Monocle

As the US celebrates its 250th birthday, an architectural playbook is being deployed in Washington. It’s one that we’ve seen before. A few months after the 1936 Berlin Olympics, Adolf Hitler and architect Albert Speer revealed a masterplan to reconceive Berlin, even renaming it “Germania”. The plan was political and spatial, to represent the new metropole of a vast global emp...

On hot summer afternoons, Mediterranean cities go quiet. The streets are emptied by heat so intense that even the shadows seem to move slowly. The climate has inspired regional traditions such as the Spanish siesta, which is as much about respite from oppressive temperatures as it is about resting.

The same logic once informed architecture too, giving buildings cool...

Tucked away in a vast pine forest in southwestern Finland, Paimio Sanatorium stands as a masterpiece of modernism and the career-defining work of Alvar and Aino Aalto. Completed in 1933, the building was designed as a tuberculosis sanatorium but it soon became a project that propelled Finnish architecture onto the global stage. Over the subsequent decades, the complex transit...

When you think about the best birthday parties that you have been to, their success inevitably comes down to a gracious host who effortlessly brings together disparate social circles, while making everyone feel welcome. Such a host tends not to plan events that alienate large swaths of the attendees, nor kick off the festivities by insulting half the guests.
 
But ...

With the promise of 300 days of sunshine a year, people in Grand Junction, Colorado, like to start the day in the great outdoors. A paddle down the river before work, perhaps, or a mountain-bike ride at lunch – or a few runs at the Powderhorn Ski Resort, a charming throwback built in 1966, where the longest wait-time at the gondola is 10 minutes.

The so-called “Colo...