Amer­i­can is a tricky word. It can refer to every­one and every­thing of or per­tain­ing to all the coun­tries of North Amer­i­ca — and poten­tial­ly South Amer­i­ca as well — but it’s com­mon­ly used with spe­cif­ic regard to the Unit­ed States. For Frank Lloyd Wright, lin­guis­tic as well as archi­tec­tur­al per­fec­tion­ist, this was an unten­able state of affairs. To his mind, the newest civ­i­liza­tion of the New World, a vast land that offered man the rare chance to remake him­self, need­ed an adjec­tive all its own. And so, repur­pos­ing a demonym pro­posed by geo­g­ra­ph­er James Duff Law in the nine­teen-hun­dreds, Wright began to refer to his not just archi­tec­tur­al but also broad­ly cul­tur­al project as Uson­ian.

Wright com­plet­ed the first of his so-called “Uson­ian hous­es,” the Her­bert and Kather­ine Jacobs House in Madi­son, Wis­con­sin, in the mid­dle of the Great Depres­sion. Chal­lenged to “cre­ate a decent home for $5,000,” says the Frank Lloyd Wright Foun­da­tion’s web site, the archi­tect seized the chance to real­ize “a new afford­able archi­tec­ture that freed itself from Euro­pean con­ven­tions and respond­ed to the Amer­i­can land­scape.”

This first Uson­ian house and its 60 or so suc­ces­sors “relat­ed direct­ly to the earth, unim­ped­ed by a foun­da­tion, front porch, pro­trud­ing chim­ney, or dis­tract­ing shrub­bery. Glass cur­tain walls and nat­ur­al mate­ri­als like wood, stone and brick fur­ther tied the house to its envi­ron­ment.” In Pleas­antville, New York, there even exists a Uso­nia His­toric Dis­trict, three of whose 47 homes were designed by Wright him­self.

The BBC Glob­al video at the top of the post offers a tour of one of the Uso­nia His­toric Dis­tric­t’s hous­es led by the sole sur­viv­ing orig­i­nal own­er, the 100-year-old Roland Reis­ley. The Archi­tec­tur­al Digest video above fea­tures Reis­ley’s home as well as the Bertha and Sol Fried­man House, which Wright dubbed Toy­hill. Both have been kept as adher­ent as pos­si­ble to the vision that inspired them, and that was meant to inspire a renais­sance in Amer­i­can civ­i­liza­tion. The Uson­ian homes may have fall­en short of Wright’s Utopi­an hopes, but they did have a cer­tain influ­ence on post­war sub­urb-builders, and have much enriched the lives of their more appre­cia­tive inhab­i­tants. The cen­te­nar­i­an Reis­ley cred­its his star­tling youth­ful­ness to the man-made and nat­ur­al beau­ty of his domes­tic sur­round­ings — but then, this last of the Uso­ni­ans also hap­pens to be one of the rare clients who could get along with Frank Lloyd Wright.

Relat­ed con­tent:

What Frank Lloyd Wright’s Unusu­al Win­dows Tell Us About His Archi­tec­tur­al Genius

12 Famous Frank Lloyd Wright Hous­es Offer Vir­tu­al Tours: Hol­ly­hock House, Tal­iesin West, Falling­wa­ter & More

How Frank Lloyd Wright’s Archi­tec­ture Evolved Over 70 Years and Changed Amer­i­ca

Frank Lloyd Wright Designs an Urban Utopia: See His Hand-Drawn Sketch­es of Broad­acre City (1932)

How Frank Lloyd Wright Became Frank Lloyd Wright: A Video Intro­duc­tion

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

If you’ve made the jour­ney to Athens, you prob­a­bly took the time to vis­it its most pop­u­lar tourist attrac­tion, the Acrop­o­lis. On that mon­u­ment-rich hill, you more than like­ly paid spe­cial atten­tion to the Parthenon, the ancient tem­ple ded­i­cat­ed to the city’s name­sake, the god­dess Athena Parthenos. But no mat­ter how much time you spent amid the ruins of the Parthenon, if that vis­it hap­pens to have tak­en place in the past 200 years, you may now ques­tion whether you’ve tru­ly seen it at all. That’s because only recent­ly has scaf­fold­ing been removed that has par­tial­ly obscured its west­ern façade for the past two decades, result­ing in the pur­er visu­al state seen in the clips col­lect­ed above.

