Category: Articles
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Fraunces Tavern: Tavern, Museum, Memorial
By Thornical Press – December 4, 2025 Fraunces Tavern sits at the corner of Pearl and Broad Streets in Lower Manhattan like a weathered storyteller, its brick and timber face a counterpoint to the glass towers that now define New York’s Financial District. To step inside is to enter a space where layers of the…
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A Modern Prelude: The Charnley House’s Construction and Materials
By Thornical Press – December 3, 2025 The Charnley House was commissioned by lumberman James Charnley and completed in 1892 by the office of Adler & Sullivan, with the young Frank Lloyd Wright playing a significant role in the design; it stands on a narrow Gold Coast lot and is recognized today as both a…
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Life in the Bailey
By Thornical Press – November 16, 2025 The bailey is the beating heart of an English castle, an open courtyard whose ordinary appearance masks a complex choreography of daily life, military logic, and symbolic power. Early chroniclers and modern historians use the terms ward and bailey almost interchangeably to describe these leveled enclosures, usually ringed…
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Roman Brick for Contextual Design
By Thornical Press – November 8, 2025 Roman brick—the long, low-profile brick type inspired by ancient Roman prototypes—has carved an unlikely but enduring niche in American architecture. Its appeal is less about novelty than about a particular visual logic: elongated courses that emphasize horizontality, fine shadow lines at narrow mortar joints, and a hand-tooled, crafted…
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Ornament and Restraint: The Material Case of the Winslow House
By Thornical Press – November 2, 2025 The Winslow House in River Forest, Illinois stands as Frank Lloyd Wright’s first major independent commission and a decisive moment in the emergence of the Prairie School. Built in 1893–94 for William H. Winslow, a manufacturer of decorative ironwork and a well-connected figure in Chicago’s design circles, the…
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Sunlit Battlements: Roquetaillade Through Time
By Thornical Press – October 21, 2025 Perched on a limestone spur in the rolling countryside south of Bordeaux, the Château de Roquetaillade reads like a condensed history of French fortification and taste. What stands today is the result of a long conversation between military necessity, domestic comfort, and later centuries’ romantic imaginings. A compact,…
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The Democratic Classic: Taste, Care, and the Model A
By Thornical Press – October 20, 2025 The Model A established a new design grammar for Ford: clearer silhouettes, defined surfaces, and a shift from exposed mechanics to contained form. The hood and radiator surround became a vertical focal point, the wheelbase offered a balanced stance, and the fenders were sculpted to trace motion even…
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Trabant: DDR Status Symbol
By Thornical Press – October 19, 2025 The Trabant feels like a pocket-sized time machine, a little plaster-and-steel relic that smells faintly of petrol and old upholstery and carries an entire vanished nation’s patience in its modest frame. Introduced in the late 1950s and produced in Zwickau for decades after, the “Trabi” was not merely…
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Elephant Statues in the Home?
By Thornical Press – October 18, 2025 In the world of home décor, few objects carry as much symbolic weight and aesthetic charm as the elephant statue. Whether perched on a bookshelf, standing guard at the entryway, or nestled among plants in a sunlit corner, these majestic figures bring more than just visual appeal—they carry…
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