The New York Times
February 9, 1995
Home, pp. C1, C6.
Architecture's Young Old Fogies
Consider (deeply, please) Mr. Smith's philosophy: "The
whole idea of doing something original is so old now."
[Photos] Above: Young classicists: from left, Michael
Dwyer, David T. Mayernik, Richard Cameron, Richard Franklin
Sammons, Donald Rattner. Left: Geoffrey Carter's
home-as-temple in Dutchess County, N.Y.
By Patricia Leigh Brown
Let history record that the Young Turks of American
architecture are really old fogies. Earnest and triumphal,
they are stealthily invading the countryside with radical
new architectural concepts -- Ionic temple fronts,
rusticated pergolas and panoramic friezes depicting the
labors of Hercules.
They are the antediluvian Vitruvians, the New Classicists.
And, while some consider them true visionaries, others call
them retro.
To understand their growing but still nascent "reticent
revolution" (as Progressive Architecture magazine called
it), begin in South Bend, Ind., home of the now-classicist
Notre Dame School of Architecture and Athens of the new
movement.
Exhibit A: The Villa Indiana, a house in the suburbs by way
of the Italian Veneto that 33-year-old Prof. Duncan G.
Stroik of Notre Dame University, has built for himself and
his family. Notice the Doric columns, the garden loggias
and what he calls "the imprint of the Serliana on the front
elevation" (translation: "Check out those Palladian
windows"). Experience the lacrymal effect of the figure of
Wisdom casting down Ignorance in the allegorical mural in
the living room.
Exhibit B: A house in Livermore, Calif., designed by Thomas
Gordon Smith, the dean of the Notre Dame Architecture
School, for Demetra and James Wilson, his inlaws. She is a
first-generation American of Greek descent; he is an
astrophysicist. Marvel at the "cubiculi" (bedrooms, to
you). Envy the clock tower modeled on the Andronicus, an
observatory built nearly 2,000 years ago.
Consider (deeply, please) Mr. Smith's philosophy: "The
whole idea of doing something original is so old now."
Their patron saints range from Vitruvius and Palladio to
early-20th-century classicists like John Russell Pope,
architect of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, and
the author and former Central Park curator Henry Hope Reed,
a founder of Classical America, an organization that
supports classicism in the arts. A more problematic but
high-profile role; model is the Prince of Wales, whose new
Institute in a John Nash-deslgned villa in London is a
mecca for the anti-carbuncle set.
So far, three degree-granting architectural schools have
recently tailored their curriculums to meet the increasing
demand for classical training. In New York, there is also
the new Institute for the Study of Classical Architecture,
founded three and half years ago by Donald Rattner and
Richard Wilson Cameron, two young architects determined, in
Mr. Rattner's words, to "stop the loss of memory on the
part of fellow architects."
One unlikely convert is Clem Labine, the founder of the Old
House Journal and the Mr. Victorian of the 1980's. He now
publishes Traditional Building, a magazine of historical
architectural products. "I have come to believe that the
Victorian revival is a rich opulent style that has nothing
to teach us about the future," he said. "In a world of
diminishing resources, it lacks moral relevance."
The young Vitruvians like to quote Hegel and are mostly
self-educated -- because the Beaux Arts training they
cherish, with its ordered symmetry and pictorial
extravagance, was largely thrown out of American
architecture schools by oldster modernists after World War
II. They say that classical architecture is more enduring,
a quality that makes it environmentally and socially
responsible. To them, being huddled over a board drawing
triglyphs and tympanums Is an ecstatlc new frontier.
"We've run out of the new and never-before-seen," said
Richard Franklin Sammons, 33, a New York classlcist who is
a lecturer at the Prince of Wales Institute and teaches
design at Parsons School of Design. "My generation is the
first that doesn't come with all that World War II baggage.
We didn't grow up in an era where the future was
necessarily positive. So you look at things with an even
eye. You realize that all the stuff built in the 1920's was
a lot better.
"We're actively intending to bulld something we actually
want to live in," he added. "We're the only avant-garde out
there."
It is a strange avant-garde indeed. The shelves of Mr.
Sammons's Greenwich Village office are lined with books
like "Proportion: A Measure of Order" and "Emily Post's
Etiquette." Mr. Sammons, for instance, who has a
professorial demeanor and a slight gentleman's paunch, is
working on a 15,000-to-20,000-square-foot mansion in
suburban Nashville inspired by Palladio and Thomas
Jefferson. He and the client have spent a year searching
for the rlght brick.
