One of the stated goals of the postmodern movement in architecture was a greater sensitivity to the people who live in or use newly designed buildings.
One of the most persistent images in American urbanism is that of the proverbial city on a hill, as first envisioned on these shores by the Puritan John Winthrop, via the Gospel according to Saint Matthew.
One reason I've never been a fan of graphic novels is because a central aspect of literature for me has always been imagining what the things I'm reading about look like.
Snohetta promotes a more democratic workplace atmosphere than most other architectural offices. This may merely reflect prevalent employment practices in Scandinavia, but Snohetta places a stronger emphasis on group participation in the design process than typical high-style firms.
During the modern period, the vanguard architect has usually relied on small residential jobs both to supply a steady income and to serve as 'sketches' for ideas that are often later translated to the larger scale of public commissions.
Architecture was the last of the major professions to devise a formal 'cursus honorum' before its practice could be undertaken.
The work that launched Snohetta into the architectural big leagues was their Oslo Opera House, which will certainly rank among the firm's highlights whatever else they may do. Although this is by any measure a triumph of city planning, the building itself is not quite a masterpiece, though very fine indeed.
Picasso's superhuman gift for draftsmanship might have made him lazy about pursuing the full potential of color. It was not unusual for him to build a composition by first outlining figures and objects in black and then filling the interstices in a perfunctory manner that can put one in mind of a museum-shop coloring book.
The first half of the 1960s was the apogee of what might be termed the Age of Cool - as defined by that quality of being simultaneously with-it and disengaged, in control but nonchalant, knowing but ironically self-aware, and above all inscrutably undemonstrative.
The tall building, concentrating man in one place more densely than ever before, similarly concentrates the dilemma of our public architecture at the end of the twentieth century: whether the new forms made possible by technology are doomed by the low calculations of modern patrons and their architects.
Although there are countless tangents that a career in the building arts can take, it is nonetheless most unusual for a major architectural practice to emerge once a firm's principals are well into what is loosely called middle age.
Before the professionalization of architecture in the nineteenth century, it was standard for an aspiring mason or carpenter to begin his apprenticeship at fourteen and to become a master builder by his early twenties.
One reason I've never been a fan of graphic novels is because a central aspect of literature for me has always been imagining what the things I'm reading about look like.
The most basic task of any museum must be the protection of works of cultural significance entrusted to its care for the edification and pleasure of future generations.
Few developments central to the history of art have been so misrepresented or misunderstood as the brief, brave, glorious, doomed life of the Bauhaus - the epochally influential German art, architecture, crafts, and design school that was founded in Goethe's sleepy hometown of Weimar in 1919.
Despite the persistent image of the architect as a heroic loner erecting monumental edifices through sheer force of will, the building art has always been a highly cooperative enterprise.
Although prefabrication has a long history - the ancient Romans shipped pre-cut stone columns, pediments, and other architectural elements to their colonies in North Africa, where the numbered parts were reassembled into temples - the idea took on a new impetus with the technological advances of the Industrial Revolution.
All architecture, classical or not, must have some sense of order, and order is much harder to achieve without the straight lines and right angles that have dominated the building art from time immemorial.