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
In 1989, at the invitation of the Cambodian government, the World I Monuments Fund embarked on an ambitious, multidisciplinary I conservation effort at Angkor—one of the first of its kind undertaken by Western experts after nearly two decades of civil unrest. WMF discovered that, while the...Read more
Humayun’s Tomb and its surrounding monuments form a vast complex, with 30 acres of gardens surrounding the central platform on which Humayun’s tomb stands. Other than Humayun’s Tomb, there are a number of other structures within the enclosure and immediately outsideRead more
Few sites are as romantic and sublime as the majestic, yet crumbling castles and abbeys of Great Britain and Ireland. Though most are but spare renderings of their former selves, they evoke a timeless beauty, a golden age of art and architecture. For all their splendor, however, many of these...Read more