Yesterday, I mentioned mill-style architecture in Providence. Here’s an example. I suspect that the first floor is cast iron, but it could be steel with architectural sheathing. But buildings like this are, architecturally, all about the brick. As plain as this building is, there’s still a lot going on here. A short description of the …
I don’t know Providence well enough to talk about the character of the city. Like a lot of small cities in the northeast, it’s had to move from manufacturing to a service economy, a transition that has probably been eased by the presence of several large educational institutions. A good percentage of the buildings downtown …
There are long treatises on the topic of the aesthetics of the machine age, starting in the nineteenth century and working their way up to the present. That topic includes everything from the precisionists to steampunk. Great stuff, but not what I want to talk about. The machine-made mass production of architectural elements in the …
That’s a picture of the train shed at the Bristol Temple Meads station. It’s a very old station, and it’s been altered several times. The shed roof here and the head house off to the left are, I believe, mostly from the 1870s renovation. I took this picture as I got off a train because …
That’s Buckhill Lodge, a private house located within Kensington Gardens in London. As I approached it and took this picture, I was surprised and thinking that carpenter’s gothic wasn’t really an English style. Then when I got closer, I realized that I had made a category error by making an assumption. Here’s the trim on …
