From the Vault

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Building America is, in a way, the Building Museum’s permanent collection, on the web. It’s an effort—a laudable and substantially accomplished effort—to put the history of American construction out in cyberspace, where the general public can get a better idea of its environment.

Martin, the architect played by Bill Pullman in Edward Albee’s new Broadway play, has made it in life. 

With works such as the Alamillo Bridge in Seville, Spain and the footbridge over the River Nervión in Bilbao, Santiago Calatrava has established himself as the most innovative and influential bridge designer of our time.

When splashed across newspapers, television screens and Web sites worldwide on December 18, the nine proposals for the World Trade Center site may have looked like a brave new skyscraper world—to paraphrase the headline of December 19th’s New York Daily News—or an exhibition of architectural ego as Lisa Rochon put it in the Toronto Globe and Mail.

One of the two main points of my essay on Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Langauge and The Phenomenon of Life is that Alexander’s thinking has been wrongly neglected by thoughtful academics and practitioners in the last 20 years.