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Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire. This is what American cities looked like a century ago. Everything you see here was demolished. Why?

Recent occurrences in the Middle East resulted a “divisive” architecture event this past Thursday at Ohio State University. According to the OSU National Association of Minority Landscape Architects’ Abdul-Azeez Ahmad, the December 7 “Justice Centered Design” confab came about due to “the illegal Israeli occupation and everything happening in Palestine.” The event featured a screening of Israeli architect Eyal Weizman’s film “The Architecture of Violence” along with a panel discussion, The Lantern reports. The film “takes [the viewer] through the eyes of hostile architecture that was designed by the Israeli occupation to subjugate and to keep the Palestinians living in...

Modernists like to manipulate words, often “spinning” them into meanings that appear simple but are relatively obscure. For example, consider the modern misuse of the terms like “accompaniment,” “social justice,” or even “woke.” Such is not the case with the architectural style known as “brutalism.” The Architecture of Despair Merriam-Webster defines brutal using the words cold, harsh, severe, unpleasant and lacking sensitivity. A bit further down the page, it refers to brutalism as “a style in art and especially architecture using exaggeration and distortion to create its effect (as of massiveness or power).” While many might not be familiar with...

There’s some justice after all. The $1.7 trillion spending bill names things after the D.C. swamp creatures passing it. That includes Pelosi. From this day henceforth, the San Francisco Federal Building (that is its name) will be named the Speaker Nancy Pelosi Federal Building. The San Francisco Federal Building is the ugly thing blotting the skyline that architects love and everyone else hates. It was so despised that it was featured in the Trump presidential order calling for a return to classical architecture. “For example, GSA selected an architect to design the San Francisco Federal Building who describes his designs...

After the discovery of the building that perhaps supported Nero's rotating dining room on the Palatine, excavations for Line C of Rome's subway brought to light a building that, according to the first hypotheses made by archaeologists, is thought to be Hadrian's Academy, built in 133 A.D. to host poets, rectors, philosophers, men of letters, scientists and magistrates. Hadrian, or Publius Aelius Hadrianus, ruled from 117-138 AD. He was an avid philosopher who was commonly referred to as one of the "five good emperors." Hadrian's Wall, in Northern England was built after a great war in what was then called...

A break from politics for ingenuity in construction. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGegneT9KfQ&t=1s Indiana Bell Central Office building, all 11,000 tons, moved 90 degrees while employees worked inside. Kurt Vonnegut's father was the local architect who came up with the idea.

A stunning Georgian townhouse, once used to film a 1995 adaptation of Jane Austen's Persuasion, is now on the market for £4.5 million. The Grade II listed property in Bath was used in the 1995 BBC recreation of the infamous period author's novel, starring Ciaran Hinds and Amanda Root. It flaunts its own ballroom, library and ornate dining room, perfect for entertaining guests with Regency-era grandeur.

A new biography traces the many lives and influences of architect Walter Gropius.Walter Gropius, one of the leaders of the early 20th-century modernist movement in architecture and a founder of one of the world’s most important schools of design, was a cowboy at heart. Before founding the internationally significant Bauhaus design school in Germany or bringing a new humanity to the design of industrial buildings, Gropius was shaped by a boyhood encounter with the Wild West showman Buffalo Bill Cody. As a 7-year-old boy in Berlin, Gropius went to see the European tour of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show,...

Billionaire Charlie Munger is bankrolling the design of a massive dormitory at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The $1.5 billion project comes with a major catch — 94% of the dorm's single occupancy rooms have no windows. A consulting architect on the university's Design Review Committee quit in protest of the project, in a resignation letter obtained by CNN Business and reported by the Santa Barbara Independent... ...In addition to being Warren Buffett's right-hand man, Munger is an amateur architect. He has no formal education in the field.... the 97-year-old vice chairman of Warren Buffet's Berkshire Hathaway, donated $200...

Just a point of curiosity. I've been reading up on how buildings can be designed to draw heat from the ground and have it sent upwards, which keeps the ground floor cooler. So, I'm just wondering how often southern homes make use of this design and why it isn't used more?

The foundations of a 1,000-year-old church built by German Emperor Otto I (also known as Otto the Great) were rediscovered by archaeologists under a cornfield in Helfta, Germany, in late June, according to the State Office for Monument Preservation and Archeology in the country’s Saxony-Anhalt region. Based on the foundations, the church was 66 feet wide, and it existed alongside a massive cemetery containing at least 70 graves. Numerous artifacts, including coins, utensils, jewelry, and other accessories, were also found last month. The church was built in the 10th century and was continuously occupied for 500 years, perhaps even once...

