He calls on classicists to dilute classicism and embrace modernism in varying degrees. That would make more confusion than anything else, and erode progress toward a classical revival.

TAG, which is now called Stoa and was called @TradArch when first held in Charleston by a few dozen attendees (meeting in person), still boasts adherents whose views contradict those of other adherents. That was true in 2015 (see “Trading TradArch trash talk“) and is still true today. This is called discourse.

I imagine most attendees at TAG 4.2 managed to pick and choose what parts of Andrés Duany’s lecture they liked best. Here’s what I liked best:

Unlike modernists, classicists are incredibly concerned with humans and humanism. We don’t respond to the culture but try to reform the culture. The modernists don’t reform a damn thing, they only express it. The world is ready for the recovery of western culture. … The world needs a revolutionary movement: not what’s new but what’s best.

Well said.

Posted in Architecture | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 13 Comments

Fictional Oxford pool room

Posted on February 22, 2022 by David Brussat

Fifth-floor Smith Building loft, in downtown Providence, decked out for holiday tour in 2008.

I once lived for 11 years, 1999-2010, in a downtown Providence billiard room. It was a loft on the fifth floor of the Smith Building (built in 1912) on Eddy Street, renovated in 1999 with views looking to the south and east, down Fulton Street between City Hall and the old Providence Journal building (1906). I say it was a billiard room because when I moved in I did not have enough possessions to fill a loft of 1,100 square feet, so I bought a pool table of regulation size, high-quality slate, and sexy legs around which I arrayed my living, eating and sleeping space.

Now, since 2010, Victoria, Billy and I live in a house with more than twice as much square footage, but the pool table is in the basement. I miss the loft and its intimate view of profuse detailing at that level of both City Hall, in the Second Empire style, and the Journal, in a Beaux Arts style. No, there was nothing like playing in that eyrie space. Now our basement is almost entirely unfinished, filled with junk, but with enough room to fit a pool table, which needs enough room around it so that long, slender cues can be used to play the game. Before buying, we saw countless larger houses that would not have had enough room to fit a pool table in the basement (and which were mostly too expensive anyway).

I dream of adding an extension to our modest house that would fill in the grossly large asphalt space between the house and the garage. The pool table would be on the upper floor and many windows would look out upon the relatively pleasant neighborhood backyards. It would not rival our loft downtown, of course, but in the meantime I fortify my illusions of billiardly grandeur with the following passage from W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz.

The protagonist, Jacques Austerlitz, is describing an upstairs billiard room that has been secretly sequestered from the rest of a 1780 house in Oxford, owned by a James Mallord Ashman, after his house was requisitioned in 1941 for official use as a wartime convalescent home.

[Ashman’s] ancestor used to play frame after frame of billiards against himself in this retreat, which he had equipped specially for the purpose, often until the dawn of day. Since his death on New Year’s Eve, 1813, no one had ever picked up a cue in the games room, said Ashman, not his grandfather or his father or himself, Ashman, let alone one of the women, of course. And indeed, said Austerlitz [in describing Ashman’s billiard room] everything was exactly as it must have been a hundred and fifty years before. The mighty mahogany table, weighted down by the slate slabs embedded in it, stood in its place unmoved; the scoring apparatus, the gold-framed looking glass on the wall, the stands for the cues and their extension shafts, the cabinet full of drawers containing the ivory balls, the chalks, brushes, polishing cloths, and everything else the billiard player requires, had never been touched again or changed in any way. Over the mantelpiece hung an engraving after Turner’s View from Greenwich Park, and the records book in which the selenographer, under the rubrick Ashman vs. Ashman, had entered all games won or lost against himself in his fine curving hand still lay open on a tall desk. The inside shutters had always been kept closed, and the light of day never entered the room.

My own billiard room had no means of blocking the view, thank goodness, and Ashman’s billiard room, between 1780 and 1813, appears to have always been used only overnight. Its view would have been of a wooded park near Oxford University, whereas my view was of downtown Providence extending through Kennedy Plaza, past Fulton Street’s row of skyscrapers, the federal courthouse built in 1908, and up College Hill – a superior view in my book. Even our wall without windows was hung with my collection of large, framed plat maps of downtown, College Hill and other precincts of the city. I doubt I’ll ever enjoy its like again. But one may always dream.

View east from loft beyond City Hall to Kennedy Plaza, downtown skyscrapers and College Hill.

Posted in Architecture, Books and Culture | Tagged , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Andres Duany on Fox News

Posted on February 19, 2022 by David Brussat

Clip from the beginning of Friday’s “Tucker Carlson Today,” with Andres Duany. (Fox News)

Yesterday, Fox News posted a brief segment featuring Andrés Duany on Tucker Carlson Tonight. In addition, Carlson speaks with Duany for an hour on Tucker Carlson Today. Duany was on fire in his comments about cities and towns in America today and in the past. Carlson had little to say but to nod and express agreement throughout – including the few times Duany criticized modern architecture directly, as he did indirectly throughout most of the hour.

Commenters on the Pro-Urb listserv have gone nutso at the idea that Duany would go on a show hosted by a racist, fascist, etc., etc. Carlson is none of those things, of course. A few understandably exasperated urbanists recognized that demonizing Carlson (or Duany for appearing with him) would add nothing to the discourse on architecture and urbanism. They tried to get a word in edgewise, but even “Snow White,” an academic who oversees the list, seemed to have been bullied into sanctioning an extremely long thread almost entirely of bullying against Carlson and Duany.

The extremist tendency to knowingly and purposely confuse conservatism with racism, fascism, etc., etc., is part of a longstanding effort to delegitimize and cancel Carlson and his show. And it is easy to see why. Carlson is the most talented exponent on television, by far, of a political philosophy embraced by upwards of half American voters, possibly more. A recent study found that more than a third of Tucker Carlson’s audience is composed of Democrats.

Many on Pro-Urb have asked to see the entire show, and here it is. I cannot be certain that people will be able to play it. It may be behind a paywall. If so, I am trying to get a transcript and will print it in its entirety if I do.

It is a great watch: Duany, who now sports a beard, is on fire.

Posted in Architecture | Tagged , , , , , | 10 Comments