Catesby Leigh

Catesby Leigh on the fight to build a World War I memorial near the White House.

The place to begin a visit to this important exhibition is with a sculptural work it doesn’t include: the Dying Gaul, on loan to the gallery from the Capitoline Museum in Rome. This fallen warrior’s powerful presence results from a masterful integration of spatial design with the complex structure…

Over half a century ago, Henry Hope Reed, who died in May at age 97, launched a permanent campaign to restore the classical tradition to its rightful primacy in American public art and architecture. The Golden City (1959) provided the polemical and pedagogical foundation for this campaign,…

The memory of Philip Johnson, who died early last year at age 98, may not linger for very long. But we shouldn't let his centennial year--he was born July 8, 1906--pass without contemplating his significance. Johnson was, after all, the original "starchitect," and perhaps no other 20th-century…

HARRIED DESIGNERS, and the number crunchers breathing down their necks, are hacking away at plans for the World Trade Center Memorial, struggling to fit this bloated, billion-dollar, largely subterranean leviathan into the $500 million budgetary straitjacket prescribed by Governor George Pataki and…

WHAT LOOKS LIKE A HUMILIATING finale to the Corcoran Gallery of Art's quest for a new wing designed by Frank Gehry has shaken the museum, one of the nation's oldest, to its roots. It is once again wracked by the same sort of institutional self-doubt that afflicted it after it buckled under pressure…

THREE DECADES AGO, TWO designers came up with ideas for memorials for Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The concepts shared a common core: an outdoor room, open to the sky and enclosed by primitive stone walls. To date, only one of these has been built: Lawrence Halprin's abysmal Roosevelt Memorial in…

IT IS A SIGHT to make L'Enfant's jaw drop: a great pile of buff limestone, like a mesa promontory somewhere in the desert. The walls undulate as the mass tapers towards the east--with large, glazed cavities and overhangs on one side, a main entrance overhang facing the Capitol, and a low, stepped…

AT THE MAIN ENTRANCE to the new National World War II Memorial in Washington, the visitor encounters this rather ponderous inscription on a formidable chunk of granite: "Here in the presence of Washington and Lincoln, one the eighteenth century father and the other the nineteenth century preserver…

Timeless Cities

Modern Architecture and Other Essays

DANIEL LIBESKIND'S victory in the architectural competition for the reconstruction of the World Trade Center site is a victory for what we might call the "permanent institution of the revolution." It looks as though we will never be able to revolt against that revolt--never be able to rid ourselves…

THE SUBTERRANEAN SPRAWL of Washington has begun. By the presidential inauguration of 2005, ascent of the majestic stairs of the Capitol--the supreme achievement of American architecture and decoration--will be a fading memory. Instead, the public will descend to the Capitol Visitor Center, a vast…

THE VILLAGE OF POUNDBURY in southwest England is a conventional real estate development, in financial terms. But its residences--ranging from spacious, detached homes to little rowhouses--are built in traditional regional styles with facades of brick, stone, or stucco. An interconnected network of…

IN THE AFTERMATH of September 11, Senator Charles Schumer recommended the World Trade Center be replaced with "something grand." It's a curious word. Who speaks of grandeur any more? Certainly not many of the fashionable architects, designers, and pundits suggesting what to do with the site. There…

NO ARCHITECT SINCE LE CORBUSIER and Mies van der Rohe has had more impact on his profession than Robert Venturi, whose erudite denunciation of the "puritanically moral language of orthodox modern architecture" was published thirty-five years ago as a slender tome entitled Complexity and…

It is a familiar, American image, that painting of a lanky, aging painter painting himself with photographic precision. Seated with his back to us, he looks at himself in a mirror, pipe dangling from his mouth, eyeglasses comically opaque. The gilded mirror-frame is crowned by an eagle with the…