Free Republic

Behold: The new home for the Milwaukee Public Museum — to be renamed the Nature & Culture Museum of Wisconsin — in downtown Milwaukee. Kind of looks like four laundry hampers, though the official PR says “the rock formations at Mill Bluff State Park in central Wisconsin served as design inspiration.” Credit the architectural firms of Ennead Architects (New York), with Kahler Slater (Milwaukee). Like many state museums, this one is a hodgepodge of history, nature (what used to be called natural history), ethnography (i.e., Indians), DEI nonsense (hey, it’s Wisconsin), and a miscellany of artifacts and freakish stuff that...

Behold the lovely new Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Building at the Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota. Complements the nearby parking deck! It’s a cancer research center, designed by HDR Architects, Omaha. Certainly has that American heartland tumor spirit! The promotional literature says, “the COVID-19 pandemic significantly influenced the design.” The building is intended to symbolize “hope and progress,” it says. Strange to relate, the percentage increase in cancer cases in the USA from 2021 to 2024 (the latest fully projected year) is approximately 12.6 percent. Could that have anything to do with the Covid-19 vaccines? Perhaps researchers in the Kellen Building...

In the Middle Ages, like rats in a burned-down barn, wayfarers sought refuge in the oversized ruins of the Roman Empire. In such places as the Forum and the Palatine Hill, shepherds roamed with their flocks. Although preoccupied with simple survival in an anarchic world, they might occasionally have glanced at the derelict, overgrown marble temples and wondered what gods once walked the earth and created such magnificent beauty. In terms of pure sensory experience, of course, they were never worse off than scholars with historical or philosophical knowledge. The classical ideals of architectural beauty, based on organic motifs, symmetry,...

Is this the real-life Atlantis. A 90-foot “pyramid” submerged just off the coast of Japan is turning heads — and could shake up everything we thought we knew about ancient civilizations. Sitting 82 feet below sea level near the Ryukyu Islands, the Yonaguni Monument has baffled scientists and divers since it was first discovered in 1986. The enormous stone structure, complete with angular steps and flat terraces, looks uncannily like the ruins of a man-made temple — despite being over 10,000 years old. That timeline, if proven accurate, would date it thousands of years earlier than Egypt’s pyramids or England’s...

One of the largest private homes built by the legendary architect Frank Lloyd Wright is on the market in Tulsa, Oklahoma — and it just got a major price cut. Dubbed “Westhope,” the residence is one of just five homes Wright built with unique, geometric blocks stacked in vertical columns. No fewer than 5,200 panes of glass cover almost half of the exterior, and large skylights let in even more Sooner sunshine. It can be yours for $3.5 million — a 56% drop from its initial asking price in 2023, Mansion Global reported. At 10,400 square feet, Westhope is one...

Concerning President Donald Trump’s executive order requiring new federal buildings to show a preference for "classical architectural style" which includes Neoclassical, Georgian, Federal, Greek Revival, Beaux-Arts, and Art Deco, referencing the architectural traditions of Greek and Roman antiquity. . . Behold (above) the federal building and courthouse in Tuscaloosa, Alabama by HBRA Architects. And, no, it was not conceived when Andy Jackson was fighting the Battle of Emuckfaw against the “Red Stick” Creek Indians in 1814. Rather, it went up in 2012, a rare example of neoclassical design executed in our time. For the most part, though, the decades-long trend...

Some of California's architectural wonders were consumed by the flames.It's been more than three weeks since the beginning of the Los Angeles area wildfires and the level of devastation is overwhelming. The numbers are stark: The fires killed 28 people and incinerated more than 16,000 structures. Officials peg the economic damage at $150 billion or more, with insurance companies expecting losses of $30 billion. We've also seen the heartbreaking images of our fellow Californians combing through the wreckage looking for their beloved pets and remnants of their lives. My wife is a Red Cross volunteer and I can't stand hearing...

One of the two dozen or so new Trump Administration’s executive orders issued since assuming office includes a mandate for the restoration of an amalgam of classicism-inspired "traditional" architectural styles in all new federal government buildings. The newly signed Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture order directs the General Services Administration (GSA) to submit recommendations within 60 days that "advance the policy that Federal public buildings should be visually identifiable as civic buildings and respect regional, traditional, and classical architectural heritage in order to uplift and beautify public spaces and ennoble the United States and our system of self-government." The President,...

“I smell cigarette smoke,” one of my travel companions noted. That was the moment I knew that we should not linger any longer. We had been warned twice on the way up the hillside not to come here. In one instance, it was claimed that two treasure hunters had been arrested by the police a week or two earlier. In the other case, we were told that if the military or police caught us there, we would be arrested. Such is the experience of interrupting the destruction of Armenian cultural sites in Turkey. There are few photographs of the monastery...

