I’m writing a book about Craig Ellwood’s Case Study House 16—an experimental biography, or by my calculus, a pulp detective novel masquerading as history in a tattered trench coat. The Los Angeles Review of Architecture published an excerpt.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ nyra.nyc/articles/col...

Her latest novel is quite good

Philippe Boudon’s Lived-in Architecture: Le Corbusier's Pessac Revisited (1972) is a good start. A good example of a post-occupancy study of an iconic modernist building.

Yes … Cronon relies a lot on Von Thünen and Christaller. I also like David Blackbourn’s The Conquest of Nature, which links de/forestation to larger ideas about Prussia’s place in the world.

Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis comes to mind. As does Barbara Mundy’s book about waterworks in Tenochtitlan.

Of Hyphen and Hurricane Thinking of a ship as architecture is enough to make it so ...

I wrote this piece on hurricanes and architectural history fourteen years ago … I still go back to it every now and then to see how it continues to inform my research: open.substack.com/pub/literary...

Season 2 of Andor is essentially an intergalactic version of Jean-Pierre Melville’s Army of Shadows (1969)

Saw the movie about the Hungarian Bauhausler who designs a Suprematist community center in Doylestown, PA and who (at least for this viewer) was more Adrian Leverkühn than Marcel Breuer.

Happy Groundhog Day

Remembering David Lynch, who inhabited the haunted house of the American psyche Enrique Ramirez remembers the work of filmmaker and visual artist David Lynch, who passed away this week. His work includes Dune, Twin Peaks, and other films with strong architectural qualities.

David Lynch 1946-2025

www.archpaper.com/2025/01/reme...

Causal Sequences Hey sport. You connect the dots. You pick up the pieces.

And another still: literaryhistoryofarchitecture.substack.com/p/causal-seq...

Station to Station to Station Along the Earth's Sensorium ....

And another: open.substack.com/pub/literary...

To The Pole Star Journeys in and out of books, scaling latitudes like rungs on a ladder

I’m posting stuff I wrote several years ago. Here’s one piece: open.substack.com/pub/literary...

Tracts, Farms, and the Great Reindexing Project of 1911-1917 — NYC Department of Records & Information Services Introduction: why archive?   Archives preserve materials for many reasons, some of which are not immediately obvious. It’s certainly true that some archived items have obvious historic importanc...

A fantastic read about the “Reindexing” of NYC property records from 1911 to 1917 www.archives.nyc/blog/2024/12...

… in 25,000 words

To immerse oneself in the rhythms and rituals of the stories of another country is a reminder that translation is more than just converting text from one language to another—it is spatial dislocation. So here I am in the tropical wilds of Quintana Roo, México, confronting Juan Rulfo once again

Paperbase: Visualizing the Material History of Black and White Paper - The Classic The Lens Media Lab at Yale University’s Institute for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage has undertaken an extensive project to document and characterize its collection of over 7 500 dated and iden...

This is amazing … theclassicphotomag.com/paperbase-vi...

I wrote a review of Prior Art: Patents and the Nature of Invention in Architecture for @nyreviewofarch.bsky.social … many thanks to the editors for the opportunity to engage this text! I had my opinions on this book, but definitely check out if you can. nyra.nyc/articles/mot...

Ground Control provides a thorough architectural analysis of NASA’s spaceflight facilities In the book Ground Control: A Design History of Technical Lands and NASA’s Space Complex, Jeffrey Nesbit shares an “infrastructural history of the U.S. rocket launch complex.”

My review of Jeffrey S. Nesbit’s design history of NASA’s spaceflight architectures is live: www.archpaper.com/2024/10/grou...

Line of Discontent: Saudi Arabia's Linear Folly Historian Enrique Ramirez looks to the long history of linear cities to understand Saudi Arabia's desert experiment.

My latest piece for Architectural Record www.architecturalrecord.com/articles/171...

My daughter, Romy

I just added this beautiful 1985 Steinberger XL-2UF fretless bass to my collection. I’ve always loved fretless basses … they look like diagrams of bass guitars.

Iceblink Space: Photography, Architecture, and International Law in the Circumpolar North - Yale Architecture The Yale School of Architecture is dedicated to educating the next generation of leading architects and designers of the built environment.

I’ll be presenting new research next month at the Yale Architecture Forum www.architecture.yale.edu/calendar/684...

Want to read something on Theodor Adorno, Thomas Mann, Sergei Eisenstein, and Mickey Mouse? Check out my piece on the Walt Disney Features Animation building in LARA #1. And also … SUBSCRIBE!

I had a mushroom latte for the first time. It smelled like Amarillo Ramp and tasted like Double Negative.

Three authors’ agreements are making my life kinda busy from now until 2026.

I am so woefully out-of-step with such things, but I learned that novelist Paul LaFarge died earlier this year. I wrote one chapter of my dissertation while reading Haussmann, or The Distinction … a wonderful novel that I would not hesitate to assign for an arch. history class.

I had a paper accepted to the next meeting of EAHN … a first for me.

My review of Alex Nemerov’s latest book is online at @nyreviewofarch.bsky.social … take a peek! nyra.nyc/articles/a-r...