Architecture

Showing 361 – 372 of 402 results

Glen Cummings|Essays

Athos Bulcão, The Artist of Brasilia

Concrete relief, Teatro Nacional, Brasilia, 1966In 1956, Brazilian President Juscelino Kubitschek was sworn into office, boasting a campaign promise to deliver half a century of progress in the space of five short years. In an effort to …

Michael Bierut|Baseball

The (Faux) Old Ball Game

Since 1992, every ballpark in America has been designed on the nostalgic model of Baltimore's Camden Yards, including the new parks for the Yankees and the Mets. Why is it impossible to build a baseball stadium that looks like it belongs …

Rick Poynor|Essays

Lost America: The Flamingo Motor Hotel

I found this old photo in a box at the back of my attic. It shows a motel in Flagstaff, Arizona where I stayed for a couple of nights in May 1978. I was 20, it was my first visit to the US, and for three weeks I had been touring around on …

Dmitri Siegel|Essays

Learning from North Philadelphia

Guild House, Friends' Housing for the Elderly, Philadelphia; Venturi and Rauch, Cope and Lippincott, Associates, 1960-1963. Photo by the author, 2008.I recently took the river-to-river drive down Spring Garden Street in Philadelphia from …

Tom Vanderbilt|Essays

Discipline and Design

"Communications office bunker below the Imperial Palace, Ho Chi Minh City, Viet Nam," photograph by Richard Ross, Architecture of Authority, 2007Looking to get a travel visa, I recently made my way to the Permanent Mission of the Socialist …

Michael Bierut|Essays

Rest in Peace, Herbert Muschamp

Officially published for the first time as a posthumous tribute: a loving parody of the writing of the late, great architectural critic Herbert Muschamp.

Michael Bierut|Essays

Donal McLaughlin’s Little Button

In 1945, architect-turned-graphic-designer Donal McLaughlin designed a lapel pin for a conference in 1945 that became one of the most widely seen symbols in the world: the emblem for the United Nations. Tomorrow is his 100th birthday.

William Drenttel|Essays

Koolhaas and His Omnipotent Masters

Koolhaas recounts the story: he chose between working on NYC's Ground Zero and the Beijing CCTV project based on a fortune cookie he was given at a Chinese restaurant — in it, the goofy prognostication "Stunningly Omnipresent Masters …

William Drenttel|Slideshows

Diversity as Form: The Yale Architecture Posters

Cover detail, Forty Posters for the Yale School of Architecture, 2006.Since 1998, Design Observer's Michael Bierut has worked in close collaboration with Robert A.M. Stern, dean of the Yale School of Architecture, designing more than 40 …

Michael Bierut|Essays

New House

In 1967, just after my tenth birthday, we moved from a cramped 1940s bungalow in an older Cleveland suburb to up-and-coming Parma, Ohio. I had been walking the earth for a full decade, but that fall I felt I was finally assuming my …

Tom Vanderbilt|Essays

Small Worlds

One of the first things I like to do upon visiting a new city is to visit the scale-model version of itself. From Havana to Copenhagen, I’ve hunted down these miniature metropolises in dusty historical museums and under-visited …

Michael Bierut|Essays