Classical architecture is not a partisan issue. President Thomas Jefferson, founder of the Democratic Party, was an enthusiastic champion of the Greek Revivalism thankfully still visible in both the capital and his Monticello home. When he designed the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, he took great care in the landscaping and architecture, knowing their likely effects on generations of young minds. Fifty years later, President Abraham Lincoln insisted that construction of the Washington Monument and U.S. Capitol continue despite the bloody and costly war taking place sometimes just 50 miles from the seat of government. Public beauty in civic buildings,...

Amazon on Tuesday unveiled second phase of development of its new headquarters in Arlington, Virginia Plans are to build three 22-story office buildings totaling 2.8 million square feet for some 13,000 employees Centerpiece is a 350ft high glass tower called The Helix, with two walkways lined with trees and plants Sprawling 2.5-acre campus includes outdoor amphitheater and green space for concerts, farmers' market Area will also hold childcare center, dog run, food truck area and a 20,000sq ft community space Amazon plans to break ground on second phase of project early next year; First phase under construction The first buildings...

A Turkey-based architecture firm is proposing some big changes to the New York City skyline. The Sarcostyle Tower, designed by Hayri Atak Architectural Design, looks like no skyscraper on the face of the planet, with its curved, sloping design and sinuous curves. “Sarcostyle” is a filament that makes up striated muscle fiber, and it’s easy to see where the building gets its name, given its anatomically inspired form. Seesaws at U.S.-Mexico border win prestigious UK design prize According to Atak, one of the “impressive” effects of the building is “that it creates an image in the mind that is tangent...

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered as follows: Section 1. Purpose. Societies have long recognized the importance of beautiful public architecture. Ancient Greek and Roman public buildings were designed to be sturdy and useful, and also to beautify public spaces and inspire civic pride. Throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, public architecture continued to serve these purposes. The 1309 constitution of the City of Siena required that “[w]hoever rules the City must have the beauty of the City as his foremost...

Since the overwhelming majority of Americans have proven time and time again that they prefer traditional architecture, why do government agencies force ugly buildings on the American people? A new study finds 72 percent of Americans prefer traditional architecture for U.S. courthouses and federal office buildings, including majorities across political, racial, sex, and socioeconomic categories. The survey was conducted by The Harris Poll on behalf of National Civic Art Society and polled more than 2,000 U.S. adults. These findings come in light of the possibility of a Trump administration executive order, appropriately named Make Federal Buildings Beautiful Again, that would...

Stephen Maciejewski dropped to a knee on a Center City sidewalk Wednesday morning and gently scooped up a yellow-billed cuckoo that had smashed into a skyscraper and died on its way to Central America or the West Indies. “This probably happened yesterday,” said Maciejewski, a 71-year-old retired social worker and volunteer for Audubon Pennsylvania. He labeled a plastic bag with the time, date, and location, tucked the slim migrator into it, and continued his rounds. Maciejewski gets emotional when he speaks about all the birds he finds, but nothing, he says, prepared him for what happened Friday. “So many birds...

REASON #1: ARCHITECTURE Of all of the points that I will make, this is the easiest to understand because it is so visible: we see its evidence every day. The power and beauty of classical architecture is everywhere, from grand buildings like our Supreme Court to our humble everyday homes. The Greeks discovered the proportions that are most pleasing to the human eye which, they tell us, are based on nature’s greatest work of art: the human body. Scale, mass, proportion, and symmetry—the principles of classical architecture—were worked out by the Greeks in great detail and built upon in succeeding...

While the country was riveted by the President’s impeachment trial, a Washington rumor was quietly bubbling about a potential executive order that, if implemented, would profoundly affect the future of federal architecture. RECORD has obtained what appears to be a preliminary draft of the order, under which the White House would require rewriting the Guiding Principles for Federal Architecture, issued in 1962, to ensure that “the classical architectural style shall be the preferred and default style” for new and upgraded federal buildings. Entitled “Making Federal Buildings Beautiful Again,” the draft order argues that the founding fathers embraced the classical models...

Modernists are trying to reverse trends in cultural-heritage preservation by subtle interventions in several key conservation standards of the European Union. Writing from Norway, Audun Engh of the International Network for Traditional Building, Architecture & Urbanism (INTBAU) warned me today that the modernists plan to “introduce recommendations that modernism (‘contemporary design’) should be a required style for new construction at EU-funded cultural-heritage sites.”