RADOSLAV ZUK (1931-2024)

RADOSLAV ZUK (1931-2024)

Rad Zuk was a longtime colleague of mine when I taught at McGill for two decades, but my first encounter with him was when I was a student there in the 1960s. I was in the penultimate year of a six-year course. Zuk had joined the faculty a year or two earlier, and I...
IRONY

IRONY

Describing the Königliches Schloss, the rebuilt imperial palace in Berlin, Michael J. Lewis wrote recently in The New Criterion: “It is not so much a recreation of the palace as a workmanlike scale model of the original, placed on the original site, and with something...
THEORY

THEORY

I recently came across two interviews on YouTube on “Theory of Architecture,” one by Mark Wigley, the other by Patrik Schumacher. Wigley sounded like a middle-aged architecture student. Schumacher was rather pedantic in his Germanic way, and he made some outrageous...
DOUGLAS KELBAUGH (1945-2023)

DOUGLAS KELBAUGH (1945-2023)

Sorry to hear of Doug Kelbaugh’s passing. I met him at Seaside when he was involved in the New Urbanism movement, but I first heard of him in 1973, in connection with a solar house that he built for himself in Princeton. It made an impression because unlike most...
CHARLESTON RENAISSANCE MAN

CHARLESTON RENAISSANCE MAN

My friend Ralph Muldrow has just published a book on the life and work of Albert Simons (1890-1980), an architect of Charleston, South Carolina. Simons (rhymes with persimmons) is an interesting figure. Trained as a classicist he practiced during the period when...
JACK DIAMOND

JACK DIAMOND

The architect Jack Diamond (1932-2022) died last week. He was perhaps Canada’s leading architect. Yet no-one would refer to him as a starchitect. “It’s easy to do an iconic building,” he once said, “because it’s only solving one issue.” Diamond’s designs were never...