This past week, on a vacation to the Midwest, I found myself at the Art Institute of Chicago, one of Chicago, Illinois’ most iconic art museums. After clumsily navigating the El and getting lost on State Street – which is almost impossible to get lost on – I happened upon the grand facade of the museum, […]Read Post ›
The architecture world has recently lost a transformative female star, in the form of Zaha Hadid. She will be remembered not only for her breathtaking contributions to the built environment, but also as a force for equality in a field that is still very much a man’s world.
On a campus full of stately brick collegiate neo-Gothic buildings, I can think of no more universally hated place on campus than the sole Brutalist structure, our Science Center. For four years, it was my academic home base and so I have a special place in my heart for this inside-out building but from the […]Read Post ›
If you were asked to name building materials, I doubt many people would list ‘plastic’ as one of them. But at one point in time, engineers and designers thought it would completely revolutionize the way that we build.
If you asked me to list the materials that changed American life the most profoundly, steel would certainly be at the top of the list. Ubiquitous in our modern daily lives, at the turn of the century this material completely revolutionized the fields of engineering and architecture in the 20th century.
During the holidays it is customary for us in the States to make our seasonal sojourns home, either to families and friends or simply to have a short respite from the work of our everyday lives. Considering the home is how I first fell in love with the study of architecture and I still find domestic architecture […]Read Post ›
I freely admit that I am more than a little biased about Rome. Two years ago, I lived in the Eternal City for ten weeks and the experience left an incredible impression on me. One of the most striking features of the cityscape is the great visibility of its “layers” – as the capital of […]Read Post ›
Anyone who saw my college dorm room knows that I love collecting vintage travel posters. It felt like I was turning my walls into a mid-century microcosm of the world by having the great cities juxtaposed with one another. Originally designed by tourism bureaus, railroad and airline companies throughout the first half of the 20th century, […]Read Post ›
Art Deco (from Arts Décoratifs) loosely refers to an aesthetic that infiltrated much of the visual arts in the decades between the two World Wars (1910-1939). The sociopolitical turbulence manifested itself visually and artists tried to negotiate between several contradictory ideologies: modernism, traditionalism and exoticism. There were some artists who paid homage to advances made in technology and engineering […]Read Post ›
The Female Gaze 