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Archive for December 2011
I don’t have the usual end-of-year wrap up. It’s been a busy, tumultuous 6 months, personally more than professionally, but I haven’t really paid much attention to the architectural world outside my own studio. I was thinking of putting a list together in the last hurried days of the year, gleaning architectural blogs and websites [...]
On a narrow spit of land, at the confluence of two mighty rivers, lies ancient Cairo. Not the one in Africa, with pyramids and camels, rather the one along the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers, Cairo, Illinois. Cairo has seen better days, the 1920 population of 15,000 having dropped below 3,000 souls. Once a shipping center [...]
Before interstate engineers replaced our river crossings with solid, straight, under-supported super-slabs of concrete highways, spidery steel bridges carried us across the impediments to the relentless to- and fro- of an increasingly mobile society. When you pass through the steel rib cages of these older bridges, especially the narrow, long spans, crossing a river feels [...]
On a recent roadtrip I followed the path of two of America’s most famous roads – the Oregon Trail and old Route 66. They say the adventure is in the journey, not the destination, but both of these pathways existed to traverse the country as quickly and safely as possible on the way to the [...]
We have been working on a project in Boulder that holds a number of challenges, not the least of which is a long narrow lot with severe building restrictions. My client’s property is 50′ wide by 188′ long, but because of its corner location, both street-facing sides of the lot require a 25′ wide setback [...]
Most of the smaller towns that I passed through on a recent road trip had their version of the local movie palace. And most were closed down along with the rest of the storefronts along the main street. The emptiness of middle America is remarkable and so sad. We all hear the [...]