The press atten­tion drawn by this event prompt­ed Greece’s Min­is­ter of Cul­ture Lin­da Men­doni to declare this the first time the Parthenon’s exte­ri­or has been com­plete­ly free of scaf­fold­ing in about two cen­turies. Hav­ing been orig­i­nal­ly built in the fifth cen­tu­ry BC, and come through most of that span much the worse for wear, it requires inten­sive and near-con­stant main­te­nance.

Its inun­da­tion by vis­i­tors sure­ly does­n’t help: an esti­mat­ed 4.5 mil­lion peo­ple went to the Acrop­o­lis in 2024, the kind of fig­ure that makes you believe in the diag­noses of glob­al “over­tourism” thrown around these days. The Greek gov­ern­men­t’s coun­ter­mea­sures include a dai­ly vis­i­tor cap of 20,000, imple­ment­ed in 2023, and a require­ment to reserve a timed entry slot.

If you’d like to see the whol­ly un-scaf­fold­ed Parthenon in per­son, you’d best reserve your own slot as soon as pos­si­ble: more con­ser­va­tion work is sched­uled to begin in Novem­ber, albeit with tem­po­rary infra­struc­ture designed to be “lighter and aes­thet­i­cal­ly much clos­er to the log­ic of the mon­u­ment,” as Men­doni has explained. But if you miss that win­dow, don’t wor­ry, since that oper­a­tion should only last until ear­ly next sum­mer, and upon its com­ple­tion, “the Parthenon will be com­plete­ly freed of this scaf­fold­ing too, and peo­ple will be able to see it tru­ly free.” Not that they’ll be able to see it for free: even now, a gen­er­al-admis­sion Acrop­o­lis reser­va­tion costs €30 (about $35 USD) dur­ing the sum­mer­time peak sea­son. Athena was the god­dess of wis­dom, war­fare, and hand­i­craft, not wealth, but it clear­ly lies with­in her pow­ers to com­mand a decent price.

Relat­ed con­tent:

How the Ancient Greeks Built Their Mag­nif­i­cent Tem­ples: The Art of Ancient Engi­neer­ing

A 3D Mod­el Reveals What the Parthenon and Its Inte­ri­or Looked Like 2,500 Years Ago

How the Parthenon Mar­bles End­ed Up In The British Muse­um

The City of Nashville Built a Full-Scale Repli­ca of the Parthenon in 1897, and It’s Still Stand­ing Today

Artist is Cre­at­ing a Parthenon Made of 100,000 Banned Books: A Mon­u­ment to Democ­ra­cy & Intel­lec­tu­al Free­dom

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Civ­i­liza­tion moved past the use of cas­tles long ago, but their imagery endures in pop­u­lar cul­ture. Even young chil­dren here in the twen­ty-twen­ties have an idea of what cas­tles look like. But why do they look like that? Admit­ted­ly, that’s a bit of a trick ques­tion: the pop­u­lar con­cept of cas­tles tends to be inspired by medieval exam­ples, but in his­tor­i­cal fact, the design of cas­tles changed sub­stan­tial­ly over time, albeit slow­ly at first. You can hear that process explained in the Get to the Point video above, which tells the sto­ry of “star forts,” the built response to the “tech­nol­o­gy that end­ed the Mid­dle Ages.”

You may be famil­iar with the con­cept of “motte and bai­ley,” now most wide­ly under­stood as a metaphor for a cer­tain debate tac­tic irri­tat­ing­ly preva­lent on the inter­net. But it actu­al­ly refers to a style of cas­tle con­struct­ed in Europe between the tenth and the thir­teenth cen­turies, con­sist­ing of a for­ti­fied hill­top keep, or “motte,” with a less defen­si­ble walled court­yard, or “bai­ley,” below. In case of an attack, the bat­tle could pri­mar­i­ly take place down in the bai­ley, with retreats to the motte occur­ring when strate­gi­cal­ly nec­es­sary. The motte-and-bai­ley cas­tle is a “great idea,” says the video’s nar­ra­tor, pro­vid­ed “you don’t have can­nons shoot­ing at you.”

