The Deerfield Inn reopens

Editorial Staff Magazine

When it comes to historic preservation too much reverence is not always a good thing. Philip Zea, president of Historic Deerfield, observes that one of the most devastating effects of 2011’s Hurricane Irene was the closing of the Deerfield Inn in the village. “The inn animates the street,” he says. “It’s right in the middle of things and even its …

For the love of architecture

Editorial Staff Opinion

Call it cultural vandalism: The case against the Museum of Modern Art’s plan to raze the former building of the American Folk Art Museum designed by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien and completed in 2001. “Tod Williams and Billie Tsien’s new American Folk Art Museum…is not only New York’s greatest museum since Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim was completed in 1959, …

Saving the Ark: Chicago’s grand synagogue Agudas Achim

Editorial Staff Magazine

Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood is tucked between the high-end shops of Michigan Avenue and the outskirts of suburban Evanston. In the early twentieth century large numbers of Austro-Hungarian Jewish immigrants settled there, until new roads and growing incomes pulled them away from the city in the years after World War II. They left behind the apartments, stores, and synagogues their parents …

Monticello: Original colors and a broader historical context

Editorial Staff Magazine

  We picture Monticello when we think of Thomas Jefferson. What does it mean to us today, and how has its meaning shifted over time? As Jefferson-statesman, farmer, scientist, bibliophile, politician, and architect-helped to forge a new country based on new ideals, his plantation in Virginia’s gentle piedmont became his architectural crucible. The Palladio-inspired Monticello has long occupied a monumental …

Preservation: The Stanton-Davis homestead

Editorial Staff Magazine, Opinion

By Katrine Ames Here in this shell of a house, This house that is struggling to be, Hope must have been The first to move in, And waited to welcome me. But hope isn’t easy to see. This lovely tribute to the White House in Leonard Bernstein and Allan Jay Lerner’s 1976 musical 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue would make a perfect anthem for …