Edwin Lutyens (1869-1944) was one of the foremost British architects of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Though his name may not be particularly well known today, he was one of very few contemporaries of Frank Lloyd Wright whose work the American architect not only admired but openly praised to his students, despite the […]
Edgar Allan Poe, Design Critic
In Poe’s view, the interior of the English apartment is the pinnacle of good taste. Everything else is hardly tolerable.
Once upon a morning dreary, I left Brooklyn with eyes bleary, Wearily I took the subway to a poet’s old forgotten home. In 1844, Edgar Allan Poe and his young wife Virginia moved to New York City. It was Poe’s second time living in the city and just one of many homes for the peripatetic […]
The Abandoned Cathedral
We were sketching outside the Eglise Sacré-Cœur de Casablanca when a small man slowly shuffled out of the strange, Deco-Gothic structure and gestured for us to come inside. How could we resist? We stepped through the enormous cathedral door and our host smiled wide, saying in hesitant English, “a church with no chairs,” before disappearing. […]
The Architecture of Assassination
The former Texas School Book Depository, now the Dallas County Administration Building (original image: Jim Bowen via Wikimedia commons) On November 22, 1963, a pall was cast over the country that some people say we’ve never emerged from. It is thought to represent a loss of innocence, or at the very least, a loss […]