by Witold | Dec 9, 2020 | Architects
“The test of a first-rate intelligence,” famously said F. Scott Fitzgerald, “is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” In Philip Johnson’s New York Times obituary, Paul Goldberger described him as...
by Witold | Nov 10, 2020 | Architects, Architecture
Every time I leave the Larkin Building in downtown Philadelphia, where we live, I admire the office building across the street. It’s a French Renaissance pile, three stories on top of a half basement, with an obviously more recent top floor addition. The original...
by Witold | Oct 25, 2020 | Architects
I just learned that Nick Wilkinson (1942-2017) died. Sad news. We had lost touch in recent years but we saw a lot of each other in the 1980s. Nick founded and edited Open House International, a journal devoted to housing. He published a number of my papers as well as...
by Witold | Oct 5, 2020 | Architects
Perhaps the most televised twentieth-century work of American architecture is the Federal Reserve headquarters (Eccles Building) in Washington, D.C., designed by Paul Philippe Cret (1876-1945) in 1938. Cret’s stripped classical facade inevitably accompanies any report...
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 | Mar 23, 2020 | Architects, Architecture
Alex Beam’s interesting new book on the saga of the Farnsworth House, which I reviewed in the Wall Street Journal recently, raises an interesting question. How can a house that has so many functional drawbacks, that is basically dysfunctional, be considered a...
