THE STANDARD.
A dedicated chronicle of architectural thought, theory, and criticism. We explore the why, not just the what.
The Architect Who Builds for Centuries
On the discipline of designing for longevity: the materials, details, and habits of mind that separate buildings that last from buildings that do not.
What Gets Listed and What Gets Lost
The politics of heritage designation, and who decides which buildings the future is allowed to demolish.
The Second Life of Buildings
Adaptive reuse is the most honest form of architectural practice. On what it means to find new purpose in old fabric.
The Restoration Debate
Viollet-le-Duc versus Ruskin: the argument about how to treat historic buildings that architecture has never fully resolved, and probably never should.
The House That Plans Itself Around the Sun
Most houses are built facing the road. The considered ones are built facing the sun.
What Jane Jacobs Got Right
Sixty years after The Death and Life of Great American Cities, her argument about what makes cities work has lost none of its force.
Geoffrey Bawa and the Tropical City
The Sri Lankan master who spent forty years asking what modernism looks like when it is built in heat, humidity, and the specific light of the Indian Ocean.
The Square and the Politics of Gathering
Public squares are where cities make their most important statements. On what it means to design a space for people to come together.
The Street As Architecture
Before the building comes the street. On why the most important architectural decision a city makes is the one it makes at ground level.
The Market and the City
From the souk to the covered arcade, the spaces where cities buy and sell have always been their most alive. On commerce as civic architecture.
Invisible Infrastructure
The sewers, tunnels, and buried networks that make city life possible are the greatest engineering achievements of the urban world. Almost nobody knows they exist.
The City After the Car
For a century, cities were reorganized around the automobile. The undoing of that decision is the defining urban project of our time.
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