Brunelleschi’s Dome

The architecture book is done.  While I was working on it, I wouldn’t have said it was fun. (My Own True Love will corroborate this.) I put in a lot of late nights.  I struggled to find a simple way to describe how an arch works.*  But along the way I re-read some old favorites,…

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Death in Florence

My first encounter with Girolamo Savonarola’s attempt to scourge Florence of religious corruption was George Eliot’s historical novel Romola, which I read in tiny bites as a distraction from historical history during my first year of graduate school. It was lush, dramatic, and exactly what I needed as I struggled with semiotics, deconstructionism, post-colonial theory,…

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