These are not low-budget productions. Among the houses
designed by Ferguson Murray & Shamamian, the firm where Mr.
Rattner and Mr. Cameron practice, is a 10,000-square-foot
house in Connecticut. Michael Dwyer, 42, an architect at
Buttrick White & Burtis in Manhattan, has recently
completed a classical-style yacht and an $8.95 million town
house on the Upper East Side and is renovating Rudolph
Nureyev's former apartment in the Dakota -- a la grecque.
Like his peers, Mr. Dwyer says he has been influenced by
the historic preservation movement, which brought "an
appreciation of apprenticeship and craftsmanship." He
spends his weekends roaming New York City, painstakingly
drawing 1920's buildings.
Classical revivals are nothing new, as Vincent Scully, the
Sterling Professor Emeritus in the History of Art at Yale
University, points out. But the latest one, albeit
fledgling, is notable for its rigor. Its adherents, who so
far are predominantly white men, may be spotted wielding
proportional dividers, compass-like instruments used for
measuring ratios. Professor Scully notes that most American
houses are not strictly modern and that many use classical
elements (witness the proliferation of bad imitations of
Tara). Classicism "speaks fundamentally to what people
want, to security and dignity and permanence," he said.
Of his generational rebellion, Mr. Rattner, who sometimes
wears a tie inspired by the Roman Temple of Mars Ultor,
observed that "every generatlon recreates the ritual
slaying of the symbolic father figure."
But the timing is significant, said the architect Robert A.
M. Stern, whose buildings often draw on classical themes.
Right now, Mr. Stern said, architecture "occupies a
margin," using fractured forms that many people find
emotionally aloof. "These young people are trying to find
something more rooted in the experience of building," he
continued. "They are perhaps the true radicals of their
tlme."
Some regard them as a reactionary lunatic fringe. James
Stewart Polshek, a modernist and former dean of the
architecture school at Columbla Unlverslty, calls the
classicists "bizarrely backward" and compares their
conservatism to the political right wing. "They have no new
ideas," he said. "They're Luddites. If I were going to be
uncharitable I would say that these young people are
looking for their market niche."
The young old fogies say that their architecture doesn't
mirror any ideological view -- although conservative
buildings may be right for cautionary times. "Some people
are surprised when we show up at dinner parties, because
they expect us to be wearing wigs and period dress," said
Anne Fairfax, 40, an architect, who is Mr. Sammons's wife
and partner. But she added, "Young classicists are not
necessarily neo-conservatlve, right-wing Newties."
In fact, classicism's contract with America is steeped in
the democratic tradition.
"Our heritage is written in the bricks, mortar, wood and
nails of classical architecture," said the Washington
architect Allan Greenberg, 56, who used polychrome Greek
columns for newspaper offices in Athens, Ga. "When looking
for a style expressive of the Declaration of Independence
and the Constitution, the Founding Fathers looked to
classicism."
It is a tradition with great emotional resonance. "In the
ancient world, a pediment and an archway symbolized the
house of God, a form which separated the world of living
from the dead," he said. "When you see this on an American
doorway, or a saltbox house, it tells you that the rights
and prerogatives of the ancient gods, appropriated by kings
in Europe, here belong to John and Jane Citizen. It's noble
and moving."
At their best, the new classicists seek to combine graceful
proportions and ornamentation with affordable materials and
an almost a Shakerlike simplicity. The biggest challenge is
to keep costs down: classical ornament has traditionally
relied on time-consuming masonry and millwork. In Dutchess
County, New York, Stephen Falatko, an architect, has
reinterpreted the spare elegant Greek Revival houses and
farm buiidings of the Hudson Valley. Mr. Falatko, for one,
awaits the advent of classical computer-aided design to
make classical architecture cost effective.
New fogies also look forward rather than back. "Classicism
can really look fuddy-duddy," Mr. Dwyer said. "It has to
look chic." The critic Sir John Summerson observed in
"Heavenly Mansions" (1963) that the creative architects in
the classical tradition have been those who have had a
feeling for its "fairy-tale" origin, while the "monsters"
have been the ones who slavishly "worked the rules."
Today, those fairy-tale origins are also mystically
unfolding in the snowdrifts elsewhere in Dutchess County.
With no classical training, Geoffrey Carter, 42, a
preservationist, has devoted the last five and a half years
to creating his own $150,000 heavenly mansion, a
temple-like house which he has built brick by handmade
brick -- all 1,800 of them.
He has spent his nights and weekends fashioning the bricks,
doors, cornices and moldings himself, mixing the stucco for
the columns out of lime, cement and sand. He was even
married on the porch last fall under a Corinthian flourish
of fireworks.
It is the stuff of myth.
[Photos] Left: Entablature (from top, cornice, frieze,
architrave.) Inset: A Muse (Richard Morris Hunt Memorial in
New York). Above Right: Richard Sammons's design for
Nashville house.
[Photo] Watercolor of fantasy villa by David T. Mayernik,
a New York architect.
[Photo] Below and Left: Thomas Gordon Smith's "Tower of the
Winds" house, in Livermore, Calif., is modeled on an
ancient astronomical observatory.
[Photos] Above: Notre Dame's classical troika: from left,
Thomas Gordon Smith and Michael Lykoudis with Duncan Stroik
at his Villa Indiana. Left: The Villa Indiana has columns
and Palladian windows. Allegorical murals will follow.
[Photo] Left: Farm building by Stephen Falatko in Dutchess
County, New York, inspired by regional Greek-Revival
architecture.
[Sidebar] Study Guide
For further study of classical tradition in architecture:
y Classical America, an organization that encourages the
classical tradition in the arts, and the National Academy
of Design will present four lectures on "The Classical
Tradition Alive Today." Jaquelin Robertson will speak on
"The Virginia Heritage" on Feb. 15; David Easton, "The
American Country House," Feb. 22; Robert A. M. Stern, "New
York Architecture," March 1, and Henry Hope Reed, "The
United States Capitol," March 8. National Academy of
Design, 1083 Fifth Avenue, at 89th Street. Fee, $10 a
lecture; (212) 369-4880.
Sir John Soane's Museum Foundation presents "Exploring
the Worlds of Thomas Jefferson and Sir John Soane," on Feb.
15 at 6 P.M. at the Union Club, 101 East 69th Street. Fee,
$65. Reservations are required; (212) 289-9101.
The Classical Architecture League of South Bend, Ind., is
sponsoring a conference and exhibition, "The Art of
Building Cities: A Challenge for a New Millennium" starting
July 8. Speakers will inciude professor Vincent Scully of
Yale University, at the Art Institute of Chicago, July 9 to
11. The exhibition will be held at the Chicago Cultural
Center July 8 to Aug. 25. For information: (219) 631-6168.
Classical America and the Carpenters' Company of
Philadelphia are sponsoring two lectures in Philadelphia:
Stephen Falatko, on classicism in the Hudson Valley, Feb.
27, and C. Allan Brown, on classical garden design, March
27. For information, (215) 963-0747.
[Sidebar] Talking. The talk of a young classicist can be
tricky -- it is nearly exclusively based on Greek and Roman
architectural precedents, created for monarchs, emperors
and mythological deities. These terms should help you
through the next cocktail party. Capital: Carved or
decorated block at the top of a column (also the money
needed to pay for these often-custom details). Corinthian:
derived from its use in the Greek city-state of Corinth,
crowned with large spiny leaves from the acanthus plant.
American architects put a native spin on it, substituting
corn husks and tobacco leaves. Entablature: Horizontal
structure supported by the column (composed of Architrave,
or lower part, Frieze, middle part, and Cornice, detail at
roof edge -- before there were aluminum gutters). Entasis:
Slight taper in the shaft of columns to correct optical
distortions returns today as a counterpoint to modernism's
concrete cylinders. Order: The parts of any colonnaded
architecture; base, column, capital, entablature. Through
the miracle of catalogues, you can now mail-order any Order
(Tuscan, Doric, Ionic, Corinthian or Composite). Mosaic:
Once the organizing principle for floor pattern in great
palaces (the bigger the stone the more important the room)
-- now reduced to four-inch sticky-back squares from
lumberyards. Pediment: Shallow triangular gable on
classical buildings has evolved into a stick-on detail for
suburban imitation of Tara. Procession: The way one passed
through a temple, relative to sacred altars and ritual
sacrifices. Now often organized around the powder room and
whims of the host.
Michael McDonough
END
February 9, 1995
Home, pp. C1, C6.
Architecture's Young Old Fogies
Consider (deeply, please) Mr. Smith's philosophy: "The
whole idea of doing something original is so old now."
[Photos] Above: Young classicists: from left, Michael
Dwyer, David T. Mayernik, Richard Cameron, Richard Franklin
Sammons, Donald Rattner. Left: Geoffrey Carter's
home-as-temple in Dutchess County, N.Y.
By Patricia Leigh Brown
Let history record that the Young Turks of American
architecture are really old fogies. Earnest and triumphal,
they are stealthily invading the countryside with radical
new architectural concepts -- Ionic temple fronts,
rusticated pergolas and panoramic friezes depicting the
labors of Hercules.
They are the antediluvian Vitruvians, the New Classicists.
And, while some consider them true visionaries, others call
them retro.
To understand their growing but still nascent "reticent
revolution" (as Progressive Architecture magazine called
it), begin in South Bend, Ind., home of the now-classicist
Notre Dame School of Architecture and Athens of the new
movement.
Exhibit A: The Villa Indiana, a house in the suburbs by way
of the Italian Veneto that 33-year-old Prof. Duncan G.
Stroik of Notre Dame University, has built for himself and
his family. Notice the Doric columns, the garden loggias
and what he calls "the imprint of the Serliana on the front
elevation" (translation: "Check out those Palladian
windows"). Experience the lacrymal effect of the figure of
Wisdom casting down Ignorance in the allegorical mural in
the living room.
Exhibit B: A house in Livermore, Calif., designed by Thomas
Gordon Smith, the dean of the Notre Dame Architecture
School, for Demetra and James Wilson, his inlaws. She is a
first-generation American of Greek descent; he is an
astrophysicist. Marvel at the "cubiculi" (bedrooms, to
you). Envy the clock tower modeled on the Andronicus, an
observatory built nearly 2,000 years ago.
Consider (deeply, please) Mr. Smith's philosophy: "The
whole idea of doing something original is so old now."
Their patron saints range from Vitruvius and Palladio to
early-20th-century classicists like John Russell Pope,
architect of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, and
the author and former Central Park curator Henry Hope Reed,
a founder of Classical America, an organization that
supports classicism in the arts. A more problematic but
high-profile role; model is the Prince of Wales, whose new
Institute in a John Nash-deslgned villa in London is a
mecca for the anti-carbuncle set.
So far, three degree-granting architectural schools have
recently tailored their curriculums to meet the increasing
demand for classical training. In New York, there is also
the new Institute for the Study of Classical Architecture,
founded three and half years ago by Donald Rattner and
Richard Wilson Cameron, two young architects determined, in
Mr. Rattner's words, to "stop the loss of memory on the
part of fellow architects."
One unlikely convert is Clem Labine, the founder of the Old
House Journal and the Mr. Victorian of the 1980's. He now
publishes Traditional Building, a magazine of historical
architectural products. "I have come to believe that the
Victorian revival is a rich opulent style that has nothing
to teach us about the future," he said. "In a world of
diminishing resources, it lacks moral relevance."
The young Vitruvians like to quote Hegel and are mostly
self-educated -- because the Beaux Arts training they
cherish, with its ordered symmetry and pictorial
extravagance, was largely thrown out of American
architecture schools by oldster modernists after World War
II. They say that classical architecture is more enduring,
a quality that makes it environmentally and socially
responsible. To them, being huddled over a board drawing
triglyphs and tympanums Is an ecstatlc new frontier.
"We've run out of the new and never-before-seen," said
Richard Franklin Sammons, 33, a New York classlcist who is
a lecturer at the Prince of Wales Institute and teaches
design at Parsons School of Design. "My generation is the
first that doesn't come with all that World War II baggage.
We didn't grow up in an era where the future was
necessarily positive. So you look at things with an even
eye. You realize that all the stuff built in the 1920's was
a lot better.
"We're actively intending to bulld something we actually
want to live in," he added. "We're the only avant-garde out
there."
It is a strange avant-garde indeed. The shelves of Mr.
Sammons's Greenwich Village office are lined with books
like "Proportion: A Measure of Order" and "Emily Post's
Etiquette." Mr. Sammons, for instance, who has a
professorial demeanor and a slight gentleman's paunch, is
working on a 15,000-to-20,000-square-foot mansion in
suburban Nashville inspired by Palladio and Thomas
Jefferson. He and the client have spent a year searching
for the rlght brick.
