Just three years ago, this stretch of Jessie Street in downtown San Francisco was a gritty back alley, populated by parked cars, pigeons, and the down-and-out. On one side of the street sat a Vietnamese sandwich shop and a budget SRO hotel; on the other hulked the granite and sandstone Old Mint, a Greek Revival building (Read More…)
Preservation
Topos
Mint Plaza in San Francisco
Published in Topos, Wednesday, July 1, 2009
The New York Times Style Magazine
The Skill Set
Published in The New York Times Style Magazine, Sunday, May 17, 2009
Indian artisans are breathing new life into old traditions.
If you close your eyes and block out the visual cues — the red ocher 18th-century buildings, the brightly colored bazaars, the monkeys scrambling maniacally over the dusty rooflines — you would still know you were in Jaipur, India. The country’s center of traditional craftsmanship has a distinctive soundtrack (Read More…)
The New York Times
Prayers at an Exhibition: Bhutan’s Art and the Monks Who Protect It
Published in The New York Times, Friday, September 5, 2008
Travel + Leisure
Sacred Acts
Published in Travel + Leisure, Friday, August 1, 2008
As the pace of change quickens in Bhutan, so do efforts to preserve its centuries-old Buddhist art. Jaime Gross heads into the Himalayas to report.
Driving Bhutan’s single highway, a serpentine road hacked precariously into the side of a mountain and perpetually under repair, is an exercise in nerve. It averages 20 curves per mile, and requires honking before every one to warn the overloaded trucks and grazing cows that lurk around each bend. (Read More…)
Town & Country Travel
Palm Springs Forward
Published in Town & Country Travel, Tuesday, July 1, 2008
A determined group of midcentury modern devotees is helping this kitschy desert city embrace its future while preserving its past.
“Modern architecture is like a black dress or a trench coat: it’s classic, and you can’t get tired of it,” declares Los Angeles fashion designer Trina Turk. We’re sitting in the living room of her 1936 weekend house in Palm Springs, California, known as the Ship of the Desert (Read More…)
Travel + Leisure
Preservation: Illinois
Published in Travel + Leisure, Thursday, April 1, 2004
Mies van der Rohe’s love-it-or-hate-it celebration of Modernism endures as a cautionary tale on the merits of glass houses.
The Farnsworth House in Plano, Illinois, about 60 miles southwest of Chicago, is revered as one of the world’s most important Modernist icons. But architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s masterpiece—the glass-walled embodiment of his dictum Less is more—provoked scathing criticism upon its completion in 1951. Edith Farnsworth, the wealthy Chicago physician who had commissioned the house, declared the transparent structure unlivable and filed suit against Mies. She lost the case—she had, after all, approved the plans—and grudgingly spent weekends in her glass box for the better part of two decades. (Read More…)
My best-laid plans were scrapped the moment I arrived in Oaxaca City. “You want to see the real, authentic Mexico, right?” asked Alejandro Ruiz, one of the city’s most renowned chefs, as he giddily steered his SUV through narrow cobblestoned streets (Read More…)