Cas­tles, he explains, “were a reflec­tion of armies at the time: build a big wall, keep the bar­bar­ians out.” But once the can­non came on the scene, those once-prac­ti­cal­ly imper­vi­ous stone walls became a seri­ous lia­bil­i­ty. That was defin­i­tive­ly proven in 1453, when “the Ottomans famous­ly bat­tered down the great walls of Con­stan­tino­ple with their can­nons. That brought an end not only to the 1500-year-old Roman Empire, but also to the Mid­dle Ages as an era entire­ly.” In response, cas­tle archi­tects added dirt slopes, or glacis, at the edges, as well as cir­cu­lar bas­tions to deflect can­non fire at the cor­ners — which, incon­ve­nient­ly, cre­at­ed “dead zones” in which ene­my sol­diers could hide, pro­tect­ed from any defens­es launched from with­in the cas­tle.

The solu­tion was to make the bas­tions tri­an­gu­lar instead, and then to add fur­ther tri­an­gu­lar struc­tures between them. Seen from the side, cas­tles became much low­er and wider; from above, they grew ever pointier and more com­plex in shape. Sébastien Le Pre­stre, Mar­quis of Vauban, an army offi­cer under Louis XIV, became the acknowl­edged mas­ter of this form, the trace ital­i­enne. You may not know his name, but his designs made France “lit­er­al­ly impos­si­ble to invade.” For sheer beau­ty, how­ev­er, it would be hard to top the plans for star forts to defend Flo­rence in the fif­teen-twen­ties by a mul­ti-tal­ent­ed artist named Michelan­ge­lo. Per­haps you’ve heard of him?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Sim­ple, Inge­nious Design of the Ancient Roman Javelin: How the Romans Engi­neered a Remark­ably Effec­tive Weapon

Leonar­do da Vin­ci Draws Designs of Future War Machines: Tanks, Machine Guns & More

How to Build a 13th-Cen­tu­ry Cas­tle, Using Only Authen­tic Medieval Tools & Tech­niques

A For­got­ten 16th-Cen­tu­ry Man­u­script Reveals the First Designs for Mod­ern Rock­ets

Behold a 21st-Cen­tu­ry Medieval Cas­tle Being Built with Only Tools & Mate­ri­als from the Mid­dle Ages

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

It’s tempt­ing, in telling the sto­ry of the Edith Farnsworth House, to break out clichés like “Peo­ple who live in glass hous­es should­n’t throw stones.” For the res­i­dence in ques­tion is made pre­dom­i­nant­ly of glass, or rather glass and steel, and its first own­er turned out to have more than a few stones for its archi­tect: Lud­wig Mies van der Rohe, the last direc­tor of the Bauhaus, who’d immi­grat­ed from Nazi Ger­many to the Unit­ed States in the late nine­teen-thir­ties. It was at a din­ner par­ty in 1945 that he hap­pened to meet the for­ward-think­ing Chica­go doc­tor Edith Farnsworth, who expressed an inter­est in build­ing a whol­ly mod­ern retreat well out­side the city. Asked if one of his appren­tices could do the job, Mies offered to take it on him­self.

The task, as Mies con­ceived of archi­tec­ture in his time, was to build for an era in which high and rapid­ly advanc­ing indus­tri­al tech­nol­o­gy was becom­ing unavoid­able in ordi­nary lives. Such lives, prop­er­ly lived, would require new frames, and thor­ough­ly con­sid­ered ones at that. The shape ulti­mate­ly tak­en by the Farnsworth House is one such frame: order­ly, and to a degree that could be called extreme, while on anoth­er lev­el max­i­mal­ly per­mis­sive of human free­dom.

That was, in any case, the idea: in phys­i­cal real­i­ty, Farnsworth her­self had a long list of prac­ti­cal com­plaints about what she began to call “my Mies-con­cep­tion,” not least to do with its attrac­tion of insects and green­house-like heat reten­tion (uncom­pen­sat­ed for, in true Euro­pean style, by air con­di­tion­ing).

