DAVID MAYERNIK
LTD.

Classical architecture may be intrinsically elegant, and eloquent, but it is only truly noble if it is put to noble ends.

Today, we either take architecture too seriously, or not enough: in the former case we see it as either the destruction or salvation of society and the environment, in the latter it’s at best mere packaging and at worst shelter.

[I]t has somehow crept into the discourse lately that specific dimensions are in some way meaningful

Architects should stop thinking they have to be pseudo-scientists or technocrats to be taken seriously. Our research is naturally in the realm of imagination, not tabulation.

Leonardo's Vitruvian man, ad quadratum and ad triangulum, the normative Ionic, and the feminine Doric in Rome

Apparently, comic book artists have more integrity than architects.

Not only did I reconstruct the absent architectural form—from the proportions of the exterior order to the shape of the roof—I also imagined what it would be like if it were frescoed and stuccoed...

For my sake as well as for that of my former colleagues and students, allow me to outline what systematic thinking means for architects.

I suppose the word “New” insulates New Urbanism from expectations that it corresponds to the old or pre-Modernist way of making cities and towns.

the Ca’ d’Oro is not composed like a typical, or normative, Venetian palace.

Tradition is a modern idea.

But above all, the best thing is to draw men and women from the nude and thus fix in the memory by constant exercise the muscles of the torso, back, legs, arms, and knees, with the bones underneath. Then one may be sure that through much study attitudes in any position can be drawn by help of the imagination without one’s having the living forms in view. Giorgio Vasari, Vasari on Technique, trans. L. S. Maclehose, Dover Publ., 1999, p. 210 I'd like to offer two alternative

Some Good Things that Happened to Cities after the Middle Ages There’s a substantial cadre of urbanists who think of themselves as...

one of the qualities that make Old Master drawings both beautiful and interesting is their pentimenti

The word “academic,” with respect to the arts, has a variety of meanings and connotations today, few of them positive. Academic art is...

Our memory’s limitations and imprecision facilitate creativity.

on creativity and intelligence, artificial and otherwise

I thought to myself, and then said to him, it would be fun to think of the right painting subject for that frame.

What more can be said or done about the classical orders? Maybe still something...