{ feuilleton }

Paris and Brussels are well-known centres of Art Nouveau architecture, less well-known but equally valuable is the Latvian capital of Riga whose historic centre is now a World Heritage Site. The highly distinctive building at Elizabetes Iela 10b is one of a number of buildings there designed by Mikhail Eisenstein, father of film director Sergei […]

Michigan Central Station.
Photos from Yves Marchand & Romain Meffre (above) and Forgotten Detroit (below), the latter being an extensive catalogue of urban dereliction.

The station waiting room.
Update: Environmental Graffiti today has a post speculating which American cities might be the lost cities of the future. Detroit is number three; go here to see which others […]

Atelier Elvira (1897-98).
Seeing as there’s been a run of Art Nouveau-related posts here it’s worth mentioning a location that’s familiar to students of the Jugendstil but less well-known to the world at large. August Endell’s Atelier Elvira was a Munich studio building whose exterior decoration of a very stylised dragon creature manages to be […]

A final visit to the Exposition Universelle of 1900 with this photograph of the Palais Lumineux, a piece of period Chinoiserie built in the Champ de Mars close to the Eiffel Tower. I forget where I found this tinted view but Wikipedia has what appears to be the same photograph coloured so as to resemble […]

Globe terrestre.
More exposition mania. The Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900 would have been more grand/fabulous/excessive (delete as appropriate) if architect Louis Bonnier had been given free reign. The building above was intended to stand before the Palais du Trocadéro and house a huge globe which visitors could peruse from surrounding galleries. Bonnier also […]

La porte monumentale.
Was the Paris Exposition of 1900 the most gloriously excessive of them all? Judging by these photos it certainly looks it. I should have linked to these earlier when I had a post about the Palais du Trocadéro which was one of the buildings raised for the occasion. The Eiffel Tower was […]

Urban Chiaroscuro 6: Paris (after Piranesi) (2007) by Emily Allchurch.
Pitzhanger Manor-House in Ealing, London, hosts an exhibition with architecture as its theme, a suitable subject given that the house was designed by notable 18th century architect (and friend of Piranesi) Sir John Soane. Artist Emily Allchurch has some meticulous and clever photo-collage reworkings of […]

More Art Nouveau and more Paris…. I can’t believe I missed this place when I was in Paris for a week, staying just a few streets away. The building is at 29 Avenue Rapp in the 7th arrondissement and I crossed that street several times when walking to the Champs de Mars and the Eiffel […]

More ephemeral architecture and also another example of old exposition architecture. The Palais du Trocadéro was designed by Gabriel Davioud for the 1878 World’s Fair and until its demolition in the 1930s faced the Eiffel Tower across the Seine after that edifice had been constructed as the entrance arch for another fair, the Exposition Universelle […]

“This dark and steep alley took its name from Sir James Stewart of Goodtrees, Lord Advocate of Scotland, 1692–1713, whose mansion stood at the foot of the close. It was a fashionable quarter in the early 18th century, and here resided Andrew Crosby, the famous lawyer, the original of Scott’s ‘Andrew Pleydell,’ Lord Westhall, John […]