To some Americans, Oklahoma is a foreign country, where the wind comes sweeping o'er the plains; a hot dry place, impressively flat and infinitely extended, yet with pockets of remarkable beauty in the form of blood red earth, golden grasslands, and a sky the shape of an inverted tureen. Here the frontier spirit lives on in small towns and vast wheat and cotton farms, and Native American influences are everywhere.
POSTCARD FROM BATH
Dear ArchitectureWeek,
Visiting Bath, England regularly over the last two years, I've been watching the progress of the Nicholas Grimshaw-designed Bath Spa Project. In March 2002, the shell and superstructure phase of its construction was completed.
OASIS IN A WAR ZONE
Israel's modernist Supreme Court, with its clean stone lines and its miniature pyramid, seems to rise up from one of Jerusalem's many hills. Planned by the brother-sister architectural team of Ram Karmi and Ada Karmi-Melamede, it is a complex three-story building of local limestone.
PARISIAN ELEMENTARY
The northeast of Paris is architecturally diverse, with a mix of 19th and 20th century constructions. In contrast to the authentically historic background, whole blocks have been sold to real estate companies, erased, and rebuilt in a style that tries to be a modern interpretation of the 19th-century Parisian buildings of Georges-Eugène Haussmann but never really reaches the same quality.