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Architecture

The 64-Square Grid Design of ‘Through the Looking Glass’

  Painters, sculptors and musicians have long since found inspiration in the complex movement of thirty-two pieces across a chessboard. But writers too have found inspiration in the 64 square battlefield. Perhaps none moreso than Charles Lutwidge Dodgson aka Lewis Carroll aka the writer of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass and What […]

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Architecture

The Mystery of 221B Baker Street: Architecture, Fiction, and The Replicating Flat of Sherlock Holmes

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 from the introductory post follows, investigating […]

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Architecture

Visible Cities: Massimo Scolari at Yale

Italo Calvino did not necessarily listen to everything Massimo Scolari said when he spoke to him about architecture, but the attention of the Italian writer was captured when he learned that the young man was…

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Architecture

A Portrait of a House, excerpts from Absalom, Absalom!

[Robert W. Tebbs, photographic survey of a Louisiana Plantation (1926); via] I’m currently reading William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! It’s a incredible book. A visceral portrait of a haunted, Civil War era American South. I haven’t finished it yet, so this post is pretty much spoiler-free, but I was so impressed with the depictions of the […]

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Architecture

New York by Gehry: A Review In Which Your Architecture Critic’s Personal Issues May Be Interfering With His Job

The following post was originally written as an entry to McSweeney’s 2011 Column Contest. It didn’t win. But I had a lot of fun writing it so I thought I’d post it here. As proposed, it was an architectural criticism column written from the perspective of a somewhat emotionally dysfunctional critic who sees his own […]