Washington, D.C.’s New Eisenhower Memorial: My Response

This piece was written in response to the Wall Street Journal article, "Monumentally Mediocre," about the construction of the new Eisenhower Memorial in D.C.. The monument cost taxpayers $150 million to construct. Not only is a classical design for the Eisenhower Memorial in Washington, D.C. monumentally less expensive for the taxpayer, but it is also …

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The Ballad of Port Grimaud: Doing It Right in St. Tropez Bay

The late British architect and urban designer, Gordon Cullen (1914–1994), developed the concept of townscape, an extension of the picturesque English landscape. A term first used in the 1880s within the context of unspoiled English towns, Cullen used it since the early 1950s to define the visual art of town planning.  Cullen maintained that townscape …

Rube Goldberg is Alive and Well in Architecture: What happened to elegant engineering?

Using the analogy of Rube Goldberg's complicated machines and the example of Chinese cities, I discuss the missteps taken in the pursuit of sustainable modernist architecture, and what we can learn from our ancestors.

The Art of Ambivalence Disguised as Pluralism: Charles Jencks, Landscape Architect, Designer, and Writer, Died on October 13th, 2019, Age 80.

©  Nir Buras Novemeber, 2019 Charles Jencks was one of my professors at UCLA in the 1980s. For me personally he was notable for his gentlemanly defense of a project I produced for his studio, a Postmodernist hamburger stand in the style of the Tail o’ the Pup hotdog stand in LA, a PoMo icon …