Up and Down: Auden

The second half of the Auden pairing (see yesterday’s post): Up There (for Anne Weiss) Men would never have come to need an attic. Keen collectors of glass or Roman coins build Special cabinets for them, date on, index Each new specimen: only women cling to Items out of their past they have no use […]

Wisdom from Another Time

MIT Chapel, Cambridge MA. Eero Saarinen, 1955 There is something profoundly moving about this show; an inescapable nostalgia pervades it for that elusive American Century. The faith in the future, the belief that science and technology would bring us a better world, is part of a more innocent era. Seeing how one architect expressed its […]

Architecture in the Aughts

Blur, Expo 02, Yverdon-les-Bains, 2002. This sensational pavilion, which was designed by New York architects Diller + Scofidio, was the star of Switzerland’s Expo 02. A cat’s cradle of tensile steel, 20m high and 100m long, it brooded at the end of a steel-and-glass jetty over Lake Neuchatel. Inside, some 30,000 water jets created clouds […]

More on Museum Expansion

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston I just found a spunky rebuttal to the much-discussed article by the Times’ Robin Pogrebin about the recent era of museum overbuilding. Pogrebin’s article is referenced in yesterday’s post, and anyone who has read her piece should also read through Lee Rosenbaum’s article on CultureGrrl, Not Dead Yet: Museum Building […]

Ara Pacis, Richard Meier and Minding the Gap

Richard Meier’s Ara Pacis Museum in Rome was controversial from its inception. The museum was built to house just one artifact, the Ara Pacis, a finely carved sacrificial altar built in 13AD to commemorate the victories of Emperor Augustus in Spain and Gaul. Adding to its historical significance to Romans, the altar was fully restored […]