A century after the original golden era of railroads, trains are once again the talk of travel. In Europe, especially, train travel is surging as an environmental alternative to short-haul flights, with more night trains, high-speed routes and transnational collaboration between rail companies. Political ties between European countries may be …
David Sellers, a maverick architect who helped start the design-build movement, creating a community of like-minded innovators near the tiny town of Warren, Vt., died on Feb. 9 in Los Angeles. He was 86. Mr. Sellers was in California visiting his son, Parker Sellers, to work on a house they …
ON A WARM September afternoon in subarctic Finland, the architect Laura Mattila kneels in the grass beside a sauna that she and Mikko Merz, her 49-year-old partner in life and work, built eight years ago in the factory town turned artists’ colony of Fiskars, an hour’s drive west from Helsinki. …
M. Paul Friedberg, a landscape architect whose playgrounds, pocket parks and plazas transformed once-gritty areas of New York City, using familiar urban materials to do so, died on Feb. 15 in Manhattan. He was 93. His death, in a hospital, was announced by Dorit Shahar, his wife. Mr. Friedberg grew …
One of the most anticipated events of an overstuffed Mexico City Art Week earlier this month promised to be a surreal collision of architecture, performance art, power, privilege — and horses. Marina Abramovic, the grandmother of performance art, would be presenting her latest works (though she would dispute recognizing them …
Will a different city emerge from the Los Angeles fires? Time and again fires have fast-tracked urban change. London after the Great Fire of 1666 rewrote its safety laws, widened streets and erected new public buildings, like the domed St. Paul’s Cathedral. Chicago after the Great Fire of 1871, which …
The Palais Garnier in Paris is among the world’s oldest theaters that still functions more or less in its original state. And long before the appearance of the selfie-stick, the Garnier was a place not just to see art, but to be seen. At a 150th anniversary gala on Friday, …
More than a week after Los Angeles’s devastating fires began, the losses to the region’s rich architectural legacy are becoming clearer. The fires have already destroyed more of the county’s built heritage than other single event, according to Adrian Scott Fine, president and chief executive of the Los Angeles Conservancy, …
To live in Los Angeles is to be regularly reminded that much of what surrounds its residents is fleeting. That pertains, most essentially, to human life and the natural world, as the deadly fires reminded us this week. But also to both the vital everyday structures and the cultural monuments …
Since November, “Architect’s Handkerchief” (1999), Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen’s 12-foot-tall abstract hankie sprouting from a breast pocket has waved from the street-level plaza of Lever House, at 390 Park Avenue in Midtown Manhattan. The sculpture’s baroque white folds evoke the creamy marble of a Bernini, voluptuous even as …
