#malcolm millais

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Millais on rebuilding Berlin

Millais on rebuilding Berlin

The Berliner Schloss, completed in 1845, bombed in 1945 and replaced by East Germany with the modernist People’s Palace, has been rebuit with three sides traditional and one modernist.

Malcolm Millais, author of Le Corbusier, the Dishonest Architect and Exploding the Myths of Modern Architecture, recently visited Berlin, in part to investigate four examples of how Germans have reconstructed…

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Porto beauty trumps video

Porto beauty trumps video

Porto, Portugal, screenshot of video by Kirill Neiezhmakov.

Last night I posted a Kuriositas video of Madrid that, using time-lapse and hyper-lapse videogrpahy caught the beauty of Spain’s capital. It was by by Kirill Neiezhmakov. I visited his website and found a video, “A Day in Porto,” the home of the author of Exploding the Myths of Modern Architecture, one of my bibles. Malcolm Millais sends…

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Save the Porto pavilions

Save the Porto pavilions

A year ago plans emerged in Portugal to replace the old pavilions of the old market in Porto with new pavilions of a  high-tech appearance. The existing market stalls of the Bolhão should not be replaced but restored. A post, “Bolhão a Year Later,” from the fab website Old Portuguese Stuff tells why, and offers a petition to help save the pavilions.The petition is in Spanish with an English…

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Decent guys as architects

Decent guys as architects

20K House by Rural Studio. (misfitsarchitecture.com)

Rural Studio is an architectural outfit in Alabama that strives to produce houses for $20,000. The website Misfits’ Architectureposted on Rural Studio recently, listing the small, affordable houses by major firms and architects that cost more, often much, much more. Even the excellent Katrina Houses, created after the hurricane by Marianne…

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Hellblog: To quoin a frieze

Hellblog: To quoin a frieze

I am about to place a new blog on my “Blogs I Follow” list. It is the blog of architectural cartoonist Louis Hellman, called “Hellblog,” and comes to me from Malcolm Millais, the irrepressible author of Exploding the Myths of Modern Architecture (2009), which Andrés Duany called the best book he’d read summarizing the evils of modern architecture. I used a Hellman toon to illustrate my review of

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Another French city ... rebuilt

Another French city … rebuilt

Rebuilt street in St. Malo. (Europe Up Close)

We are still angry and sad about Nice, but let me shift the spotlight to another ancient French resort city, St.-Malo, on the Brittany coast of the English Channel. As I say, an ancient city, but it was shelled and bombed into ruins by the Allies during the battles that followed D-Day. But by 1960 it had been entirely rebuilt, and looks much as it…

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Is that moss on the roof?

Is that moss on the roof?

St. Peters Seminary, near Glasgow in Scotland. (Alamy)

Above is an aerial photo of what some consider Scotland’s most significant modernist building. Is that moss on the roof? What’s left after water seeped (or gushed) in, sparking problems that led to the almost obligatory debate between owner and architect of whose to blame for the building’s flaws?

One flaw is that from above it looks like a…

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Painting in Porto, Port.

Painting in Porto, Port.

Malcolm Millais, author of Exploding the Myths of Modern Architecture, is a British engineer and architect who has retired to Porto, in Portugal, where he has taken up the pastime of painting – as Churchill did after his Gallipoli military disaster in WWI (he was Lord of the Admiralty) ended his political career, or so he thought. Malcolm has emailed me a couple of his works, which I find…

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