These are not low-budget productions. Among the houses
designed by Ferguson Murray & Shamamian, the firm where Mr.
Rattner and Mr. Cameron practice, is a 10,000-square-foot
house in Connecticut. Michael Dwyer, 42, an architect at
Buttrick White & Burtis in Manhattan, has recently
completed a classical-style yacht and an $8.95 million town
house on the Upper East Side and is renovating Rudolph
Nureyev's former apartment in the Dakota -- a la grecque.
Like his peers, Mr. Dwyer says he has been influenced by
the historic preservation movement, which brought "an
appreciation of apprenticeship and craftsmanship." He
spends his weekends roaming New York City, painstakingly
drawing 1920's buildings.
Classical revivals are nothing new, as Vincent Scully, the
Sterling Professor Emeritus in the History of Art at Yale
University, points out. But the latest one, albeit
fledgling, is notable for its rigor. Its adherents, who so
far are predominantly white men, may be spotted wielding
proportional dividers, compass-like instruments used for
measuring ratios. Professor Scully notes that most American
houses are not strictly modern and that many use classical
elements (witness the proliferation of bad imitations of
Tara). Classicism "speaks fundamentally to what people
want, to security and dignity and permanence," he said.
Of his generational rebellion, Mr. Rattner, who sometimes
wears a tie inspired by the Roman Temple of Mars Ultor,
observed that "every generatlon recreates the ritual
slaying of the symbolic father figure."
But the timing is significant, said the architect Robert A.
M. Stern, whose buildings often draw on classical themes.
Right now, Mr. Stern said, architecture "occupies a
margin," using fractured forms that many people find
emotionally aloof. "These young people are trying to find
something more rooted in the experience of building," he
continued. "They are perhaps the true radicals of their
tlme."
Some regard them as a reactionary lunatic fringe. James
Stewart Polshek, a modernist and former dean of the
architecture school at Columbla Unlverslty, calls the
classicists "bizarrely backward" and compares their
conservatism to the political right wing. "They have no new
ideas," he said. "They're Luddites. If I were going to be
uncharitable I would say that these young people are
looking for their market niche."
The young old fogies say that their architecture doesn't
mirror any ideological view -- although conservative
buildings may be right for cautionary times. "Some people
are surprised when we show up at dinner parties, because
they expect us to be wearing wigs and period dress," said
Anne Fairfax, 40, an architect, who is Mr. Sammons's wife
and partner. But she added, "Young classicists are not
necessarily neo-conservatlve, right-wing Newties."
In fact, classicism's contract with America is steeped in
the democratic tradition.
"Our heritage is written in the bricks, mortar, wood and
nails of classical architecture," said the Washington
architect Allan Greenberg, 56, who used polychrome Greek
columns for newspaper offices in Athens, Ga. "When looking
for a style expressive of the Declaration of Independence
and the Constitution, the Founding Fathers looked to
classicism."
It is a tradition with great emotional resonance. "In the
ancient world, a pediment and an archway symbolized the
house of God, a form which separated the world of living
from the dead," he said. "When you see this on an American
doorway, or a saltbox house, it tells you that the rights
and prerogatives of the ancient gods, appropriated by kings
in Europe, here belong to John and Jane Citizen. It's noble
and moving."
At their best, the new classicists seek to combine graceful
proportions and ornamentation with affordable materials and
an almost a Shakerlike simplicity. The biggest challenge is
to keep costs down: classical ornament has traditionally
relied on time-consuming masonry and millwork. In Dutchess
County, New York, Stephen Falatko, an architect, has
reinterpreted the spare elegant Greek Revival houses and
farm buiidings of the Hudson Valley. Mr. Falatko, for one,
awaits the advent of classical computer-aided design to
make classical architecture cost effective.
New fogies also look forward rather than back. "Classicism
can really look fuddy-duddy," Mr. Dwyer said. "It has to
look chic." The critic Sir John Summerson observed in
"Heavenly Mansions" (1963) that the creative architects in
the classical tradition have been those who have had a
feeling for its "fairy-tale" origin, while the "monsters"
have been the ones who slavishly "worked the rules."
Today, those fairy-tale origins are also mystically
unfolding in the snowdrifts elsewhere in Dutchess County.
