Tag Archives: architecture

Wandering into Pencil Points

Posted on February 13, 2014 by David Brussat

Yesterday I opened my Princeton selection of reprints from Pencil Points, the journal for architectural draftsmen, to an editorial from the January 1925 issue on the new modern architecture, entitled “Living Architecture.” Here are a couple passages from it: When … Continue reading →

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Column: “The Rise and Fall of Penn Station”

Posted on February 13, 2014 by David Brussat

Before Pennsylvania Station opened in 1910, travelers headed for New York on the Pennsylvania Railroad, owned by the largest company in the world, had to debark in New Jersey and cross the Hudson River by ferry to Manhattan. It’s hard … Continue reading →

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How vulnerable is Gehry’s Ike?

Posted on February 5, 2014 by David Brussat

The industry journal that rules on Capitol Hill is not the Washington Post but Roll Call. Here it publishes “It’s Time to Bury Gehry’s Eisenhower Memorial Design,” an assessment of the prospects for Frank Gehry’s not just ridiculous but sinister … Continue reading →

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Old video: San Franscico after the quake, 1906

Posted on February 3, 2014 by David Brussat

Here is an old video from YouTube of San Francisco after the earthquake. It gives rise to the suspicion that maybe the video I posted yesterday was a later video, with more types of automobile and with time to have … Continue reading →

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“The Monster-Builder” – the trailer

Posted on February 2, 2014 by David Brussat

Nikos Salingaros, the University of Texas mathematician and architectural theorist whose thought has influenced Amy Freed – the playwright who wrote “The Monster-Builder” – has sent me a trailer of the play now being performed at the Artists Repertory Theatre … Continue reading →

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Britannica on architecture, c. 1911

Posted on January 31, 2014 by David Brussat

I dragged out my 11th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. My edition is actually the 12th edition, which is the 11th plus an appendix updating, in 1922, various important subjects, many of which had seen their articles in the famous … Continue reading →

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Blast from the past: America’s got architecture!

Posted on January 30, 2014 by David Brussat

In my weekly column, called “Architecture critic, heal thyself!” and posted this morning, I referred to the elephant in architecture’s living room. That is the fact that most Americans prefer traditional to modern architecture. Among other evidence for this is … Continue reading →

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Column: Architecture critic, heal thyself!

Posted on January 30, 2014 by David Brussat

Witold Rybczynski’s 18th book, “How Architecture Works: A Humanist’s Toolkit,” opens with a quarrel in its title. By any definition of humanism, architecture has been broken for at least seven decades. The book, published in October by Farrar, Straus and … Continue reading →

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Review of “The Monster-Builder”

Posted on January 29, 2014 by David Brussat

Michael Mehaffy, of Portland, Ore., and the TradArch list, sends this review from The Oregonian of the new play at the Artists Repertory Theatre there by Stanford University’s playwright-in-residence, Amy Freed. Michael pulls out this interesting quote from the review: … Continue reading →

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Past blast: Review of Versaci’s “new old” house book

Posted on January 27, 2014 by David Brussat

My blog on how to resolve the difficulty of finding an old house to buy mentioned Russell Versaci’s prefab houses, but I was unable to access my review of his book from 2008. Here it is, reprinted courtesy of The … Continue reading →

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