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Beauty and Utility
Martin Filler; photo by Brigitte Lacombe In the Review’s December 22, 2022, issue, architecture critic Martin Filler wrote about the “undulating lines, swirling excesses, and propulsive forms” that...
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The Architect of Subtraction
Schloss Charlottenburg, Berlin/Alamy/© 2023 Fondation Oskar Kokoschka/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ProLitteris, Zürich Adolf Loos; portrait by Oskar Kokoschka, 1909 1. Several of modern...
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The Architect and the Rock Star
It’s hard to imagine two women more antithetical than the visionary singer-songwriter-poet Patti Smith, winner of the National Book Award for her memoir Just Kids (2010), and the Seagram’s liquor...
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The Gilder Age
The American Museum of Natural History’s new Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education, and Innovation completes that venerable teaching and research institution’s four-city-block campus on...
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Too Good for Hollywood
Heritage Auctions Aline MacMahon; photograph by Cecil Beaton, circa 1932 1.I first laid eyes on Aline MacMahon seventy years ago, when I was five and my parents took me to Brooklyn’s Marboro Theatre...
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Poet of Shubert Alley
The death of the musical comedy lyricist Sheldon Harnick on June 23, ten months shy of his centennial, brought forth a torrent of memories that I’d hardly anticipated. Long ago I consigned the...
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Oppie’s Problem
If you’re a member of any dynasty prominent in twentieth-century political history—with Roosevelts, Churchills, Windsors, and Kennedys at the forefront—your relatives are certain to be reincarnated in...
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1.Even the most assiduous self-promoter is well advised to be wary of writing a memoir, which tends to inadvertently divulge more than any author anticipates. That is true of Robert A.M. Stern’s...
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Before the Wrecking Ball Swung
One sobering, cautionary revelation follows another in Lost in America: Photographing the Last Days of Our Architectural Treasures, a wonderfully engaging book based on the Historic American Buildings...
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Sublime Detritus
When I heard about the death of the Los Angeles–based artist Alexis Smith, who was done in after a nine-year struggle with Alzheimer’s disease on the second day of the new year at the age of...
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