Tag Archives: Rome

A lovely 3 minutes in Rome

Here is a video of Rome, with some clips from Pisa and Vatican City, sent to me by Big Geek Daddy. Actually, they sent a video of Barcelona, but it was marred by too much focus on special effects, though … Continue reading

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St. Vitus’s Rome still lovely

Here is another one of those herky-jerky travelogue videos of a famous city, in this case Rome. Titled “If You Have Never Wanted to Visit Rome, You Will After You See This,” it’s title could be inverted to read “If … Continue reading

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Henry James’s Roman ruins

As we saw in his novel The Princess Casamassima, Henry James indulges himself in his descriptions of cities. In Daisy Miller, he describes the ruin of the Palace of the Caesars, and the Colosseum, in Rome: A few days after … Continue reading

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Hark, a noble local Nobel!

Congratulations to Brown University for the Nobel won by one of its physics professors, Michael Kosterlitz. Moreover, congrats to Kosterlitz himself. His Nobel threw me for a loop. It was, I thought, for a discovery in topography, as if he’d … Continue reading

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Fallen Rome, fallen moderns

Passages from Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve: How the World Became Modern evoke a Rome in the 15th century fallen from its imperial glory: The population of Rome, a small fragment of what it had once been, lived in detached settlements, … Continue reading

Posted in Architects, Architecture, Architecture Education, Architecture History, Art and design, Books and Culture, Landscape Architecture, Other countries, Preservation, Urbanism and planning | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Adele C-T at PPS in Prov.

Adele Chatfield-Taylor will speak at tonight’s annual meeting of the Providence Preservation Society. It will be at 5:30 p.m. this evening in the Providence Public Library. Last night, trying to finally decide whether to attend or to train up to … Continue reading

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Beethoven’s architecture

Beethoven’s birthday was yesterday. He would have been 245 years old. Today is the anniversary of his baptism, the day after his birth. A vagueness of timing, however, did not fit into the architecture of his music. Goethe called architecture … Continue reading

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Mayors and modernism

Here is a column I wrote back on May 22, 2008, just after Boris Johnson’s election as mayor of London. At the time there was good news coming from the mouths of mayors in Italy and Czechoslovakia as well. Rome … Continue reading

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Palladio the Erroneous

Along with Calder Loth, in his latest essay for the Classicist Blog at the Institute of Classical Architecture & Art, I mean no disrespect to Andrea Palladio, the 16th Century architect and teacher of classicism. His influence on architecture has … Continue reading

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Wandering into Pencil Points

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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