Long-Form Essays on Architecture and Cities

The whole old town of Matera seen from across a gorge: cream stone houses climbing to a bell tower on the skyline, above green slopes and limestone outcrops

Essay

MATERA — THE CAVE CITY THAT WAS A DISGRACE, THEN A WONDER

In 1952 Italy emptied the caves of Matera as a national disgrace. Today they are hotels, film sets and a World Heritage Site. How the Sassi work, and who paid for the change.

Black-and-white aerial photograph of a new town on a flat plain: pale buildings around a large open square with a tall tower, a big church at the bottom right, and straight roads running out

Architecture

THE PLAN

Latina and Sabaudia, Brasília, Chandigarh: cities a state drew on a blank sheet of paper, and the real city that grew where the paper ended. Chapter IV of Utopian Cities, with a detour to Louis Kahn's parliament in Dhaka.

A long stone power station with battlements on the far bank of a wide, still green river, with the square tower of a castle rising behind it among trees.

Architecture

THE COMPANY TOWN

A sleeping-car maker builds a town south of Chicago, a cotton manufacturer a village on the Adda, Henry Ford a rubber town in the Amazon. Chapter III of Utopian Cities: the company town, and what is left of it once the company no longer needs it.

17th-century etching of a vast forecourt seen from the palace: an octagonal fountain, carriages and crowds behind a curved railing, two great horseshoe-shaped buildings beyond, and a straight

Architecture

ALL ROADS LEAD TO THE KING

Three avenues converge on the palace at Versailles, some thirty streets fan out from a tower at Karlsruhe, and a prefect cuts boulevards through Paris. Cities laid out for power, who paid the bill, and why Paris is still one of the best cities to walk in.

Pienza on its ridge seen from a green wheat field below, with cypresses, the palaces and the cathedral bell tower against the sky

Architecture

PIENZA — THE POPE WHO BUILT A CITY TO ENJOY THE VIEW

A pope goes back to the village where he was born and turns it into a city in three years: a trapezoid square, a street that hides its end, a church sliding towards the valley, and a palace built only for looking.

The Nordic Pavilion at the Venice Biennale by Sverre Fehn, its roof of slender concrete ribs above a wooden library structure

Architecture

THE VENICE BIENNALE — DO WE REALLY WANT TO GO IN?

In 2004, off the night train, Venice filled our eyes so much that we asked ourselves whether we really wanted to go into the Biennale. Nineteen years later I have the answer: go in, for the pavilions, and come out slowly.

Sepia photograph of a straight, empty country road lined with ruined tombs and brick walls with marble reliefs set into them, with no trees along it

Strata

WHO MADE THE APPIAN WAY

Almost nothing of the Appian Way we carry in our heads is ancient. The fragments on the walls, the road dug out and given back, the enclosure, the pines: someone decided all of it, between 1808 and the twentieth century.

Restoration

WHERE IT WASN'T, AS IT WASN'T

I got there by motorbike in June 2019, two months after the Notre-Dame fire, and didn't connect the two. It took me seven years.

Architecture

VILLA D’ESTE — THE OTHER SIDE: FRESCOES, AUTOMATA, MYSTERIES

At the gate of Bomarzo a sphinx asks whether marvels are made by deception or by art. Take her to Villa d'Este: the palace is painted to lie, the fountains play music and birdsong, and the man who designed it all invented inscriptions. Room by room, the other side of the garden.

Veil-like cascade falling from a great basin into the oval pool of the Oval Fountain, among climbing plants and balustrades, at Villa d'Este

Architecture

VILLA D'ESTE — WATER AS A BUILDING MATERIAL

Villa d'Este is not a garden with fountains. It is a hydraulic machine, and a map you can walk, built between six lost conclaves by a man who never got to Rome, and who brought Rome home instead.

A small child walks away down a side aisle of Chartres Cathedral, between blackened vaults and a half-cleaned pier, towards the bright nave at the far end

Architecture

THE CATHEDRAL WITHOUT SHADOWS

I walked into Notre-Dame and found it flat. Then I discovered that the man who designed its light calls himself a sculptor of shadows.

The round travertine tomb of Caecilia Metella crowned with medieval battlements, rising above holm oaks beside the Appian Way under a clear blue sky

Strata

THE APPIAN WAY — THE ROAD ON TOP OF A VOLCANO

On the Appian Way you ride higher than the fields. It isn't an impression: you are on the back of a lava flow that stopped exactly where the tomb of Caecilia Metella stands.