The Third Law isn’t nearly as universal as the first two, but it does suggest some possibilities. One thinks, for example, of the magnificent railroad stations that were built as late as the 1930s in far-flung American cities like Buffalo and Cincinnati, just as rail was, you’d think predictably, about to give way to the car and the plane. Or think of the imperial architecture of Britain, in London and New Delhi, as the Empire began to weaken in the early years of the 20th century. Photo ' Jeff Goldberg/Esto Polshek's Newseum opened as newspapers face threats to their survival.

There are a number of Campbell’s Laws of Architecture; they tend to take the form of paradoxes. Campbell’s First Law, for example, states: “The faster the means of transportation in any society, the larger will be the portion of the average citizen’s life that is spent in getting from one place to another.” Photo ' Bettmann/Corbis The Moors built the Alhambra in Granada as they were losing control of Spain to the Christians. Peasant’s walk to the fields? Twenty minutes. Commute from the suburbs? Fifty minutes. Plane to the coast? Six hours. Rocket to the moon? Four days. As the

The bigger picture There needs to be a caveat here, though. Density is a plus word today, and it’s often said that New York’s Manhattan is the greenest community in the U.S., because its high density leads to low per-capita consumption of energy for heating, cooling, and transit. But throw the frame a little wider, and you realize that a lot of the food for New York is coming in carbon-powered trucks and airplanes from California, or even Brazil or China. Maybe there’s a more optimal city size, one that would permit us to raise more food nearer home. Photo

President-elect Obama, we’re informed, intends to create an Office of Urban Policy. Obama is a lawyer, and I’m sure he’s thinking more about social issues than about architecture or urban design. But at this writing (in early December), nobody knows who will occupy the new office, or what its brief will be. Maybe architects will begin to have some influence on public architecture? It doesn’t happen often. Architects aren’t known for their political skills. My friend Dick Swett, who used to be a United States Representative from New Hampshire, believes he was the only architect to serve in Congress in

Forty thousand people die every year in auto accidents in the United States — 400,000 every decade. Far, far more than have died from terrorism in this country. But we do not respond by withdrawing the right to drive. Images © Werner Huthmacher The new U.S. embassy in Berlin sits next to Brandenburg Gate, but is set back from the street (top); In a rendering (above), MRY shows an intention to capture the spirit of Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s work. It’s an analogy that occurs to me whenever I see the latest field of bollards or other barriers in front of

All those bollards and barriers are described as necessary for security. But in fact they’re dealing with only a single threat: car bombs. There are, obviously, other kinds of terrorism: biological; electronic (in which the enemy disables computer systems and records); or even, in the worst case, nuclear. When you lock the door against one kind of terrorism, another one may open. I’m not an expert in security, but I’d guess that the most useful antiterrorist weapons don’t require the defacing of architecture. These are, surely, intelligence, surveillance, and redundancy. Photos © Werner Huthmacher The embassy’s neighbors include Gehry’s DZ

Making new demands It’s important to understand that this kind of sophisticated climate control was still fairly new at the time Otto was designed. Art conservators were making demands that neither the world of architects nor the world of engineers and contractors had quite caught up with. Okay, that’s the art guys’ story. The weather guys—the architect, his engineering consultants, and the builder—created pretty much the kind of wall they’d always built. Its primary purpose was not to nurture the art but to keep out the weather. They built a cavity wall, a sandwich of materials including a vapor barrier.

Years ago, in Washington, D.C., I had dinner with Peter Blake. Peter was at that time teaching architecture at Catholic University. But he was best known as a journalist— a former editor of Architectural Forum and the founding editor of Architecture Plus, two of the best architecture magazines of the 20th century. Photo © Paul Warchol Harvard plans to tear down Werner Otto Hall (top and above), an addition to the Fogg Museum, rather than repair its exterior walls. Peter also wrote books, and books were the subject of our dinner. He spoke of a famous series of articles in

City of dreams While in Los Angeles, I had a chance to revisit a very different museum, the Getty Villa—not the Richard Meier–designed white monastery on a hilltop, but the original Getty that was built in 1979 to hold the oilman’s art collection, and which then was greatly enlarged in 2006 by Boston architects Machado and Silvetti. Photo © Richard Ross (top); Bradley Johnson/Machado and Silvetti (above). At the Getty in Malibu, Machado and Silvetti built an amphitheater next to the villa (top) and treated the site as an archaeological dig where visitors descend through time (above). It’s often said

A few random field notes on Renzo Piano’s new Broad Contemporary Art Museum building at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). I assumed RECORD would already have an article on the Broad in the works, but I’m told that no, because Piano is designing so many museums and has also just won the AIA Gold Medal, the magazine is going to hold off for a while. Photo © 2008 Museum Associates/LACMA Renzo Piano’s new Broad building at LACMA features a sawtooth roof of skylights (top) that bounce northern light into the top-floor galleries (above). I suppose the goal