The book I just finished, “The Architecture of Happiness” by Alain de Botton, is one that I read slowly in order to savor the language. This is the second book I’ve read by de Botton and he is a smart writer, putting together words in unexpected ways to create insights that make you think. One of his make-you-think statements is the following: “It is in dialogue with pain that many beautiful things acquire their value.”…
Since my dad died 2 1/2 years ago, I’ve been paying especially close attention to the local obituaries. Perhaps because my dad died after having just turned 71, which seems much too young to my 48-year-old soul, I noticed that I was seeing an awful lot of deaths among the 40 to 60-year-old cohort, joining those who were over the age of 85. (It’s not uncommon to see people reach the high 90s or even…
Historic preservation is an ever-changing field. Twenty-some years ago, people in the field concerned themselves with trying to save as many “old” buildings as they could, “old” meaning primarily Victorian-era, with the goal being to bring these buildings (or, at the very least, their facades) back to how they were originally conceived. In many cases, that meant stripping off any modern skins that had been applied during the 1940s to 1970s, removing insensitive architectural features…