In contrast to our prima-donna image, we architects are for the most part fairly quiet souls. Still, there is one surefire way to get us apoplectic, and that's to have people second-guessing us and meddling with our work. So if you ever want to drive an architect crazy, that's a fine way to do it.  more...

We Americans are a people with profoundly changeable opinions. Our lifestyle ideals, for instance, seesaw from extravagance to asceticism in bursts of 30 years or so. This peculiar national trait affects our architecture as it does everything else, repeatedly taking us from overblown ostentation to reactionary modesty and back again.  more...

(This is Part 2 of a two-part series. See Part 1: Skylights done right.)

Last time, we looked at how to avoid some skylight-planning pitfalls. Now, armed with a couple of prospective locations, we'll learn how to test a skylight's performance before it's installed.  more...

(This is Part 1 of a two-part series. See Part 2: Small-scale model helps see the skylight.)

Adding a skylight is among the most popular do-it-yourself projects around. Too often, though, people decide where to put in their skylight by gosh and by golly, and then just hope for the best.  more...

Architect Frank Furness was a mustachioed bulldog of a man who, by contemporary accounts, seemed more renowned for his legendary swearing ability than for his architectural skill. Yet in his greatest projects, which date from the 1870s and '80s, Furness gleefully took Victorian eclecticism to another plane entirely, if not to another planet.  more...

Dear Gail,

You probably don't remember me, but I'm the kid who grew up next door to your mother back in the old neighborhood in Concord. Your mom used to baby-sit me, and in a way, over the years, she became the grandmother I never had. But I think you were already long married by that time.

Anyway, I dreamed about the neighborhood last night, as I still do now and then, even though the whole place is of course long destroyed. But there I was back home again, and in that aimless way that dreams develop, I thought I'd stop in next door and say hi to your mom.  more...

Beside a picture of Albert Einstein, a newspaper ad for "beautiful vinyl windows" declares: "It doesn't take a GENIUS...to buy the right windows."

"RESTORE IT RIGHT!" fires back an ad for a competing firm that installs only wood windows – "the perfect fit for your custom home." So which replacement windows are really the right choice? Vinyl? Wood? Some other kind? Or none at all?  more...

Some myths about bathroom design just won't seem to die – people subscribe to them out of custom more than anything else. But don't let your bathroom project be hobbled by a lot of obsolete ideas. Like these:  more...

Growing up, I got used to seeing the U.S. Capitol on the evening news, usually rising majestically behind Dan Rather as he reported on some national crisis or other. Over the years, its domed-and-colonnaded form has assumed almost mythical proportions. It is, after all, the focal point of the world's most powerful nation.  more...

A while back I happened to catch a popular radio host discussing some guy in Florida who'd painted his house in his old fraternity colors – purple and gold. Predictably, the man's neighbors were up in arms.

Now, as offensive as a purple-and-gold house might sound to you, hearing the way the talk show host carried on about it was worse. It was an outrage, he declared in so many words, that people could simply paint their houses any color they pleased, and by golly, there should be a way to stop them from doing it. It was a classic argument for the Taste Police.  more...

If you've ever chuckled at how your job is portrayed in the movies, be glad you're not an architect. On film, we're either saints or we're psychos. Judge for yourself:

Leading off with some early bad press for the profession is the 1934 horror film "The Black Cat," in which Boris Karloff is a loony architect who kills the wife of his nemesis Bela Lugosi, preserves her in a glass coffin, and then marries and kills Lugosi's daughter. Oh yeah, I forgot – when he's not busy doing all this, he also runs a satanic cult.  more...

If you've ever seen one of the old Buck Rogers movie serials, with their packing-crate robots and Art Deco rockets shooting sparks, you can appreciate how quaint another era's vision of the future can be -- and how difficult it is to get it right. Yet speculating on things to come, whether in writing, in images, or in three dimensions, is something humans find irresistible.  more...

The Carson Mansion in Eureka, Calif. – perhaps America's most recognized Victorian house – is so preposterously ornate that it approaches caricature.

Lumber magnate William Carson was anxious to showcase the marvelous versatility of his California redwood, so he made sure his architects, the brothers Samuel and Joseph Newsom, pulled out all the stops in his mansion's design. And did they ever: Since its completion in 1886, Carson's soaring gingerbread confection has remained the last word in Victorian bombast.  more...

Chances are, movie palaces changed the way you light your home.

After electric lighting replaced gaslight at the end of the 19th century, most electric lighting was "specular," a fancy way of saying it came from a point source like the white-hot filament of a standard light bulb. That situation changed during the 1920s with the arrival of indirect lighting ("indirect" meaning that the light source is hidden).  more...

A few blocks from my office, there's a dreary, 10-year-old strip mall fronted by literally acres of unrelieved parking lot. Though it has no fewer than five separate entrances for cars, God help anyone who dares to approach the place on foot.  more...