Upon arriving in the small town of Crescent City, you will feel like you’ve stepped back in time. Filled with old Florida charm, it is a picturesque community full of beautiful turn-of-the-century homes and churches. Crescent City is a town comfortably nestled between two lakes: one shaped like a crescent moon, called Crescent Lake, and…
House of Beauty: Colonial Revival Style
In a series, master woodworker Brent Hull will introduce readers to the different architectural styles that were popularized throughout American history, explaining their significance and unique design features. In the early 1920s, two men of great wealth were investing their time and money into large restoration and preservation projects. These two men, H. F. DuPont…
An ‘Academical Village’ as a Model for a New Republic
If you had traveled with the Marquis de Lafayette to the Piedmont region of Virginia in 1824, you would have been amazed to come upon a beautifully proportioned village being built in the finest tradition of Renaissance planning. Ten pavilions, connected by colonnades extending from a great building resembling the Roman Pantheon, rose impressively above…
American Classicism and the ‘Gentleman Architect’ Thomas Jefferson
In 1784 Thomas Jefferson found himself in France as our first ambassador. While he was there he fell in love. Arrested by its striking classical beauty, the patriot became smitten with a small Roman temple in Nîmes known as the Maison Carrée (square house). Describing it as “the most perfect model existing of what might…
Preserving the Nation’s Heritage, One House at a Time
If walls could talk, what stories would they tell? During the Civil War, Union soldiers occupied the region of Helena, Arkansas. They quartered inside a Greek Revival-style home that belonged to a local Confederate soldier. It was a stately mansion built in 1858, with a robust pediment and tall, elegant columns on its facade. Union…
Pop Culture Historian Preserves LA’s Past While Looking to the Future
Alison Martino calls herself a “DeLorean of the internet”—comparing herself to the iconic modern car that serves as a time machine in the movie “Back to the Future.” The daughter of show business royalty, Martino has made it her life’s mission to preserve the pop culture history of Southern California by creating Vintage Los Angeles,…
The Sublime ‘Church of Gold’: St. Mark’s Basilica, in Venice, Italy
From dawn to dusk, the golden mosaics on the façade of St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice shimmer and shine to differing degrees. The constantly shifting sunlight seems to bring endless dramatic effects to the mosaic pictures that depict mainly religious life. The mosaics were first created in 1071, and developed over eight centuries to cover around…
Making America’s Civic Architecture Great Again
“Whenever it is proposed to prepare plans for the Capitol, I should prefer the adoption of some one of the models of antiquity which have had the approbation of thousands of years,” Thomas Jefferson wrote to French engineer Pierre Charles L’Enfant on April 10, 1791. But why did Jefferson and America’s Founding Fathers admire classical…
A Designer Reveals the Higher Purpose of Architecture
NEW HOPE, N.Y.—“If you sing the perfect note right in the center stage, the person at the back of the amphitheater can hear it just as well as a person in the front,” says James H. Smith, educator and founder of Cartio, an architectural photography and design atelier. The ancient Greek amphitheaters “aren’t something that…
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