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Blue - places I've been; Red - places I'd like to go


Browse my posts by topic (updated links are coming soon):

Architecture:
Architecture & Urbanism
Design Competitions
Design Work / Stuff I Made

Reviews:
Book Reviews
Exhibition Reviews
Movie Reviews
Concert Reviews

International Travel:
Brazil
Denmark
France
Guatemala
Greece
Israel/Palestine
Italy
Japan
Spain
Switzerland
Tunisia
UK

Domestic Travel:
Arizona/Mexico Border
Chicago, IL
Detroit, MI
Grand Canyon (Nevada / Arizona)
Maui and Kaua'i, HI
Los Angeles, CA
New Orleans, LA
Sacramento, CA
Santa Fe, NM
Seattle, WA
Washington, DC

Miscellaneous:
Sad attempts at humor
Soap Box

"AOR At Work" Photo credit: David Hoadley

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Book Review: "Theory and Design in the First Machine Age"

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Reyner Banham 's Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (1960) is an engaging overview of the important theoretical developments of the early 20th century leading up to the "International Style" of the 1930s-40s.  Banham does a fairly good job, in my opinion, of avoiding excessive editorializing, although he has a clear viewpoint on the Modern Movement and finishes with a strong conclusion.  In opposition to his teacher, Nikolaus Pevsner , whose own history of modernism came out in 1936, Banham dismantled the " form follows function " credo that became the stereotype of modernism, arguing instead that formalism (a preoccupation with style and aesthetics) was an important, if not overriding, concern of Modern architects.  Two sections of the book struck me in particular: his analysis of Le Corbusier's famous book Vers une architecture (Toward a [new] architecture) from 1923, and his Conclusion (chapter 22), where he breaks the link between functionali...
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Infrastructure and Urbanism in 1920s Sarasota, Florida

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This post is based on research I did for "History of the American City" taught by Gwendolyn Wright this past fall. As an undergraduate in architectural history I was encouraged to think critically about my home town as part of an exercise in historical writing.  This past semester, for a course focused on the history of American cities, I decided to take this further and research the history of the city as a whole.  I was surprised to find that Sarasota, Florida , has a much richer architectural history than I had understood from living there as a teenager.  Settled as a frontier outpost in the 19th century, it grew thanks to tourism, the circus , and real estate speculation, resulting in an incredible expansion in the 1920s that died with the Great Depression.  The city grew again after WWII, and in the 1950s was home to the Sarasota School of Architecture , a nationally-renowned architectural style and movement (not a physical school) that produced early attempt...
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