Chron­i­clers of the Farnsworth House saga tend to men­tion that the cen­tral rela­tion­ship appears to have exceed­ed that of archi­tect and client, at least for a time. But what­ev­er affec­tion had once exist­ed between them had sure­ly evap­o­rat­ed by the time they were suing each oth­er toward the end of con­struc­tion, with Mies alleg­ing non-pay­ment and Farnsworth alleg­ing mal­prac­tice. In the event, Farnsworth lost in court and used the house as a week­end retreat for a cou­ple of decades before sell­ing it to the British devel­op­er and archi­tec­tur­al enthu­si­ast Peter Palum­bo, who espe­cial­ly enjoyed its ambi­ence dur­ing thun­der­storms. Today it oper­ates as a muse­um, as explained by its exec­u­tive direc­tor Scott Mahaf­fey in the new Open Space video above. Hear­ing about all the tur­moil behind the Farnsworth House­’s con­cep­tion, the atten­dees of its tours might find them­selves think­ing that hell hath no fury like a client scorned.

Relat­ed con­tent:

A Quick Ani­mat­ed Tour of Icon­ic Mod­ernist Hous­es

An Oral His­to­ry of the Bauhaus: Hear Rare Inter­views (in Eng­lish) with Wal­ter Gropius, Lud­wig Mies van der Rohe & More

The Mod­ernist Gas Sta­tions of Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe

How a 1930s Archi­tec­tur­al Mas­ter­piece Har­ness­es the Sun to Keep Warm in the Win­ter & Cool in the Sum­mer

Why Do Peo­ple Hate Mod­ern Archi­tec­ture?: A Video Essay

How This Chica­go Sky­scraper Bare­ly Touch­es the Ground

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Doric, Ion­ic, Corinthi­an: these, as prac­ti­cal­ly every­one who went through school in the West some­how remem­bers, are the three vari­eties of clas­si­cal col­umn. We may still recall them, more specif­i­cal­ly, as rep­re­sent­ing the three ancient Greek archi­tec­tur­al styles. But as ancient-his­to­ry YouTu­ber Gar­rett Ryan points out in the new Told in Stone video above, only Doric and Ion­ic columns belong ful­ly to ancient Greece; what we think of when we think of Corinthi­an columns were devel­oped more in the civ­i­liza­tion of ancient Rome. The con­text is an expla­na­tion of how the ancient Greeks built their tem­ples, one of the char­ac­ter­is­tics of their design process being the use of columns aplen­ty.

It’s one thing to hear about Greek columns in the class­room, and quite anoth­er to walk amid them in per­son. That, per­haps, is why Ryan deliv­ers the open­ing of his video perched upon the ruins of what’s known as Tem­ple C. Hav­ing once stood proud­ly in Seli­nus, a city belong­ing to Magna Grae­cia (Greek-speak­ing areas of Italy), it now con­sti­tutes one of the prime tourist attrac­tions for antiq­ui­ty-mind­ed vis­i­tors to mod­ern-day Sici­ly.

Though his chan­nel may be called Told in Stone, Ryan begins his brief his­to­ry of the Greek tem­ple before that hardy mate­r­i­al had even come into use for these pur­pos­es. At first, the Greeks fash­ioned the homes of their gods out of mud brick, with thatched roofs and wood­en porch­es; only from the sev­enth cen­tu­ry BC, “prob­a­bly inspired by con­tact with Egypt,” did they start build­ing them to last.

Or they built them to last as long as could be expect­ed, in any case, giv­en the nature of the mate­ri­als avail­able in the ancient world and the mil­len­nia that have passed since then. Take the Tem­ple of Apol­lo at the Sanc­tu­ary of Didy­ma in mod­ern-day Turkey, which his­to­ry-and-archi­tec­ture YouTu­ber Manuel Bra­vo pays a vis­it in the video just above. It may not look as if the near­ly 2400 years since its nev­er-tech­ni­cal­ly-com­plet­ed con­struc­tion began have been kind, but it’s nev­er­the­less one of the bet­ter-pre­served tem­ples from ancient Greek civ­i­liza­tion in exis­tence (not to men­tion the largest). Even in its ruined state, it gives what Bra­vo describes as the impres­sion of — or at least, in its hey­day, hav­ing been — “a for­est of huge columns,” a built ver­sion of “the sacred forests that Greeks used to con­se­crate to the gods.” They’re Ion­ic columns, in case you were won­der­ing, but don’t sweat it; there won’t be a quiz.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The City of Nashville Built a Full-Scale Repli­ca of the Parthenon in 1897, and It’s Still Stand­ing Today

