Architects and Artisans

At the southeast corner of Fifth Avenue and 110th Street in Manhattan, a twenty-story structure now rises from a formerly vacant site, with a design by Robert A. M. Stern Architects.  When complete next year, it will overlook a statue of Duke Ellington and his piano at the center of the circle that bears the [...]

Louis Sullivan was a conflicted genius – and we’re all better off for it. “This is an American Vincent Van Gogh story,” said Mark Richard Smith, whose independent film, “Louis Sullivan: The Struggle for American Architecture” has just been named best documentary film at the Kansas City Film Festival. “But it’s important to look at [...]

Now that he’s saved Marcel Breuer’s last building from the wrecking ball, Max Eternity has returned his attention to the things that really matter, like painting and publishing. In 2008, when he learned that a county board of commissioners planned to demolish the Bauhaus master’s downtown Atlanta library, the Marietta native kicked a campaign into [...]

Hundreds of pavilions for the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai now straddle the Huangpu River where that tributary of the Yangtze splits the city on the eastern coast of China. This mega-exposition will welcome more than 200 nations and international organizations from May 1 to October 31, when 70 million visitors are expected to pour [...]

In April 1925, Courtenay S. Welton penned an article for The Southern Architect and Building News on “Houses of the Georgian Period.” Among the residences he surveyed was his own ancestral home, the Nelson House in Yorktown, Va. “The bricks were brought from England and are laid in Flemish bond, the quoins and keystones being [...]

Just a half-mile down the Piazzale Fraccon from the Villa Rotonda in Vicenza, Italy lies another estate, designed and built by a Palladio disciple in the late 1600s. But the Villa alle Scalette is a little livelier than its predecessor. Its name is derived from the Scalette Arch, designed by Palladio himself. It was built [...]

No one can say that the new North Carolina Botanical Garden in Chapel Hill hasn’t been carefully thought through and sensitively designed. It’s been in the planning stages for twelve years. Frank Harmon Architect PA of Raleigh has been actively engaged with it for the past decade. In that time, at least twenty workshops for [...]

“Alabama Studio Style” is Natalie Chanin’s second book. Her first, “Alabama Stitch Book” won high praise from respected sources. Vogue magazine called it “haute homespun out of the Deep South.” She’s 48 years old, a 1987 graduate of North Carolina State University’s School of Design with a double major in design and textiles. “It’s called [...]

Timothy Richards of Bath, England has turned a passion for communicating with architecture into a sophisticated cottage industry that serves the international design community. Working with hard and strong crystacal plaster, he creates exquisite scale architectural models in the manner of Jean- Pierre and Francois Fouquet, the well-respected 18th and 19th century model-makers whose works [...]

The work of Andreas Palladio offers a detailed roadmap into another time and place, said Dr. Irene Murray, co-curator of “Palladio and His Legacy – A Transatlantic Journey” now on exhibit at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York. “It’s a way of finding your way into another culture,” she said. But for Americans, [...]