Why are buildings today simple and austere, while buildings of the past were ornate and elaborately ornamented? The answer is not the cost of labor.

The visitors often draw comparisons between the iconic Taj Mahal and the newly built mausoleum of the founder of the Radhasoami sect in Soami Bagh, located about 12 km away from the Taj Mahal. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Saomi Bagh in Agra is a new white marble structure in Agra that took 104 years to build ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ A new white marble structure in Agra that took 104 years to build is daily drawing hordes of spiritually inclined tourists. The visitors often draw comparisons between the iconic Taj Mahal and the newly built mausoleum of the founder of the Radhasoami sect in Soami Bagh,...

Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire. This is what American cities looked like a century ago. Everything you see here was demolished. Why?

Recent occurrences in the Middle East resulted a “divisive” architecture event this past Thursday at Ohio State University. According to the OSU National Association of Minority Landscape Architects’ Abdul-Azeez Ahmad, the December 7 “Justice Centered Design” confab came about due to “the illegal Israeli occupation and everything happening in Palestine.” The event featured a screening of Israeli architect Eyal Weizman’s film “The Architecture of Violence” along with a panel discussion, The Lantern reports. The film “takes [the viewer] through the eyes of hostile architecture that was designed by the Israeli occupation to subjugate and to keep the Palestinians living in...

Modernists like to manipulate words, often “spinning” them into meanings that appear simple but are relatively obscure. For example, consider the modern misuse of the terms like “accompaniment,” “social justice,” or even “woke.” Such is not the case with the architectural style known as “brutalism.” The Architecture of Despair Merriam-Webster defines brutal using the words cold, harsh, severe, unpleasant and lacking sensitivity. A bit further down the page, it refers to brutalism as “a style in art and especially architecture using exaggeration and distortion to create its effect (as of massiveness or power).” While many might not be familiar with...

There’s some justice after all. The $1.7 trillion spending bill names things after the D.C. swamp creatures passing it. That includes Pelosi. From this day henceforth, the San Francisco Federal Building (that is its name) will be named the Speaker Nancy Pelosi Federal Building. The San Francisco Federal Building is the ugly thing blotting the skyline that architects love and everyone else hates. It was so despised that it was featured in the Trump presidential order calling for a return to classical architecture. “For example, GSA selected an architect to design the San Francisco Federal Building who describes his designs...

After the discovery of the building that perhaps supported Nero's rotating dining room on the Palatine, excavations for Line C of Rome's subway brought to light a building that, according to the first hypotheses made by archaeologists, is thought to be Hadrian's Academy, built in 133 A.D. to host poets, rectors, philosophers, men of letters, scientists and magistrates. Hadrian, or Publius Aelius Hadrianus, ruled from 117-138 AD. He was an avid philosopher who was commonly referred to as one of the "five good emperors." Hadrian's Wall, in Northern England was built after a great war in what was then called...

A break from politics for ingenuity in construction. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGegneT9KfQ&t=1s Indiana Bell Central Office building, all 11,000 tons, moved 90 degrees while employees worked inside. Kurt Vonnegut's father was the local architect who came up with the idea.

A stunning Georgian townhouse, once used to film a 1995 adaptation of Jane Austen's Persuasion, is now on the market for £4.5 million. The Grade II listed property in Bath was used in the 1995 BBC recreation of the infamous period author's novel, starring Ciaran Hinds and Amanda Root. It flaunts its own ballroom, library and ornate dining room, perfect for entertaining guests with Regency-era grandeur.

A new biography traces the many lives and influences of architect Walter Gropius.Walter Gropius, one of the leaders of the early 20th-century modernist movement in architecture and a founder of one of the world’s most important schools of design, was a cowboy at heart. Before founding the internationally significant Bauhaus design school in Germany or bringing a new humanity to the design of industrial buildings, Gropius was shaped by a boyhood encounter with the Wild West showman Buffalo Bill Cody. As a 7-year-old boy in Berlin, Gropius went to see the European tour of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show,...

Billionaire Charlie Munger is bankrolling the design of a massive dormitory at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The $1.5 billion project comes with a major catch — 94% of the dorm's single occupancy rooms have no windows. A consulting architect on the university's Design Review Committee quit in protest of the project, in a resignation letter obtained by CNN Business and reported by the Santa Barbara Independent... ...In addition to being Warren Buffett's right-hand man, Munger is an amateur architect. He has no formal education in the field.... the 97-year-old vice chairman of Warren Buffet's Berkshire Hathaway, donated $200...