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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 Architecture of Chess

Prior to 1849, there was no such thing as a “normal chess set.” At least not like we think of it today. Over the centuries that chess had been played, innumerable varieties of sets of pieces were created, with regional differences in designation and appearance. As the game proliferated throughout southern Europe in the early 11th […]

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Architecture

The Architecture of Superman: A Brief History of the Daily Planet

  “Look! Up in the Sky!” “It’s a bird!” “It’s a plane!” “It’s a giant metal globe hurtling toward us that will surely result in our demise! Oh, nevermind…Superman took care of it.” Whenever disaster strikes Superman’s Metropolis, it seems that the first building damaged in the comic book city is the Daily Planet – […]

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Architecture

Design Decoded: The Golden Arches of McModernism

The second McDonald’s ever built and the oldest still standing, in Downey, CA. (image: Alan Hess via Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians) When the ancient Romans marched through arches, it was a celebration of victory, an end to long-fought battles and distant travels. Today, when we march through arches, it is a celebration […]

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Architecture

Building Stories, Panel by Panel

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 popular publications, including The New Yorker, The New York […]