With no classical training, Geoffrey Carter, 42, a
preservationist, has devoted the last five and a half years
to creating his own $150,000 heavenly mansion, a
temple-like house which he has built brick by handmade
brick -- all 1,800 of them.
He has spent his nights and weekends fashioning the bricks,
doors, cornices and moldings himself, mixing the stucco for
the columns out of lime, cement and sand. He was even
married on the porch last fall under a Corinthian flourish
of fireworks.
It is the stuff of myth.
[Photos] Left: Entablature (from top, cornice, frieze,
architrave.) Inset: A Muse (Richard Morris Hunt Memorial in
New York). Above Right: Richard Sammons's design for
Nashville house.
[Photo] Watercolor of fantasy villa by David T. Mayernik,
a New York architect.
[Photo] Below and Left: Thomas Gordon Smith's "Tower of the
Winds" house, in Livermore, Calif., is modeled on an
ancient astronomical observatory.
[Photos] Above: Notre Dame's classical troika: from left,
Thomas Gordon Smith and Michael Lykoudis with Duncan Stroik
at his Villa Indiana. Left: The Villa Indiana has columns
and Palladian windows. Allegorical murals will follow.
[Photo] Left: Farm building by Stephen Falatko in Dutchess
County, New York, inspired by regional Greek-Revival
architecture.
[Sidebar] Study Guide
For further study of classical tradition in architecture:
y Classical America, an organization that encourages the
classical tradition in the arts, and the National Academy
of Design will present four lectures on "The Classical
Tradition Alive Today." Jaquelin Robertson will speak on
"The Virginia Heritage" on Feb. 15; David Easton, "The
American Country House," Feb. 22; Robert A. M. Stern, "New
York Architecture," March 1, and Henry Hope Reed, "The
United States Capitol," March 8. National Academy of
Design, 1083 Fifth Avenue, at 89th Street. Fee, $10 a
lecture; (212) 369-4880.
Sir John Soane's Museum Foundation presents "Exploring
the Worlds of Thomas Jefferson and Sir John Soane," on Feb.
15 at 6 P.M. at the Union Club, 101 East 69th Street. Fee,
$65. Reservations are required; (212) 289-9101.
The Classical Architecture League of South Bend, Ind., is
sponsoring a conference and exhibition, "The Art of
Building Cities: A Challenge for a New Millennium" starting
July 8. Speakers will inciude professor Vincent Scully of
Yale University, at the Art Institute of Chicago, July 9 to
11. The exhibition will be held at the Chicago Cultural
Center July 8 to Aug. 25. For information: (219) 631-6168.
Classical America and the Carpenters' Company of
Philadelphia are sponsoring two lectures in Philadelphia:
Stephen Falatko, on classicism in the Hudson Valley, Feb.
27, and C. Allan Brown, on classical garden design, March
27. For information, (215) 963-0747.
[Sidebar] Talking. The talk of a young classicist can be
tricky -- it is nearly exclusively based on Greek and Roman
architectural precedents, created for monarchs, emperors
and mythological deities. These terms should help you
through the next cocktail party. Capital: Carved or
decorated block at the top of a column (also the money
needed to pay for these often-custom details). Corinthian:
derived from its use in the Greek city-state of Corinth,
crowned with large spiny leaves from the acanthus plant.
American architects put a native spin on it, substituting
corn husks and tobacco leaves. Entablature: Horizontal
structure supported by the column (composed of Architrave,
or lower part, Frieze, middle part, and Cornice, detail at
roof edge -- before there were aluminum gutters). Entasis:
Slight taper in the shaft of columns to correct optical
distortions returns today as a counterpoint to modernism's
concrete cylinders. Order: The parts of any colonnaded
architecture; base, column, capital, entablature. Through
the miracle of catalogues, you can now mail-order any Order
(Tuscan, Doric, Ionic, Corinthian or Composite). Mosaic:
Once the organizing principle for floor pattern in great
palaces (the bigger the stone the more important the room)
-- now reduced to four-inch sticky-back squares from
lumberyards. Pediment: Shallow triangular gable on
classical buildings has evolved into a stick-on detail for
suburban imitation of Tara. Procession: The way one passed
through a temple, relative to sacred altars and ritual
sacrifices. Now often organized around the powder room and
whims of the host.
Michael McDonough
END