Travel • Living • Design
As the 2018 FIFA World Cup quarterfinals played out, of the teams that progressed — England, France, Belgium, Croatia — we were packing for a…
Continue reading → Northwestern Europe: Football, Four Countries, Carry-On Only
After California's wettest winter on record, Yosemite Valley ran louder than usual — every fall at full volume, granite walls disappearing into mist, a rainbow waiting at the end of it. A spring trip through rain, the Ahwahnee's fireplaces, and a detour to a fig-tree kitchen in Gold Rush country.
San Juan Capistrano holds the ruins of the Great Stone Church alongside the state's oldest building still in use — a single site where the mission system's architectural formula, and its human cost, are both fully legible. The same quadrangle logic repeats from Sonoma to Santa Barbara, and echoes once more, without the mission itself, in Old Town San Diego.
An hour and a half outside Las Vegas, Hoover Dam's 726 feet of engineered control gives way to Grand Canyon West — nearly a million acres of Hualapai land where an eagle hides in the rock and a different philosophy about land, balance, and belonging comes into view.
Hearst Castle is 165 rooms of Spanish Colonial, Moorish, Gothic, and Neoclassical detail, built over 28 years by the same architect who designed two buildings I've walked past my whole adult life in Sacramento. A family stop along the PCH, and a quieter return fourteen years later.
The Columbia River Gorge is the only sea-level passage through the entire Cascade Range — a fact that explains almost everything about why this particular…
Lan Su Chinese Garden hides most of itself on purpose. In under an acre behind a Portland city block, framed views, leak windows, and a strict yin-yang material logic create the sensation of a space many times its actual size — a masterclass in restraint doing more than any expansion could.
There are places designed for ordinary use — and then there are places designed for a particular kind of moment. The National Mall is the…
Continue reading → Washington, January 2009: On Being Present for History
Jefferson called it his "essay in architecture" — and like most essays, it was revised continually, for most of his adult life, in pursuit of…
Continue reading → Monticello: On What Jefferson Borrowed and Why
A walled Maya port city on a Caribbean cliff — read structure by structure, through a spatial designer's eye. Tulum rewards the visitor who moves slowly.