Last August, the FBI raided San Francisco's Department of Building Inspection and arrested an official for allegedly taking bribes from a contractor. It was yet another embarrassment for an organization that, rightly or wrongly, has long suffered from a reputation for favoritism and improprieties. At the time of the arrest, the department had been under FBI investigation for five years.

This event got me to thinking about the nature of corruption in building and planning departments, regardless of where it occurs.  more...

In the 20 years that followed World War II, the phrase "Made In Japan" was transformed from a synonym for worthlessness into a mark of exceptional quality. More recently, Korea's reputation for quality has likewise turned around: The automaker Hyundai, for example, whose early U.S.  more...

Thanks to the old stereotype of the architect hunched over a drafting board, T-square in hand, many people still think that an architect's main purpose is to draw "blueprints" (nowadays more properly called working drawings).

The trouble with this romantic notion is that it suggests that architects are paid to draw, when in fact, they're paid to think.

In truth, producing working drawings is a tedious but relatively incidental aspect of the architect's charge. It's roughly analogous to taking a novel that's been written in shorthand and typing it into a computer.  more...

It's been almost 30 years since the architectural and decorative style known as "High-Tech" hit the American scene. Arising during the mid-1970s, and legitimized by Joan Kron and Suzanne Slesin's eponymous book of 1978, High-Tech had every hipster architecture student of my generation designing facades with chain-link fencing and corrugated culverts.

Among High-Tech's most celebrated paradigms was Paris's Pompidou Center, completed by the architects Richard Rodgers and Renzo Piano in 1976.  more...

We Americans are a puzzling bunch. We travel to Italy, France or Spain and come back smitten with the charmingly walk-able streets, close-knit houses, and humanly scaled public spaces we find there.  more...

Everybody loves a Victorian-era house. It's hard not to be charmed by such a big and boisterous creation, and to be sure, Victorians had many good qualities. Spaciousness was certainly one. Another was the almost incredible amount of effort lavished on their famously ornate detailing.  more...

"People will not look forward to posterity," said the English statesman Edmund Burke, "who never look backward to their ancestors."

Burke's words ring truer than ever today, when many of the world's most fortunate inhabitants behave as if they were the only ones who ever mattered or ever will.

Although many of our ancestors have been pictured as heavy-handed exploiters of the environment, at least they had the excuse of ignorance.  more...

If you're of Baby Boom vintage or younger, you probably take your local supermarket for granted. You walk in, round up the Mr. Clean and Mrs. Butterworth, mince your way through the check stand, and you're done.

But grocery shopping wasn't always like that. The modern supermarket--technically known as a "self-service food store"--is a fairly recent invention.

Prior to World War II, grocery stores were usually very small, narrow affairs, and going shopping amounted to telling a clerk behind a counter exactly what was needed.  more...

(This is part 3 of a three-part series. See Part 1 and Part 2.)

Suppose you wanted to go out and buy yourself a new suit of clothes, or perhaps a new car. Now suppose that, after you'd chosen the one you liked, you had to appear before a board that would rule on whether it found your choice acceptable. If it didn't, you had to change your ideas until it was satisfied.

Sound Orwellian? It isn't.  more...

(This is Part 2 of a three-part series. See Part 1.)

"The fallacy of contextualism," wrote former New York Times architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable, "the masquerade of matched materials, the cosmetic cover-up of architectural maquillage meant to make a building 'fit' surroundings that frequently change, are a trap into which many architects jump or fall."

Or, I might add, are pushed.  more...

(This is Part 1 of a three-part series. See Part 2: )

For a century or so, zoning and building regulations have existed to ensure public health and safety. Now and then, they've affected architectural aesthetics as well--for example, New York's light-and-air zoning laws indirectly created the city's characteristic stepped-back skyscrapers--but dictating how buildings should look was never their intent.

This is no longer the case.  more...

Suppose a developer wanted to advertise the name of his/her subdivision by building a sign 500 feet long on a prominent hillside that was visible for miles. Suppose each letter was going to be 50 feet high and built out of telephone poles, pipes and sheet metal. And suppose the whole thing was going to be lit up by 10,000 or so unshaded 40-watt bulbs, so it couldn't be overlooked even at night.

A design review board's nightmare? Not really. In 1923, a pair of developers named S.H.  more...

People love things that come in threes, whether wise men or musketeers or stooges. But you'll also find groups of three showing up in more hifalutin' places: Hence, a symphony has three movements, a play has three acts, and a novel has its proverbial beginning, middle and end.

The peculiar power of three-part compositions crops up in architecture as well. Take, for instance, the division of the classical column into base, shaft and capital -- a sort of beginning, middle and end in three dimensions.  more...

Charles Kuralt, the longtime "On The Road" correspondent for CBS News, once observed that, "thanks to the interstate highway system, it is now possible to travel from coast to coast without seeing anything."

Since Kuralt made that comment a generation ago, things have only gotten worse. Nowadays, instead of not seeing anything, we just see the same things over and over, no matter where we go. Although the interstate system crisscrosses some of the most splendidly varied landscape on the earth, it has also helped make traveling that landscape an experience of unparalleled monotony.  more...

It's human nature to crave the fresh, the new and the fashionable -- and that goes for remodeling as much as anything else. The quest for the mythical "updated look" of magazine lore has long tempted both owners and architects to graft trendy additions onto older homes just to make them ever-so-briefly fashionable again. Alas, you need only to leaf through a 20-year-old copy of Better Homes and Gardens to see how such "updates" have stood the test of time. Most would elicit groans, if not laughter.  more...