Tag Archives: Modern Architecture

How modernism got square

Posted on June 8, 2023 by David Brussat

Editor’s note: Here is a post from December 2013, almost a decade ago, shortly after the Providence Journal booted my Journal blog from its roster of staff-written web logs, which is where the word “blog” comes from. I used to … Continue reading →

Posted in Architecture, Blast from past | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

Professor Curl’s revenge

Posted on January 27, 2023 by David Brussat

1933 competition entry by Mies van der Rohe for new Reichsbank. (Stevens Curl collection) Since the publication of his masterly evisceration of modernist architecture in 2018, Making Dystopia: The Strange Rise and Survival of Architectural Barbarism, James Stevens Curl has … Continue reading →

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

QE2 is dead, long live Charles

Posted on September 9, 2022 by David Brussat

Anglophilia runs deep in this corner. Not because Great Britain has a royal family but because it has embraced Western civilization more than any nation. This fact explains its reign as Europe’s most powerful and influential country for centuries, nationally … Continue reading →

Posted in Other countries | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 9 Comments

The stupidest profession

Posted on July 6, 2022 by David Brussat

Occasionally I run across a post of mine from long ago that bears reprinting. This one from July 31, 2018,  fits that description, it seems to me, even though I have edited it to fix some badly written parts that … Continue reading →

Posted in Architecture | Tagged , , , , , | 8 Comments

The joy of hating modernism

Posted on May 15, 2022 by David Brussat

My favorite writer of all time is William Hazlitt, the British essayist of the early 19th century and contemporary of Charles Lamb and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He was considered a “good hater” (or maybe it was “a good damner”) and … Continue reading →

Posted in Architecture, Art and design | Tagged , , , , , | 39 Comments

Modernist GMO architecture

Posted on April 8, 2022 by David Brussat

It occurs to me that in my longstanding effort to demonize modern architecture that I could stand to remind readers that it qualifies as the architectural equivalent of genetically modified organisms – GMO architecture. I wrote of the term several … Continue reading →

Posted in Architecture, Blast from past | Tagged , , , , , , | 3 Comments

The hegemony of architecture

Posted on December 7, 2021 by David Brussat

Architecture may be suffering from a hegemonic conundrum that afflicts the major institutions of the whole world. It is not just hegemon vs. hegemon anymore, according to analyst Richard Fernandez in his recent essay “There Is Something Wrong with our … Continue reading →

Posted in Architecture | Tagged , , , , , | 6 Comments

“Conundrum of architecture”

Posted on November 4, 2021 by David Brussat

Below is a long guest post written by Scottish architecture critic David Black, who lives in Edinburgh. Written in light of controversies in the United States over former President Trump’s effort to align the styles of federal architecture with American … Continue reading →

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

The vapidity of the modern

Posted on July 21, 2021 by David Brussat

You know you are being targeted when your clickbait stories include video of a 2001 panel led by Charlie Rose (transcript included) discussing Ludwig Mies van der Rohe with Paul Goldberger, Phyllis Lambert (a liquor distributor’s daughter who hired Mies … Continue reading →

Posted in Architecture | Tagged , , , , , | 12 Comments

Greenberg’s independence

Posted on July 6, 2021 by David Brussat

In the temporal orbit of Independence Day, we have seen the passing of classicist Thomas Gordon Smith and the trashing of all the values he respected and that we celebrate on the Fourth of July. Leaving aside the latter, I … Continue reading →

Posted in Architecture | Tagged , , , , , , | 7 Comments