There’s an excitement about newness. Moving into a new space, with fresh paint, unmarred counters, crisp door frames. The shininess of a countertop says “new,” not just as in “unblemished,” but “made just for you.” It says “this will not have to be repaired or replaced for a long time.” There is an excitement about […]

I like deconstructivist architecture. I like it the same way, I think, that I’d like a night out on the town with Lady Gaga. But at the end of the evening, I’d rather return to a home like an Audrey Hepburn in that simple black dress. Home is, more than anything else, our place of […]

“All discord [is] harmony not understood,” noted Alexander Pope. Discovering harmony in architecture, in what at first looks like discord, lends a wonderful richness and intrigue. Take this house on Vallejo Street. Study the ostensible jumble of unaligned windows and they’ll slowly reveal the internal layout of rooms and stair behind the façade. A similar work without the underlying […]

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 […]

Every now and then I come across a book so enlightening, so thought provoking, so intelligently written, it makes me want to toss out a score of others on my shelves lest I be tempted to waste time on them.