March 20, 2012 – 11:16 am
Designed by Heikki and Kaija Siren in 1957, the Otaniemi Chapel is settled quietly among the pine and birch trees on the Aalto University Campus in Finland. The woodland clearing contrasts starkly with the hustle of the main campus. As this was my first trip above the Baltic, I found all Finnish architecture enchanting. And [...]
November 4, 2011 – 8:59 am
A short while ago, when coming down Prospect Street in New Haven, you would have spied a sleek, one-story, silver classroom and office building with horizontal metal siding and long patterns of windows that seemed to race by each other. It was an intriguing curiosity, boldly announcing that it was having fun. And yet its [...]
October 19, 2011 – 2:46 pm
The headline above could reference brand new edifices that preternaturally swoop and sway, hither and thither, as if a tornado had been an integral part of the design team. Or perhaps the “Orange Cube,” a commercial apparition in Lyon, France that appears to be a giant pumpkin-carving project gone awry (it’s actually more fun than [...]
October 13, 2011 – 4:03 pm
I touched on New York City’s High Line in my last post; now I am landing on it with both feet. Set atop an abandoned, elevated rail line, it is the planet’s longest green roof, stretching nearly a mile and a half. It is a remarkable, idiosyncratic pathway that commences in lower Manhattan’s West Side, [...]
October 3, 2011 – 9:31 am
Examples of compelling architecture and exquisite craftsmanship are all around us. I have always admired the Deep River Town Hall, just one town north of the home office here in Centerbrook, Connecticut. The building was completed in 1893 on what was then the region’s major artery leading north from the beaches of Long Island Sound. [...]
September 22, 2011 – 11:38 am
Like many architects of a certain age, I am sitting on a slide collection of innumerable images gleaned from many trips to architectural shrines and lesser destinations. I recently began to digitize some of these so I could more easily share them with colleagues and remind myself of old lessons. In the process I also [...]
“Getting there is half the fun” was Cunard Line’s famous advertising slogan in the 1950s, intended to lure Americans away from flying across the Atlantic. At the time, its fleet could boast two of the finest examples of ocean liner transport, the RMS Queen Mary and RMS Queen Elizabeth, which regularly traveled between Europe and [...]
Since a photograph is purportedly worth a thousand words – and as the Graphic Designer here, I’m much better with pictures: So I’ll keep this short. Architects tend to be proud of what they design, and they commission photographers who specialize in capturing the built environment to document their work for various purposes. What we [...]
January 10, 2011 – 4:07 pm
I had admired it from afar for a long time, from still images in collegiate art history texts, and I have always had a thing for flying buttresses and ribbed vaults. So with a Centerbrook Travel Grant in hand, I headed straight for the Cathédrale Notre Dame de Paris, which is surrounded by the meanders [...]
September 23, 2010 – 3:50 pm
Owing to close family ties, I’ve been a frequent visitor to Switzerland. Aside from the requisite sightseeing of astonishing alpine environs, the small city of Schaffhausen, first mentioned in the historical record in 1045, has served as my vacation base camp for more than 40 years. Staying there so often has given me the opportunity [...]
