It’s pretty rare that the cacophonous architectural media lines up about anything, but the wall of resistance to MoMA’s plan to demolish the firm’s design of the American Folk Art Museum is extraordinarily firm and consistent. The promised demolition of the museum is a highly emotional loss for the architecture community, not only because it Read more

At the risk of digging myself in even deeper I revisit my last post, which has been oversimplified as “Paul Rudolph’s architecture made the Boston Marathon bomber evil.” I didn’t write, nor do I feel, that architecture has such power.Yet people frequently opine that the environments we create are soulless and alienating, and that is Read more

I spent last Friday impatiently locked down in Cambridge as the search went on for the second suspect in the Boston Marathon bombing. The day before, I’d gone to have a look at the University of Massachusetts campus in Dartmouth, a gigantic eerie, dozen-building concoction of grim ribbed-concrete hubris designed by Paul Rudolph in the Read more

Can there still be hope for the 25-year-old dream of remaking Penn Station from a grim maze to smoothly operating city gateway? The Municipal Art Society think so, and kudos to them for turning up the heat to get it done. The deux ex machina this time is the expired operating permit for the dreadful Madison Square Garden, which Read more

Word comes via the New York Times that the Ohr-O’Keefe Museum in Biloxi, Miss., is struggling. It displays the impish, gorgeous ceramic work of the “Mad Potter of Biloxi,” George Ohr. Frank Gehry has made a fairy-tale assemblage that nicely echoes Ohr’s work and takes full advantage of a swoonable site full of live oaks facing the Gulf of Read more