As antique furniture goes, it is not much to look at: four simply turned legs; a drawer; two square wells, for ink and pounce. Despite its diminutive stature, however, the desk is a fitting centerpiece for the show, for it was, in its time, the platform for dramatic change.
Bringing back Olana
The fiftieth anniversary of the rescue of Church’s exotic masterpiece finds it and its spectacular landscape more popular than ever with lovers of art, architecture, and ecology. View looking south to the Hudson River from the bell tower of the main house at Olana. Andy Wainwright 2004. Just south of Hudson, New York, a signpost on Route 9G marks the …
The Yale Center for British Art Reopens
The Library Court of the Yale Center for British Art, following its recent reinstallation. Photograph by Richard Caspole. Traditional architecture can age gracefully but nothing is more dispiriting than modernism gone to seed. That may be especially true of Louis Kahn’s work because Kahn hid nothing; it was part of his bravery, and his ethics, to put every …
Sites along the Schuylkill
The story goes that the Dutch, sailing up the Delaware River, missed the marshy entrance to its largest tributary. Upon discovering their mistake, the Europeans dubbed the waterway the Schuyl Kill, or “Hidden River.” The Dutch were soon squeezed out of Pennsylvania by the Swedes and then the English, but the name somehow stuck, showing up as the “Scool Kill …
Cajun and Creole, the rough and the fine
Over the past ten years Wade Lege has rescued some of the disappearing landmarks of his native Louisiana
Farther afield: A Lost Paradise: The Clandon Park Fire
Venetian architect Giacomo Leoni created a magnificent Palladian residence for Thomas, the 2nd Baron Onslow, in the 1720s on the estate outside of Guildford, in Surrey, south of London, that the baron’s great-grandfather Richard Onslow, the MP for Surrey, had purchased in 1641. The dignified restraint of Leoni’s exterior hid a luxuriant interior oozing with Georgian glamour. Its most …
Take care of this house: The Stanton-Davis homestead, 1670
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 …
For the love of architecture
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
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 …
Great Estates: Fenway Court, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston
Fenway Court, the former home of Isabella Stewart Gardner, gives added meaning to the notion of a house museum. Built in the style of a fifteenth-century Venetian palace, it was conceived as both a residence and a museum. With the help of many great advisers, Gardner amassed-and later, meticulously arranged-a superlative collection of fine and decorative arts, architecture, and rare …