Today Digby pointed to an article By Kurt Anderson in Vanity Fair that hit on something I’ve been wondering about myself: why does 2012, in terms of fashion, art, culture and such, look so similar to, say 1992? The clothes, the cars, the architecture, the hairstyles, even the music haven’t really changed at all. It’s [...]
Back in 2004 I was working on a house in Irvington, and a neighbor dropped by to chat. A loquacious gal, she had soon informed me that her elderly father had been moved to a nursing home, so she and her husband planned to fix up his house and move in; it was just down [...]
In an earlier post, I wrote about the ongoing renovation of the Edith Green-Wendell Wyatt Federal building, a bland 1970′s-looking hulk being completely retrofitted under the stimulus bill. Currently, it’s one of three cranes left in a skyline that had more than a dozen just a few years ago, one stands idly over a project [...]
Zimmer Gonsul Frasca Architects, a national firm based in Portland, has just completed its new headquarters building on 12th and Washington streets in Downtown Portland; a 23 story tower in which the firm and its staff of 250 will occupy four floors, the remainder of which will be “luxury” apartments. The building lies in between [...]
One of the reasons for my loathing of modern architecture is its relentless utilitarianism; as James Howard Kunstler once wrote, and I paraphrase out of laziness, its schools and libraries fail to convey the higher calling of learning, its courthouses offer no visual cues about the majesty of law, and even its banks fail to [...]