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History haunts a (non)landmark When I was a kid (though not a mere child), I defended Edward Durell Stone’s much maligned Gallery of Modern Art at 2 Columbus Circle when it opened in 1964. It had that recherché white marble cladding with an arcade and loggia outside, and rich walnut and macassar ebony paneling within. Thick, jungle-red-carpeted stairs took you up to intimate galleries at half-levels, where a soigné and surreal art collection, including Gustave Moreau’s Salome Dancing Before Herod (1874–76), awaited. At the top of the museum was the Gauguin Room, with tapestries à la Gauguin, where you could

Interviewing celebrated architects can be like Dancing with the Stars. But no matter how big the name, it still takes two to tango. Unlike many of my fellow critics, I was neither trained as an architect nor ever had the slightest urge to become one. Apart from my notable lack of hand-eye coordination (which has made me as poor a draftsman as I am a ballplayer), I am particularly unsuited to the building art because I simply could not abide an inescapable part of the architect’s job: talking about one’s work before, during, and even long after the design and

Architects from Vitruvius onward have written about the building art with the same promotional goal in mind, and modern masters, led by Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier, gave new impetus to the role of architect as self-publicist in print. But not every architect is a natural writer, and the interview can be a much more efficient method for putting one’s point of view across to the public in general, and potential clients in particular. Photo ' Jesse Frohman/Corbis (above left); Brooks Kraft/Sygma/Corbis (above right). Verbal heavyweights: Both Philip Johnson (above left) and Thom Mayne have been known to take

If you come (naively) expecting to see a lot of architecture at the 11th International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale 2008 — as traditionally understood in tangible form — plan to leave disappointed.

Forty thousand people die every year in auto accidents in the United States — 400,000 every decade. Far, far more than have died from terrorism in this country. But we do not respond by withdrawing the right to drive. Images © Werner Huthmacher The new U.S. embassy in Berlin sits next to Brandenburg Gate, but is set back from the street (top); In a rendering (above), MRY shows an intention to capture the spirit of Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s work. It’s an analogy that occurs to me whenever I see the latest field of bollards or other barriers in front of

One of the few to appreciate his work consistently was Banham who, in The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment got it just right, citing: “Paul Valery’s contrast between Eupalinos, the architect, and Tridon, the shipwright. The former was preoccupied with the right method of doing the allotted tasks, and deploying the accepted methods of his calling, and seemed to find a philosophical problem in every practical decision. Tridon, on the other hand, applied every technology that came conveniently to hand, whether or not it was part of the shipbuilding tradition, and treated the sayings of philosophers as further instruction on

One of the results of the current Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art is the rediscovery of historical prefab housing on the opposite coast.

In the summer of 1967, my mother and I traveled to Montreal to see the Expo.

Years ago, in Washington, D.C., I had dinner with Peter Blake. Peter was at that time teaching architecture at Catholic University. But he was best known as a journalist— a former editor of Architectural Forum and the founding editor of Architecture Plus, two of the best architecture magazines of the 20th century. Photo © Paul Warchol Harvard plans to tear down Werner Otto Hall (top and above), an addition to the Fogg Museum, rather than repair its exterior walls. Peter also wrote books, and books were the subject of our dinner. He spoke of a famous series of articles in