IN A STRIKING BREAK from its typical Manhattan-centric provincialism (even more pronounced, in those days, than it is now), the New York Times gave over an entire two-and-a-half columns in the Style section of the March 10, 1977, edition to some very local news out of Philadelphia. Written, of all people, by Anna Quindlen—still twenty-five years before her Pulitzer—the story details the presumed final luncheon of the New Century Club, once a fixture of high society in the City of Brotherly Love and a force for women’s rights nationwide. The occasion coincided, ironically, with the hundredth

“WHAT IS IMPRACTICAL can never be beautiful,” architect Otto Wagner, one of the guiding forces of the Vienna Secession, wrote in his 1896 book Modern Architecture. And yet it’s hard to apply the rubric of practicality to the triple bridge at the heart of Ljubljana. The unconventional arrangement—a more traditional central thoroughfare flanked on either side by a scrawnier, slightly askew counterpart, like a blue whale and her two calves—was designed by Wagner’s Slovenian protégé Jože Plečnik (1872–1957), who used what he learned in Vienna to breathe new life into the Slovenian capital’s urban

THE LOST ARCHITECTURE OF JEAN WELZ. BY PETER WYETH. DoppelHouse, 2022. 346 pages. 

WHEN IT COMES TO THE UR-HISTORY of modernist architecture, we all pretty much know the first few lines by heart. In the beginning there was nothing; the Earth was void, and without Corb; then Sullivan said “Let there be Wright,” and Loos and behold, Behrens begat Gropius begat Mies—or something like that. Even other, sublimated ancestries (the “zones of silence,” as critic Reyner Banham once called them) long omitted from the grands récits of modernism have, by now, largely become part of the general conversation.

Near the bottom of The Egg of Columbus Centre, 1973, a painting by Zoe Zenghelis, the cerulean slab of the United Nations Secretariat Building in New York comes face-to-face with an impish impostor and blanches. At the top of the frame, a cluster of gilded Arkhitektons synthesizes Malevich and Trump, as if to prefigure the luxury hotel the latter had hoped to impose on perestroika-era Moscow. Down First Avenue, a sprawling megastructure reminiscent of a ’60s Spanish casino hopscotches across the marmoreal plinths that have begun to supplant Manhattan’s blocks. Clambering amphibious volumes

ONE OF MODERNISM’S most ambitious goals was to house the masses through efficient, affordable, and mass-produced architecture. While the success of this project differs wildly from locale to locale, it is almost universally associated in the West with steel, reinforced concrete, and plate glass. Ironically, one of the systems that perhaps best fulfilled these dreams in the United States is an entirely different material, and one underpinning 90 percent of single-family homes in the United States: softwood framed construction. Despite its ubiquity, traditional architectural discourse has rarely

WHEN DAVID HOCKNEY first arrived in Santa Monica, in 1964, he decided to ride his bicycle across Los Angeles as far as Pershing Square, which he had heard was a prime cruising spot. Only too late did he realize that the journey was eighteen miles. The painter resolved to buy a car the next day.

Christopher Hawthorne told this story a couple of Fridays ago, delivering it with a wan smile. “There’s a whole genre of non-LA artists and writers coming here and trying to bike the city,” he said. “Newcomers just don’t understand the scale.” The former architecture critic of the Los Angeles Times—now

THE CROWD AT THE SMOLNY INSTITUTE had only just stopped applauding, the minority delegates having reluctantly ceded the floor, when the leader of the revolutionary congress grasped the sides of the podium and spoke the first words of a new era. “We shall now proceed to construct the socialist order,” Vladimir Lenin said: In Russian, the verb he used was stroit (строить), literally “to build”; in time, versions of the phrase would become a rhetorical rallying cry throughout the Soviet Union and its allied states, adorning the overpass of a dam on the Volga River, for example, and the side of an

IN 1935, W. E. B. Du Bois published Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880. Coming in at just under eight hundred pages, Du Bois’s “essay” served to carefully delineate the role of African Americans in the social, political, and economic restructuring of the United States following the devastation of the Civil War. In many ways, the artists, architects, and designers included in “Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America,” at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, have

“DARLING, AT A CERTAIN POINT ONE MUST STOP BITCHING and get to work,” Detlef Weitz told me when we met at a sun-showered Humboldt Forum shortly before Christmas. He had a point. My bad-mouthing the reconstructed Baroque Royal Palace had stopped being interesting. For years, every mention of the project has sparked animated discussions of the sort where each statement lights a fire under the next, resulting in extraordinary conflagrations of fury. In that way, the Humboldt Forum is a bit like Donald Trump or Brexit: I don’t know a single person who thought it was a good idea. Yet here it is, 766

THIS PAST MAY, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, was briefly in the public eye for being the first major American museum to reopen after the initial wave of coronavirus-related lockdowns. Come November, the debut of the final component of a $450 million expansion project—the Nancy and Rich Kinder building, which boasts 164,000 square feet of exhibition space dedicated to international modern and contemporary art—coincided with the onset of what promises to be the pandemic’s deadliest season yet. Despite the grim winter forecast, museum leadership, armed with the blessing of Governor Abbott’s “

THE COLD WAR is not remembered as a love story. More frequently recounted as a cautionary tale of mutual distrust, antagonism, and the looming specter of global nuclear annihilation, the era has been memorialized in literature, art, and cinema—think Dr. Strangelove or From Russia with Love—through caricatures that capitalize on fears of evil Russian ambitions to undermine American sovereignty. 

“Building a new New World: Amerikanizm in Russian Architecture,” at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal, plumbs architectural history to suggest an alternative reading of the bilateral

IN JULY 1825, eight months before his death, the French architect Jean-Jacques Lequeu donated several hundred of his meticulous pen-and-wash drawings to the Bibliothèque Royale in Paris (now the Bibliothèque Nationale de France). Representing more than four decades of work, and spanning the fall of the Bourbon monarchy, the French Revolution, the Napoleonic era, and the Restoration, Lequeu’s corpus reveals a maximalist artistic vision unlike any other. Made in near-total isolation in a cramped Parisian bachelor pad furnished with little more than a table and chair, a mattress, and a lone coffeepot,