Bringing back Olana

Art, Furniture & Decorative Arts

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

Editorial Staff Art

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 …

Farther afield: A Lost Paradise: The Clandon Park Fire

Editorial Staff Magazine

  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 …

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 …

Great Estates: Fenway Court, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston

Editorial Staff Furniture & Decorative Arts

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 …