Tag Archives: William K. Brussat

Bob Stern and Bill Brussat

A book unexpected and unannounced arrived on my doorstep today: Robert A.M. Stern’s Between Memory and Invention, which I immediately mistook for an update of an earlier volume of his, Tradition and Invention in Architecture (2011). That has inhabited my … Continue reading

Posted in Architecture, Architecture Education | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

I. M. Pei, rest in peace

The Chinese-American architect Ieoh Ming Pei died last week at age 102 after a career designing modernist buildings, many of them now famous. Since it is poor manners to speak ill of the dead, I will say only that most … Continue reading

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

Tour the national classical

I grew up in Washington, D.C., and credit its robust and abundant classical and traditional architecture – the buildings themselves, not my upbringing among them – for my own taste in the architecture of civic beauty. I have no idea … Continue reading

Posted in Architects, Architecture, Architecture Education, Architecture History, Art and design, Preservation, Urbanism and planning | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Bill & Hugh, together again

Here is my July 20, 1995, column from The Providence Journal about my father and his best friend, who both were city planners. The images are photographed from an old copy of the column, so I apologize if the expressions … Continue reading

Posted in Architecture, Architecture History, Art and design, Blast from past, Development, Urbanism and planning | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 5 Comments

City planning now and then

My friend Steve’s father Hugh Mields and his friend William K. Brussat (my dad) were city planners. Steve, who is both a philatelist and a fenestration cleanliness engineer, recently sent me an envelope postmarked Washington, D.C., Oct. 2, 1967, and … Continue reading

Posted in Architecture, Architecture History, Art and design, Blast from past, Development, Humor, Urbanism and planning | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Sketching my mom of moms

Here’s the column I wrote in 2004 about the annual meeting in Providence of the American Society of Architectural Illustrators. I was going to write it mainly about the work of a sort of sketchy illustrator from San Francisco in … Continue reading

Posted in Architecture, Art and design, Blast from past, Books and Culture, Providence, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

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

Posted in Architecture, Architecture Education, Architecture History | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment