#tradarch

American Revolution Museum, Yorktown, Va. (Photo by Calder Loth)

About a year ago, the American Revolution Museum at Yorktown was completed, replacing the Yorktown Victory Center – a quotidian slanty modernist version of colonial (it is brick) – with a classical, quasi-Palladian building of considerable merit. Today, retired Virginia chief preservationist Calder Loth sent its main entry portico…

Steps to entrance of church near Ponte Vecchio, in Venice. (courtesy of Joel Pidel)

Tomorrow I head down to Charleston, S.C., to confer on matters architectural with people I’ve never met but with whom readers of this blog are familiar. They are the TradArch family of architects and architectural busybodies (like me). Before I fly down I’d like to stroke readers of this blog by posting a…

Another sharp comment . . . ?

Modernist addition to traditional house in Durban, South Africa. (dreamfunddesign.com)

Here’s a comment that just came in to the TradArch list by Andrès Duany. He helped found and has been the most active leader of the New Urbanism movement. Today, after winning the Driehaus Award of 2009, he is writing a treatise on classical architecture in which he seeks to “capture territory” for classicism…

How to capture territory

The classical revival has been expressed, in numerous threads over several years on the TradArch listserve discussion of classical architecture, as a matter of “recapturing territory” captured by modernism from classicism decades ago. Andres Duany, rightly famous for successfully leading the New Urbanist movement, is responsible for the muscular military rhetoric that has framed at least his…

Modernist infill in Toronto. (urburbia.ca)

Here is an e-mail sent by architect Marc Snarzowski to the TradArch listserv’s discussion thread, “CNU is burning,” about modernism being invited further into New Urbanism at its recent conference in Buffalo. Marc disagrees, and though I’m not buying into it 100 percent, to say the least, he makes some very interesting points on how modernism has moved…