Travel • Living • Design
Light streams between a forest of spiral stone columns. Each one twists upward, branching into a delicate web of ribbed groin vaults overhead — the…
Continue reading → La Lonja de la Seda: Valencia’s Temple of Trade
In 1791, a French-born engineer handed the new American republic a plan for its capital that it has spent two centuries trying to live up…
Vatican City contains the greatest concentration of human artistic achievement on earth. It also contains, on any given morning, thirty thousand other people who know…
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 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.
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.
I had researched the Loire Valley châteaux for two separate high school French essays before I ever stood in front of one. We left Paris…
Continue reading → The Loire Valley: Châteaux, River Towns, and Three Nights at Artigny
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,…
Continue reading → Chartres: Sound, Stone, and the Gothic Cathedral Interior