U. S. Commission of Dark Arts 🧱🗃️

The reason Donald Trump can fiddle with DC's public spaces is that they're controlled by the National Park Service. That wasn't never inevitable, and the story of how they ended up under a big brown campaign hat says a lot about Progressive-era paternalism. 🗃️

Much to recommend about this article, but these are some of the prettiest sun studies I’ve seen. Done in Blender.

Incredible

Great publicity for wHY and BBB’s redesign of KRJDA’s Rockefeller wing.

Tomorrow's the day for me and @stephenjacobsmith.com talking about single-stair and the future of design review in DC. Tickets are getting scarce.

I think it was actually very healthy that people like Jane Addams became concerned about the conditions poor Londoners suffered.

Historians like to contrast the bombastic, male-led City Beautiful movement with the practical, women-led Municipal Housekeeping movement. But what if women invented both, while reinventing Christianity? 🗃️

It's a new Stone Age in London, with stone apartment buildings and a stone demonstrator exhibit showing how it's done. Because it is silly to grind up limestone, cook it, and then add water to turn it into... stone. We could be doing a lot more of this in Canada- we are made of rock.

Tangential to the Cheesecake Factory talk is that their workers are genuinely elite tier 1 operators in the food service industry. I have a friend who manages bars and restaurants and he will instantly hire anyone with Cheesecake Factory experience. They are like the Marines minus the war crimes

RCV is going to make ANC outcomes so much better.

If you enjoyed You Can See Everything, can I recommend a another documentary where everyone is lying? Orson Welles is a lot more, uh, French, than Fielder though.

My son’s middle school baseball coach was taken by ICE last week, immediately after denial of his citizenship application. My tween and I have now written letters to attach to a bail application so Coach can come home, for a minute at least, from detention in Louisiana.

Residential buildings in NYC With the largest interior yards. The Dakota is in 25th place.

I think more Americans need to understand that their built environment is regulated by the groupthink of unaccountable organizations whose members think the sky is a different color abroad.

The most Manhattan thing in London. Ideal House by Raymond Hood. 1928-29.

Interesting article about how India’s new American-style highways aren’t peeling trucks away from the old roads because, essentially, there isn’t enough sprawl infrastructure (mechanics, rest stops) to support trucking www.bloomberg.com/features/202...

This is actually an unreadable work by a Continental philosopher. Congestion is a metaphor. Or is it? Here's 200 pages of anecdotes about carriage horses in Early Modern Europe.

The U.S. Department of Commerce published a report in 1951 to support an effort to create a harmonized code for all 50 states. In 1955, ASME published the A40.8 National Standard Plumbing Code as an American Standard Association (predecessor to ANSI) publication.

I already voted for I-86 for ethical reasons but spiting the steakhouse expense account set does sweeten the deal.

In much the same way the ballroom became about security over time, the arch has become about history. On the administration's closing argument for it (at NCPC and in court): www.nytimes.com/2026/10/23/u...