What the Capitol Says: American Neoclassicism
...established through the timeless principles of liberty and order...
Paris Notre-Dame: What the Fire Revealed
I have stood inside Notre-Dame three times, and each time it has been a different building. The first time I stood inside the cathedral was…
The Space Needle: What Was Gained, What Was Lost
The Space Needle was never meant to last. Built in 110 days for the 1962 World's Fair — a fair whose theme was Century 21, meaning…
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La Lonja de la Seda: Valencia’s Temple of Trade
Light streams between a forest of spiral stone columns. Each one twists upward, branching into a delicate web of ribbed groin vaults overhead — the…
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The Eiffel Tower: What the City Rejected, Then Claimed
We had been here before, Aaron and I, in a different Paris — before the fence, before the glass walls, before the security lines. That…
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Mission San Juan Capistrano and the Pattern That Built a Coast
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.
Hearst Castle: The Discipline Behind the Excess
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.
Lan Su Chinese Garden: A Portland Acre That Hides Itself on Purpose
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.
Monticello: On What Jefferson Borrowed and Why
Jefferson called it his "essay in architecture" — and like most essays, it was revised continually, for most of his adult life, in pursuit of…
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Chartres: Sound, Stone, and the Gothic Cathedral Interior
As a student of architecture, I had studied Chartres Cathedral in the way you study canonical buildings before you've seen them — through plans, sections,…
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