Jean Vissering laughs when asked to describe a really beautiful wind turbine. What loyal Vermonter could take pleasure in the prospect of festooning a pristine ridge with a series of industrial towers as tall as a 25-story building?... Read more

Ada Louise Huxtable, the dean of American architecture critics, declared six years ago that our nation was in "near-total architectural retreat." In her book The Unreal America, the former New York Times critic complained of a pervasive "architecture of facile illusion, of image over substance, of artifice over art."... Read more

Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron do big boxes. The Swiss design duo won the 2001 Pritzker Prize, making them the architectural equivalent of Nobel laureates. American Pritzker winners include Frank Gehry, whose signature buildings twist and shout, and I.M. Pei, famous for the boldly angular East Wing of the National Gallery in Washington.... Read more

Middlebury College professor Glenn Andres still recalls the day he picked up Robert Venturi at the airport and drove him to campus for a visit. As Andres remembers it, the famous Philadelphia architect-author got out of the car, took one look at the place, and declared: "You have what everyone thinks an American campus looks like but almost never does. It would be very easy to mess this up."... Read more