Tag Archives: Germany

Hamburg in the crosshairs

Posted on July 9, 2017 by

The annual G20 conference of the world’s major economies met in Hamburg last week, with leaders convening in palaces and demonstrators rioting in the streets. It brought to mind the cheerful violence that greeted me and my brother, Tony, on … Continue reading →

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Yale lecture: Krier on Speer

Posted on February 4, 2017 by

Léon Krier does not seem to dislike modern architecture as much as I do, but he may dislike it with much more passion. The architectural theorist, master planner of Prince Charles’s new town Poundbury, and practitioner of his own edgy … Continue reading →

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The good cheer of beauty

Posted on December 26, 2016 by

Vanity Fair, by William Makepeace Thackeray, was published as a serial novel of 20 monthly parts in issues of Punch magazine from January 1847 to July 1848. So next month will be the 170th anniversary of its appearance in print. … Continue reading →

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Music and architecture, cont.

Posted on December 13, 2016 by

In October, Roger Scruton visited the belly of the musical beast, in Germany, to deliver a lecture against atonal composition. It was as if  the superhero of classical architecture, Henry Hope Reed, arose from his grave to address the celebrants … Continue reading →

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Hitler’s revenge on America

Posted on June 8, 2016 by

The journal Places has published, as the inaugural installment in its Future Archive series of forgotten writing of the past century, a 1968 essay for Art in America by Sibyl Moholy-Nagy called “Hitler’s Revenge.” The essay is introduced by Despina … Continue reading →

Posted in Architects, Architecture, Architecture Education, Architecture History, Art and design, Development, Preservation, Urbanism and planning | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Epiphany in Stuttgart

Posted on April 26, 2016 by

My brother, his wife Sabrina and her two sons stayed a stretch in Germany for treatment of the two sons’ Lyme disease – successful treatment, by the way. They were in Stuttgart when Tony, a noted philosopher of the mind/body/nature continuum, … Continue reading →

Posted in Architecture, Architecture Education, Architecture History, Art and design, Other countries, Urbanism and planning | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Fascism, modernism paired

Posted on April 21, 2016 by

Mother’s milk flowing from her gentle soul, a good friend expressed at lunch yesterday her dismay at the fascist tendencies of modernist architect Philip Johnson. She is no fan of his buildings (there are two in Providence), but she was … Continue reading →

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

The Schwäbisch Hall cure

Posted on February 11, 2016 by

A German town of some 36,000 in population, Schwäbisch Hall was barely nicked by Allied bombing in World War II, and it shows. The medieval streetscapes in the photos here might well suggest the town as spa or cure for … Continue reading →

Posted in Architecture, Architecture History, Art and design, Other countries, Photography, Preservation, Urbanism and planning | Tagged , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Paying for Berliner Schloss

Posted on October 9, 2015 by

Audun Engh of INTBAU kindly noted, after reading my last post, that the figures next to architectural elements and statuary in drawings of a Berliner Schloss façade near the end of the Extrablatt PDF represented not the cost of those … Continue reading →

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Speer’s Berlin described

Posted on May 18, 2015 by

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 →

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