A 3D Mod­el Reveals What the Parthenon and Its Inte­ri­or Looked Like 2,500 Years Ago

How the Parthenon Mar­bles End­ed Up In The British Muse­um

Explore Ancient Athens 3D, a Dig­i­tal Recon­struc­tion of the Greek City-State at the Height of Its Influ­ence

What Ancient Greece Real­ly Looked Like: See Recon­struc­tions of the Tem­ple of Hadri­an, Curetes Street & the Foun­tain of Tra­jan

The His­to­ry of Ancient Greece in 18 Min­utes: A Brisk Primer Nar­rat­ed by Bri­an Cox

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

It’s com­mon to hear it said that some par­tic­u­lar city — usu­al­ly one of the Amer­i­can metrop­o­lis­es that sprang into exis­tence over the past cou­ple of cen­turies — “should­n’t exist.” And indeed, as urban plan­ner M. Nolan Gray writes in a recent blog post, “no city should exist.” On the scale of human his­to­ry, we’ve only just start­ed build­ing the things, and we don’t do so on pure instinct. “There isn’t sup­posed to be a city any­where. They exist because we will them into exis­tence.” And we often do so in unlike­ly con­texts: “Half of Boston was dredged up from the ocean. St. Louis only exists because we tamed the great­est riv­er on our con­ti­nent. Sup­ply­ing Philadel­phia with drink­ing water is an engi­neer­ing feat on the scale of the Los Ange­les Aque­duct.”

Out­side the Unit­ed States, we see the same con­di­tions sur­round­ing “the great­est cities ever built: Tokyo and St. Peters­burg required engi­neer­ing feats on the scale of any­thing seen in the US. Ams­ter­dam and Mex­i­co City were lit­er­al­ly built on top of water.” How that was man­aged in the par­tic­u­lar case of the Dutch cap­i­tal is explained in the new video from The Present Past at the top of the post, as well as in the OBF video below.

Ams­ter­dam’s most strik­ing fea­ture, its canals, were cre­at­ed not to look pic­turesque; in fact, as The Present Past host Jochem Boodt puts it, their con­struc­tion was “a mat­ter of life and death.” Too soft for farm­ing or home-build­ing, the swampy ground beneath the city on the riv­er Ams­tel had to be drained; when drained, it became sub­ject to floods, which neces­si­tat­ed build­ing dikes and a dam.

httv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mo3llzKdAD0

That thir­teenth-cen­tu­ry engi­neer­ing project of damming the Ams­tel pro­tect­ed the city, and also gave it its name. The Ams­tel itself is, in fact, a huge canal, and the rapid expan­sion of the set­tle­ment around it neces­si­tat­ed dig­ging more and more aux­il­iary canals to assist with drainage, which defined the space for islands on which to build new dis­tricts (Venice-style, atop hun­dreds of thou­sands of poles dri­ven into the sea floor). As shown in the OBF video, this dis­tinc­tive urban struc­ture dic­tat­ed the shapes of the city’s hous­es, with their uni­ver­sal­ly nar­row façades and their depths reflect­ing the wealth of the fam­i­lies with­in. Now, four cen­turies after it took its cur­rent shape — and hav­ing sur­vived numer­ous crises inher­ent to its unusu­al sit­u­a­tion and form — the cen­ter of Ams­ter­dam is looked to as a paragon of urban plan­ning, some­times imi­tat­ed, but with­out sim­i­lar­ly “impos­si­ble” orig­i­nal con­di­tions, nev­er repli­cat­ed.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Why Dutch & Japan­ese Cities Are Insane­ly Well Designed (and Amer­i­can Cities Are Ter­ri­bly Designed)

The Bril­liant Engi­neer­ing That Made Venice: How a City Was Built on Water

New Web Site Show­cas­es 700,000 Arti­facts Dug Up from the Canals of Ams­ter­dam, Some Dat­ing Back to 4300 BC

Trav­el from Rot­ter­dam to Ams­ter­dam in 10 Min­utes by Boat: A 4K Time­lapse

Why Europe Has So Few Sky­scrap­ers

When the Dutch Tried to Live in Con­crete Spheres: An Intro­duc­tion to the Bol­wonin­gen in the Nether­lands

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.