Category: Architecture
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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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