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There are some small signs of movement, especially in the stirrings of fungibility on the part of planning and landscape. Although I run a program in urban design, I have a fundamental disbelief in any unitary discourse of the city and try to offer access to many. Originally conceived as a way of recuperating physical design from a planning profession that had fallen in thrall to the social sciences, urban design is often taught simply as big building and fixates excessively on historic patterns. But urbanism’s most desperate needs devolve on the new morphologies of sustainability and equity that an

In New York City, where restaurants last an average of two years and seldom more than seven, a dining establishment that survives for half a century might seem a culinary Methuselah.

Ask who has built the essential Southern California house, and the answer for many California architects will be Ray Kappe.

Curating Wright The Wright show disappoints in other ways, too. There’s no sense of a governing critical intelligence. The exhibition is simply a haphazard attic of Wrightiana, certainly fascinating for Wright buffs, but lacking a clear point of view. The title is the giveaway: Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward. The idea is that Wright designed his buildings by first planning the interior spaces, and only then shaping the exterior appearance around them. Well, sure he did, but so what? This is a tired cliché, not a stirring theme for a new exhibition. It’s an idea for an old-fashioned show

Unlike architecture, which requires solidity to provide shelter over time regardless of style, landscaped gardens are ephemeral by nature. They may possess a degree of flamboyancy and fantasy expressive of the philosophical tone of their times and their creators without concerns for function. This is particularly true among the rolling hills of southwest Scotland, where in Portrack, just north of Dumfries near the English border, Charles Jencks, the American theorist, architect, and (increasingly) landscape architect, and his late wife, Maggie Keswick, created a 30-acre garden on a family estate that engages both the mind and the senses. Known as the

A fresh look at the state of historic preservation. Preservation’s History And “grandmother” is right, because women constituted many of the first highly visible preservationists. Independence Hall in Philadelphia may be the first nationally important building saved, but The Ladies, with a capital L, of the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association organized by Ann Pamela Cunningham resolutely raised $200,000 in 1853 to save George Washington’s home, Mount Vernon, Virginia, which had fallen into disrepair by the mid-19th century. Their accomplishments spurred others to action and set a pattern for preserving historic properties. Photo © Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association George Washington’s Mount

A fresh look at the state of historic preservation. Today’s Challenges Far beyond the small, precious numbers who initially saved individual houses, today’s preservation movement has been radically democratized. With the shift in demographics of the United States, and a wider visibility of Hispanic, Asian), and African-American populations, preservation has had to address the philosophical questions of representation, with an increasing need to clearly answer the question: Who is telling the story? Richard Moe, the longtime president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, underscores this fact by saying that “preservation is threatening to become mainstream.” Photo courtesy the Preservation