What the Capitol Says: American Neoclassicism
...established through the timeless principles of liberty and order...
The American South: Three States, Three Campuses, One Tornado
The American South carries a history that shouldn't be forgotten. It happened. We can't erase it. What we can do is preserve the beauty it…
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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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The National Mall: Reading the Axis
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…
Yosemite Spring
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.
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.
The Contrast of Hoover Dam and Grand Canyon West
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: 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.
Multnomah Falls and the Columbia Gorge
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: 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.