Ever since Sir Arthur Evans first excavated at the site of the Palace at Knossos in the early twentieth century, scholars and visitors have been drawn to the architecture of Bronze Age Crete. Much of the attraction comes from the geographical and historical uniqueness of the island. Equidistant from Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, Minoan Crete is on the shifting conceptual border between East and West, and chronologically suspended between history...

In an era of brash, expensive, provocative new buildings, a prominent critic argues that emotions--such as hope, power, sex, and our changing relationship to the idea of home--are the most powerful force behind architecture, yesterday and (especially) today. We are living in the most dramatic period in architectural history in more than half a century: a time when cityscapes are being redrawn on a yearly basis, architects are testing the very idea...

"Notre-Dame of Amiens is one of the great Gothic cathedrals. Its construction began in 1220, and artistic production in the Gothic mode lasted well into the sixteenth century. In this magisterial chronicle, Stephen Murray invites readers to see the cathedral as more than just a thing of the past: it is a living document of medieval Christian society that endures in our own time. Murray tells the cathedral's story from the overlapping perspectives...

The rebuilding of Ground Zero is the most architecturally, politically, and emotionally complex construction project in recent American history. The struggle to develop these 16 acres of 'sacred' land has encompassed 12 years, 19 government agencies, and over {dollar}20 billion. Aside from the engineering challenges, various constituencies - politicians, developers, architects, insurers, local residents, and relatives of 9/11 victims - profess conflicting...

"In 1945, Edith Farnsworth asked the German architect Mies van der Rohe, already renowned for his avant-garde buildings, to design a weekend home for her outside of Chicago. Edith was a woman ahead of her time--unmarried, she was a distinguished medical researcher, whose discoveries put her in contention for the Nobel Prize, as well as an accomplished violinist, translator, and poet. The two quickly began an intimate relationship, spending weekends...

Nathan Glazer is Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Education at Harvard University. He was Coeditor of the Public Interest. His books include Beyond the Melting Pot, We Are All Multiculturalists Now, and The Public Face of Architecture. Modernism in architecture and urban design has failed the American city. This is the decisive conclusion that renowned public intellectual Nathan Glazer has drawn from two decades of writing and thinking about...

While the construction of architecture has a place in architectural discourse, its destruction, generally seen as incompatible with the very idea of "culture," has been neglected in theoretical and historical discussion. Responding to this neglect, Herscher examines the case of the former Yugoslavia and in particular, Kosovo, where targeting architecture has been a prominent dimension of political violence. Rather than interpreting violence against...

A no-holds-barred look at the collision of interests behind the ambitious attempt to raise a new national icon at Ground Zero When we stand in downtown Manhattan in the future and look up and ask, "Why?"--Why is it so strange, so rude, so striving, so right, so wrong?--we will have Sixteen Acres to give us the answers. Tracing the redevelopment of the World Trade Center site from graveyard to playground for high design, insurgent critic Philip Nobel...

Americans tend to imagine their public libraries as time-honored advocates of equitable access to information for all. Through much of the twentieth century, however, many black Americans were denied access to public libraries or allowed admittance only to separate and smaller buildings and collections. While scholars have examined and continue to uncover the history of school segregation, there has been much less research published on the segregation...

Architecture can no longer limit itself to the art of making buildings; it must also invent the politics of taking them apart. This is Jill Stoner's premise for a minor architecture. Her architect's eye tracks differently from most, drawn not to the lauded and iconic but to what she calls "the landscape of our constructed mistakes"--metropolitan hinterlands rife with failed and foreclosed developments, undersubscribed office parks, chain hotels, and...