Michael J. Lewis

Although Christopher Alexander, who died this year on March 17, was officially an architect, the significance of his life lay in the challenge he posed to architecture. In a sense, he did not believe that -architects were necessary. Put a small group of people on a building site, give them materials . . . . Continue Reading »

When exactly did utopia become less interesting than dystopia? The vision of a grim and gray future is just as much a fantasy as that of a perfectly ordered society, but somehow it is the grim one that now captures our attention. The descriptions of a glistening City of the Sun or a New Atlantis . . . . Continue Reading »

Some influential books fade as their ideas become conventional wisdom, but Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities remains as startling as when it appeared in . . . . Continue Reading »

The achievement of Frederick Law Olmsted is so stupendous that one cannot stand far enough back to take it all in. . . . . Continue Reading »

Imperial Gothic: Religious Architecture and High Anglican Culture in the British Empire, 1840–70 by g. a. bremneryale, 364 pages, $95 Over the course of a few years in the 1840s, the colonial architecture of high-church Anglicanism progressed from timorous neo-gothic copyism to uninhibited . . . . Continue Reading »

Today’s students are more socialized and considerably more self-disciplined than their predecessors. To teach them is a joy, but they will risk nothing, not even for one facetious question on a minor exam. Continue Reading »