Articles
Architecture, November 2000
“Exploration Place Science and Children’s Museum”
Written by Larry Speck
Moshe Safdie is a refugee from the “style wars” that have swept across the international design landscape over the last three decades. Outspoken in his disdain for movements like postmodernism and deconstructivism, he has fled from trendy skirmishes between “hot” and “not” on favor of an independent career, producing work that is difficult to categorize [...]
Architecture, January 2000
“Becky’s Birthday”
Written by Larry Speck
As Laugier’s hut contrasted with the excess of its rococo context, so this modest ranch shelter provides an antidote to the intemperance of contemporary architecture.
Plagued by an acceleration of excess and bombast, architecture periodically needs a course correction, a return to what is fundamental and authentic. Just as Marc-Antoine Laugier’s primitive hut contrasted with the [...]
Architecture, January 2000
“Back to School”
Written by Larry Speck
Fifty years later, Alvar Aalto’s Baker House still celebrates student life. Lawrence W. Speck visits a campus landmark.
Texas Architect, January/February 1999
“A Greater Whole”
Written by Larry Speck
Some of the most powerful and convincing environments we have produced in the United States over the last two centuries have been college and university campuses. Both in terms of architecture and urban design, the halls of academe and the lush grounds that surround them often are oases in the desert of commercial [...]
D Magazine, May 1998
“Concept and Design”
Written by Larry Speck
A critic looks at what the new arena can–and should–do for Dallas.
D Magazine, January 1998
“A Sense of Place”
Written by Larry Speck
With a sweeping new campus design, SMU intends to change its physical relationship with the city and improve its setting for students. Will it work?
Center, No.7, 1992
“Style Wars in the Final Decade”
Written by Larry Speck
When I was in college I had a friend who had a singing voice that was as beautiful as any live vocalist I have heard before or since. She had a gift. Her tone was clear and even like a bell’s. Her range was extraordinary—from piercing high trills through rich mezzo tones to a deep [...]
Center, No.5, 1989
“The Individual and the City”
Written by Larry Speck
In the introduction to her landmark book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, published in 1961, Jane Jacobs states flatly, “This book is an attack on current city planning and rebuilding.”[1] “My attack is not based on quibbles about rebuilding methods or hairsplitting about fashions in design. It is an attack, rather, on [...]
Center, 1998
“Buildings and Reality: Architecture in the Age of Information”
Written by Larry Speck
On October 23-24, 1986, the fourth annual symposium of the Center for the Study of American Architecture, School of Architecture, University of Texas at Austin was held. The subject: “Buildings and Reality: Architecture in the Age of Information.’, Several of the papers in this issue of CENTER (those by Horace Newcomb, Peter Eisenman, Karsten Harries, [...]
Center, 1988
“American Academy of Arts and Sciences”
Written by Larry Speck
When Kallmann and McKinnell – consummate Modernists known at the time for their brutalist Boston City Hall of 1968 – produced the gentle, arcadian American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1980, it caused quite a stir among avid style-labelers in the Modernism/Postmodernism debate. Although noted critic Ada Louise Huxtable termed it “an architectural event [...]