The Family Store

A melting pot. A quilt. These are convtentional metaphors for the modern city, but if you ask me, a better choice is the sandwich. What's more urban than a sandwich, ideally a pastrami on rye, from a good deli? Throw in a Dr. Brown's and a pickle and you've really got something: a combination of flavors that together make something complex but with a little bite to it, something that may not be entirely good for you but sure tastes great and how could you live without it? That's a city defined right there.

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The Tower that Beer Built

Somewhat unwittingly, I have embarked on a series of pieces on skyscrapers born of alcoholic beverage magnates. The Seagram Building was the product of the (bootleg) whiskey fortune amassed by Sam Bronfman. In Dallas, we have the Kirby (nee Busch) Building, now a residential apartment house but originally a spec office tower financed by the St. Louis beer barron Adolphus Busch. Like the Woolworth in Building in New York, it celebrates its centennial this year.

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The Bush Library

My first review as architecture critic of the Dallas Morning News ran this past weekend, an examination of the George W. Bush Presidential Center. The complex houses three functions — a library, a museum, and a policy institute. The design is by Bob Stern, with landscaping and an attached park by Michael Van Valkenburgh.

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The Story of Seagram

About fifteen years ago, when I was an editor at Princeton Architectural Press, I asked Phyllis Lambert to write a short introduction to a book of Ezra Stoller photographs of the Seagram Building. Deeply immersed in the research for the show and book that would become Mies in America, she declined my offer. I recall, also, her mentioning that she planned to write something on the building herself in the future, something substantial. Now we have that book: Building Seagram, a unique hybrid that is at once a work of the highest architectural scholarship, a memoir, and an argument for civic responsibility.

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How to Design an Iconic NY Fast Food Joint

The best hot dog in New York? That's a no-brainer: Papaya King. Even Julia Child said so. "Tastier than filet mignon," is the mantra at its iconic Eighty-sixth Street storefront, a neon-decked, mustard-yellow institution since the 1930s. In a few short weeks, this signature New York establishment will be coming downtown for the first time, to a storefront on St. Mark's Place. Great news, but how do you design an outpost of a legendary fast-food joint without losing its character?

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Berlin: Then and Now

Roman Vishniac is not a household name, but it probably should be. As a new retrospective at the International Center of Photography, curated by Maya Benton, makes plainly evident, Vishniac was one of the more versatile photographers of the twentieth century, and the breath of his accomplishment and legacy is only now beginning to come clear.

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The Dallas Way

I am pleased to announce that next month I will become the new architecture critic of the Dallas Morning News, and also a professor in the architecture school at the University of Texas at Arlington. This is an extraordinary personal opportunity, to say the least, and one that will place me in a city of Ewing-sized ambition and energy.

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Inventing the Modern Library

With the future of the New York Public Library the subject of so much public contention, there could not be a better time for MoMA's new exhibition on Henri Labrouste, the 19th-century French architect who invented the modern library as we know it. His two great projects — he built little else — are a pair of touchstone Parisian libraries, the Bibliotheque St. Genevieve and the Bibliotheque Nationale, that remain landmarks for their inventive structure, functional planning, and edifying design.

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Orange City

Because I've been on holiday in Florida, and because I've been reading John McPhee's book on the subject, and because I've just read an urgent story on their potential demise, I've been thinking a lot about oranges, and also eating them and drinking their sweet juice.

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The Imaginary Worlds of Stephen Talasnik

A few months ago, an architect friend referred me to Stephen Talasnik, an artist of considerable energy and charm who creates dense, mesmerizing works in two and three dimensions. New Yorkers may be familiar with his idiosyncratic portfolio from one of his many exhibitions here or from his recently installed work at Storm King. That initial introduction led to my contribution of an essay to Talasnik's new book, Floating World, a documentation of his installation of extraordinary bamboo islands at the Denver Botanic Gardens.

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Mark Lamster is a writer on the arts and culture. He is Associate American Editor of The Architectural Review, and is currently at work on his third book, a biography of the late architect Philip Johnson. Follow: @marklamster.

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Master of Shadows: The Secret Diplomatic Career of the Painter Peter Paul Rubens
Mark Lamster
Nan A. Talese, 2009
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