Witold Rybczynski's Blog

Well, it’s the law, at least for now. The executive order concerning the use of classical and traditional styles in federal buildings was signed on August 28, 2025. The intent is unequivocal, for example: “In the District of Columbia, classical architecture shall be the preferred and default architecture for federal public buildings absent exceptional factors necessitating another kind of architecture.” But what kind of classical? That remains to be seen. It could be the somewhat archaeological classical of Charles McKim, who is mentioned in the order, or the stripped classical of Paul Cret, who is not.  (Cret’s 1933 Ft. Worth courthouse is pictured above.) Or the inventive classical of Grosvenor Goodhue,

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Recent architecture from KieranTimberlake at the University of Pennsylvania. It’s hard to imagine a more awkward addition to a nice old building (Cope & Stewardson, 1892). The height, roof form, curtain wall, brick color—all clash, and not in a good way. And the obligatory green roof doesn’t make up for it. What were they thinking?

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The post WHAT NOT TO DO first appeared on Witold Rybczynski.

Although the media frequently describes the building project that the Federal Reserve is undertaking at its Washington, DC headquarters, the Marriner S. Eccles Building, as a “renovation,” it is much more than that. When Paul Cret designed the building in the mid-1930s, he used an H-shaped plan to ensure daylight in all the offices. The current project fills in those two spaces with glass-roofed atria. The external view (above) shows the clumsy mating of Cret’s marble facades with a steel-and-glass curtain wall. Quel dommage!

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A warning to the voters of New York. As Stephen Kotkin has observed, “There are two ways to destroy a city, bombing and rent control.”

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Léon Krier was a character. He dressed like an impresario, wrote like a pamphleteer, and drew like an angel. He happily stoked public controversy. His most famous bon mot was “I’m an architect, because I don’t build.” But he did build. The two buildings that I’ve seen of his—his own house and a town hall—have a quality that seems to have eluded most of his traditional-minded contemporaries: originality. He was a classicist, but not a revivalist. He was original, too, in his thinking about town planning, to use an old-fashioned term he would have liked. To Krier, the principles of sound urban design were all known long ago—and didn’t need to be reinvented—the great challenge was how to accommodate the automobile.

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The post LÉON KRIER, ARCHITECT AND TOWN PLANNER (1946-2025) first appeared on Witold Rybczynski.

This month sees the publication by Monacelli of Planting Fields: A Place on Long Island. Gilded Age country estates on Long Island’s Gold Coast are not unusual—there were originally 500 of them—but this one is, not least because the house and its 400 landscaped acres have survived, more or less intact, as a public arboretum and state park. I contributed a chapter that tells a fifty-year story of agency and contingency, of strong-willed owners and talented designers, and of the accidental events that interfered with their plans and dreams.

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The post A COUNTRY PLACE AND ITS MAKERS first appeared on Witold Rybczynski.

I was saddened to learn of the death of David Childs (1941-2025). He was the chair when I joined the Commission of Fine Arts, and an intelligent architect and a charming man. Reading the obituaries put me in mind of something I came across while writing The Biography of a Building, about the Sainsbury Centre for the Visual Arts, a very early Norman Foster design. Sir Hugh Casson, the dean of postwar British architects, had written a letter of recommendation for the young Foster, who was being considered for the job: “As you have already met him [Foster],

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 I’ve been re-watching that excellent TV series, Ozark. The last episode included one of the characters—actually his ghost, there’s a lot of dead people in Ozark—singing a song whose melody was familiar although I couldn’t place it immediately. It was John Prine’s “Angel from Montgomery.” The mournful music evoked my Shirley, who loved Prine. I think it was his ironic lack of sentimentality that appealed to her. She also liked Joe Cocker, Randy Newman, Blossom Dearie, anything by Cole Porter. And Janis, whom she heard at Woodstock.

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The post MAKE ME AN ANGEL first appeared on Witold Rybczynski.

The other day I had the opportunity to visit Camp-Woods, a house on Philadelphia’s Main Line. It was built in 1910-12 for James M. Willcox, a banker who would later be president of the Philadelphia Saving Fund Society—and would commission the PSFS Building, America’s first International Style skyscraper. Camp-Woods is definitely not International Style, according to the brief Wiki entry it is Italianate-Georgian. While the architecture is a fusion, that is a misleading description. The architect was Howard Van Doren Shaw (1869-1926), one of the leading residential architects of his day—he was awarded the AIA Gold Medal, a high honor at that time.

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I dislike e-cards for Christmas. They are impersonal and seem to say “we couldn’t be bothered.” I still send cards, sometimes handmade, but there is one part of that that always disappoints: dropping them in the mailbox. The USPS mailbox at the corner is a dismal affair, a cheap, ugly metal receptacle that reminds me of a trash can and always makes me feel as if I’m throwing my letters away. I grew up in England, and I still remember the pillar box, made of sturdy cast-iron, embossed with G VI R and a royal crown, and painted bright red.

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