Could it be that we’re entering a golden age in concert hall design?
The very idea may sound a little crazy, given how adamantly some people insist that the audience for classical music is slowly dying off.
To those skeptics the current explosion of new concert spaces may seem nothing but a last-ditch attempt to attract younger [...]

As Joe Valerio sees it, architects shouldn’t just shape structures; they should interpret their times. “The most useless term in architecture is `timeless building,’ which I translate into `meaningless,’” Valerio says over lunch at the sleek Blue Water Grill at Dearborn Street and Grand Avenue. “Our job is to do cultural commentary.”
Valerio is hardly the [...]

Twenty-two-year-old Pierre Charles L’Enfant was stirred. He’d watched American colonists declare their independence from England and fight for freedom. Now, he decided, it was time for him to act.
Led by the same democratic spirit that inspired the colonists, L’Enfant became one of the first French volunteers to enlist in the Continental Army in 1776.
Then a [...]