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Chris Ware’s Building Stories is ostensibly a comic book chronicling the lives of the occupants of a three-story Chicago brownstone. But it’s so much more than that. At once expansive and intimate, it is a masterpiece of storytelling, a fragmentary collection of sad and beautiful vignettes that began more than a decade ago serialized serialized across several [...]
Sports are good design. American football is no exception: helmets are perhaps the most highly engineered piece of protective equipment in professional sports; the football field is unique in that it’s not designed to accommodate a ball, but to serve as a metric of progress in a battle for territory; the ball itself is an [...]
I’ve recently started writing for Smithsonian’s Design Decoded blog, which explores a new topic every few weeks through a series of interlocking posts that will, we hope, offer a new lens for viewing the familiar. Our current series takes a look at Design and Sherlock Holmes. A brief excerpt [...]
To celebrate this week’s release of The Dark Knight Rises, I thought I’d take the opportunity to repost an excerpt from one of the most popular articles ever published on Life Without Buildings, the story of Batman, Gotham City, and an overzealous architecture historian with a working knowledge [...]
What if Bruce Wayne wanted to demolish Penn Station in order to surreptitiously construct an auxiliary Batcave beneath the new building? That, in essence, is the plot of Chip Kidd’s new graphic novel Batman: Death by Design. Though a few familiar faces –and grins– make an appearance, Death by Design is, for better and worse, a [...]
Billboards Are Almost All Right
