Art & Architecture

A few years ago, after I had just met my boyfriend, we found ourselves driving in circles around a Colorado carpark. He claims the carpark was confusingly oriented, that its architecture seemed to indicate that we would go either up or down if we kept going.

For decades, African nations have fought for the return of countless works of art stolen during the colonial era and placed in Western museums. In Africa’s Struggle for Its Art, Bénédicte Savoy brings to light this largely unknown but deeply important history.

In The One Hundred Circle Farm, renowned photographer Emmet Gowin (b. 1941) presents stunning aerial images of center-pivot irrigation systems in the western and midwestern United States. In this short discussion with anthropologist and National Book Award finalist Lucas Bessire, author of Running Out, Gowin offers insight into his powerful photographic survey of the impact of irrigation systems on landscape.

Architecture is represented not only with lines, figures, and words, but also with colors. What sounds like a truism today—when colorful, computer-generated renderings of building projects dominate architectural media—is in fact a relatively recent phenomenon.

Environmentally speaking, it might be said that Western culture backed the wrong horse with both Christianity and capitalism. Each ingrained a self-centeredness—respectively, inter- and intra-species—that has proven disastrous for the planet.

A confession: for many years I lived a double life—as a writer, anyway. I started as a scholar of the Renaissance and antiquity who loved to cook, to eat, and to taste wine; then, by various happy accidents, I began to receive requests that I actually write about cooking, eating, and tasting wine.