Revisiting something that I wrote about years ago. Public transit stations are places of movement. Travelers not only move between stations, but within stations as well. The many escalators and stairways (and the spaces around them) in London’s Westminster Station are just as mechanical as the trains that whisk commuters from place to place. In many ways, subway stations [...]

The J. Paul Getty museum overlooks West Los Angeles like a citadel – a fortress city – upon a hill. Designed by Richard Meier, it is accessible to the public via a tram that winds its way up Santa Monica Mountains. Its location and its emphasis on classical "western" art has opened it up to [...]

I like how the private space of the skyscrapers looms over the public space of the library in this picture. Bunker Hill’s “Fortification” as Mike Davis has called it, is stark when looking at the organization of space around the Central Library. Much of the area around the library, including the sidewalks, are technically private [...]

For the past 100 years, Spanish-Colonial Revival has been central to a local mythology that romanticizes the style in architecture and popular culture. Sites such as Union Station in the heart of Los Angeles are excellent examples of the region’s integration of the mythic past into urban development. Yet, we should not ignore that its [...]

Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport is the 8th busiest airport in the United States. The site itself has been an airport since the 1930s, but the building that stands today was constructed in the 1990s. This is a picture of Terminal 4, the Barry Goldwater Terminal take from a walkway to Concourse A. PHX’s geometric architecture [...]