Following a cyclone in December, 1995, the Conservatory of Flowers, a public greenhouse in San Francisco, was severely damaged. Assembled in 1878 by the greenhouse design firm Lord & Burnham using imported hardware and local timber, the damaged Conservatory was included in the inaugural...Read more
In the past decade, the work of Austrian architect Rudolph Michael Schindler—especially his own residence at 835 Kings Road in West Hollywood, CA—has drawn belated admiration and scholarship. Considered a maverick in the annals of Modernism, Schindler was preoccupied with the shaping of space, not...Read more
With more than 65 landmarks in six historic districts, the 3.9-squarekilometer area of Lower Manhattan is arguably the most important cultural site in the United States. Since its establishment as the Dutch Colony of Nieuw Amsterdam in 1625, New York has been a focus of American life. From its...Read more
Over the last year and a half, I have found myself arguing with lots of pictures of buildings, the buildings I feel I know from walking the streets of my city. You cannot, I have said to the images of Ana Carolina Boclin, try to tell me that the Woolworth Building sometimes looks yellow against a...Read more
The famed Leaning Tower of Pisa is no doubt one of Italy’s most iconic monuments. It is also one of its most endangered buildings, having teetered on the brink of collapse until recently, when conservators and engineers carried out an ingenious plan to reduce the tower’s lean by a mere .5°, buying...Read more
On April 10, the world helplessly stood by as it witnessed the wanton destruction of Iraq’s National Museum, no doubt one of the world’s greatest repositories of cultural treasures. Only weeks before, I had walked its corridors, marveling at the wealth of material on display. Standing alone in a...Read more
Ten thousand years before Tsar Peter the Great founded St. Petersburg, it lay under more than 1,000 meters of ice. Then, just as the first great civilizations began to flourish in the valleys of the Nile, Tigris, and Euphrates, a receding glacial sea—the Baltic—flooded the territory of the modern-...Read more
On July 4, 2001, Tito Dupret, a 30-year-old Belgian filmmaker and multimedia director, embarked on a multi-year mission to photograph all 730 UNESCO World Heritage sites, using a sophisticated digital camera and software to create 360º spherical “virtual reality” (VR) films. The purpose of this...Read more
Strategically sited on a Rajasthan hilltop, the fortified city of Jaisalmer is one of India’s greatest architectural treasures. Founded in a . d. 1156 by the Rajput prince, Rawal Jaisal, Jaisalmer is known colloquially as Sonar Kila, or the “Golden Fort,” after the luminous sandstone of which it is...Read more
Kent Diebolt, founder of the private firm Vertical Access, uses mountaineering techniques and equipment to conduct architectural surveys on buildings. Following the attacks of September 11, 2001, the firm has been assessing the damage to buildings surrounding the World Trade Center site in lower...Read more