T. S. Eliot grew up surrounded by books. Frank Lloyd Wright’s mother covered his walls with architectural prints. Charles Ives was raised in a house full of musical instruments. But what if Eliot had been raised among the architectural images? What if Ives had been raised with the books? Or for that matter, what if […]

  There’s a difficulty in designing one thing for multiple locations, such as a bus shelter or a public toilet. You can’t design for context since the surrounding of each installation is unique. Whatever the design, it can only display the unity of its own system. Too often, this frees a designer to promulgate his particular style at the expense of […]

The very normal-sized side door to this apartment house on Church is given proper entry status by an enormously over-proportioned broken pediment.  Most delightful is how the thing weighs so heavily on the doorway it actually crops off the top of the door within. The architect might have squeezed a normal pediment at the conventional […]

What color are my white walls? It depends on the time of day. With white, the early morning light glows orange, cool evening light is a quiet blue, only grey winter skies suffuse the room with pure white. A warm color lit by cool northern light would look muddy and insubstantial; the same with a […]