VANITY FAIR

Jay-Z and the Brooklyn Nets Are Exciting and All, but Is the New Barclays Center Any Good As A Building?

October 2nd, 2012

The Fight to Save Chicago’s Prentice Hospital

August 14th, 2012

Prentice Hospital, by Bertrand Goldberg, is a cluster of concrete cylinders–ugly to many, beautiful to others. Here is the (now lost) argument for saving it.

George Widman / AP Photo

A Fond Farewell to Robert Venturi, the Architect Who Taught Us to Stop Worrying and Love Las Vegas

August 2nd, 2012

A Monumental Conflict

July 16th, 2012

Everyone agrees Dwight D. Eisenhower was one of America’s greatest leaders. But the effort to memorialize the 34th president—with a monument on four acres near the Capitol—has led to open conflict, pitting Eisenhower’s grandchildren against one of America’s most respected architects, Frank Gehry.

Examining the Bombastic Classicism of the London Bomber Command Memorial

July 13th, 2012

Paul Goldberger on the Practical, Poetic Thomas Heatherwick Exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum

July 5th, 2012

Hugh Hardy’s New Lincoln Center Space, the Claire Tow Theater, Is Pleasing, Deferential – and Barely Visible

June 14th, 2012

At the Most-Comprehensive-Ever Show of Roy Lichtenstein, a Witty and Dignified Look at an Icon

May 22nd, 2012

The first thing that struck me when I walked into the vast and exhilarating Roy Lichtenstein retrospective that opens this week at the Art Institute of Chicago was that it was in the Rice Building, a graceful classical wing added in 1988 by the architect Thomas Beeby, which houses the museum’s great pre-1950 American collection. […]

A Glare Grows in Dallas: Why a New Condo Tower Has the City’s Art Community Up in Arms

May 15th, 2012

The hottest news in architecture right now is, well, about heat. And light. And how there is too much of both of them in Dallas, where something called Museum Tower, a 42-story condominium with a façade of highly reflective glass, has risen beside the Nasher Sculpture Center, the building by Renzo Piano that is one […]

The New Barnes Foundation Building: Soulful, Self-assured, and Soaked with Light

May 4th, 2012

There is no record of what Dr. Albert C. Barnes, the famously eccentric, famously difficult collector of post-Impressionist painting, African art, ancient art, and American furniture and decorative art said to the architect Paul Cret when he hired him to build the Barnes Foundation, his personal museum, in suburban Philadelphia in 1922. Cret gave Dr. […]

Can Paul Rudolph’s Architecturally Vital Orange County Government Center Be Saved?

May 2nd, 2012

Let’s start with an obvious truth: Paul Rudolph is not an easy architect. He never was. His assertive modernist buildings of concrete and glass are not what anyone would call user-friendly. They can be harsh, and tough, and it is not surprising that to many people they are cold. But oh, can they be beautiful, […]

Reflected Grief

April 1st, 2012

Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial, with its extraordinary black granite wall extending gradually into the earth and carved with the names of 58,272 Americans who died in the nation’s tragic escapade in Southeast Asia, was finished 30 years ago. It is still far and away the greatest memorial of modern times—the most beautiful, the most […]

A Vroom of His Own

January 1st, 2011

With its stainless-steel counters, halogen lights, and museum-style installations, D.A.D. Garage looks nothing like an everyday, oil-stained garage. Of course not–it belongs to Ralph Lauren, who owns 60 or so of the rarest, most valuable cars in the world, including a 1938 Bugatti coupe, a 1938 Alfa Romeo Mille Miglia roadster, and the world’s only 1930 Mercedes-Benz SSK “Count Trossi” roadster, all in ideal condition and all driven by the designer himself. The author plugs into the lifelong fantasy behind Lauren’s collection.