Archive

Rome is the foundation of the University of Notre Dame architecture and urban design curriculum, and properly so. Nevertheless, every year for the past ten years I have traveled...

Over the last fifteen years or so I have seen (and been moved by) many of the aspirational/inspirational billboards sponsored by The Foundation for a Better Life, an organization...

Building is a willful act of symbolic import, sometimes intended and sometimes not, and all architecture expresses the power of its makers and their aspiration to legitimate authority. This...

Most cities built before 1945 were founded at the scale of what today we might call a town or even a village. Some rose around some sacred site or...

In the moderately memorable 1997 movie The Edge , Anthony Hopkins and Alec Baldwin portray characters marooned in the Alaskan wilderness. In their dramatic struggle to survive both the...

For centuries the public square and the street have been the spatial media of public culture. But just how important is traditional public space––urban space––to a genuinely public culture?...

What follows is prompted not by a cigar, but rather a painting by the Dutch (strictly speaking, Flemish) master Jan Van Eyck. “The Mystic Adoration of the Lamb” is...