by Witold | Jun 3, 2020 | Modern life, Urbanism
The veneer of civilization is perilously thin. I was living in Montreal during the 1969 policemen and firemen’s strike. It lasted only sixteen hours but that was long enough for things to unravel. For the first half day, drivers observed traffic light signals, then...
by Witold | May 21, 2020 | Architects, Architecture
Blair Kamin, the architecture critic of the Chicago Tribune, recently tweeted a May 19 photograph of Mies van der Rohe’s famous Farnsworth House almost inundated by the rising waters of the nearby Fox River. Kamin writes that the water level appears to be receding,...
by Witold | Apr 19, 2020 | Modern life
In 1973, my friend Martin Pawley published The Private Future: Causes and Consequences of Community Collapse in the West. According to his Guardian obituary (he died in 2008) the book “foresaw a society with ever greater technical means of communication becoming...
by Witold | Apr 9, 2020 | Design, Modern life
Nicholas Fox Webber, the author of a biography of Le Corbusier, has recently published iBauhaus. I have not read the book yet, but the subtitle, “The iPhone as the Embodiment of Bauhaus Ideals and Design,” says it all. There is no doubt that the iPhone is a...
by Witold | Apr 3, 2020 | Modern life
According to the United Nations Secretary-General, the coronavirus pandemic is the “greatest test” the world has faced since the United Nations was formed in the wake of the Second World War. One of the results of that global war was the ascendancy of modernist...
