An image on the front cover of I.D. Magazine first drew me toward this weekend vacation home by 2008 National Design Award Winner Tom Kundig, with the unlikely name of Chicken Point Cabin. The interconnection of domestic and natural space was especially alluring to me. A native of the Pacific Northwest, Mr. Kundig comes from a...

Thomas Moran painted this beautiful watercolor of the Grand Canyon on a 1901 trip that was organized and paid for by the Santa Fe Railroad.   The Railroad treated Moran and other artists to a three-week excursion at the Canyon, together with a guide to point out the most picturesque views.  The Railroad’s aim was to...

In April 2005, while writing an essay on Winslow Homer and the American Landscape, I drove up with my husband to Prouts Neck, Maine where Homer had his studio on land that was owned by his family.  Homer, along with his father and two brothers, had purchased property on Prouts Neck from 1882 through 1909,...

According to the art critics of the day, the rooms in Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s Townsend House, his home near St. Regent’s Park, could be considered a portrait of the artist, a celebrated painter of Greek and Roman themes. In this cozy library interior, painted in 1884 by Alma-Tadema’s daughter, we see: a fur-covered couch and...

This perspective tour de force dazzles the eye with the complexities of its illusionistic architecture. The story behind the work is equally compelling. When the magnificent Church of Saint Ignatius Loyola was constructed in Rome during the late 16th-century Counter Reformation, the newly founded Jesuit order was trying to solicit the faithful to their cause. They believed that...

After a week of nature rendering havoc on the northeastern coast of the United States, and televised images of death, drowning, and destruction, it is interesting to consider the work of the experimental architect, Lebbeus Woods, who died on October 30, 2012. Woods was a visionary for whom destruction and reconstruction were two poles of human...

While recent advertising has been overwhelmingly digital, the contemporary graphic designer and former National Design Award winner, Stefan Sagmeister, relishes the opportunity to use his considerable graphic talent and imagination to create posters the traditional way, through photo offset lithography. These posters are deliberately human and personal, in response to the “cold” modernist design of...

Richard Meier’s Getty Center, which sits atop a hill in Santa Monica, is, arguably, the last great building of the 20th century. While some liken the complex to a fortified Tuscan hill town, and Meier himself says that he was thinking of Hadrian’s Villa in Tivoli or the Villa Farnese in Caprarola, it reminds me of another ancient hilltop complex, the Parthenon.

Among the most important 20th-century architectural drawings in Cooper-Hewitt’s collection, this work presents four sketches for a suburban Paris two-family villa, commissioned by the modern art collectors, Michael and Sarah Stein (brother and sister-in-law of Gertrude Stein), and their close friend Gabrielle de Monzie. While De Monzie wasn’t especially interested in architecture, she still paid...