On a wooden platform in the middle of the village, dozens of young women gather, dressed in intricately embroidered aprons and jackets—the traditional costume of the Dong, one of the many ethnic minority groups of southwestern China. Nearby, a large group of villagers huddles around a bonfire. Everyone in Dimen, this tiny town about 400 miles northwest of Hong Kong, is preparing to celebrate the inscription of the Grand Song of the Dong onto UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity list. (Read More…)
Preservation
Afar
Old Ways, New Path
Published in Afar, Saturday, January 1, 2011
Dwell
In The Modern World: Protect and Conserve
Published in Dwell, Tuesday, June 1, 2010
In construction-mad Beijing, “development happens at a crazy speed, like a tsunami,” says Matthew Xinyu Hu, the former managing director of the nonprofit Beijing Cultural Heritage Protection Center (BCHPC). This was especially evident in the lead-up to the 2008 Summer Olympics. The government poured more than $40 billion into improved infrastructure, razing much of the traditional urban fabric of the city in the name of modernization.
The Olympics bore the brunt of the bad rap, but in truth, Beijing’s historic city center has been at risk (Read More…)
ReadyMade
El Cosmico: Trailer Made
Published in ReadyMade, Monday, March 1, 2010
Three days before its grand opening party, El Cosmico was humming. Under the big West Texas sky, a crew of artists, musicians, and designers poured concrete floors for the hotel’s outdoor showers, raked gravel along meandering pathways, and transformed salvaged regional materials—abandoned oil drums, ranch fencing wire—into lobby furniture and shade structures.
The brainchild of Austin-based hotelier Liz Lambert, El Cosmico is a new kind of lodging: part trailer park, part creative commune—“a Trans-Pecos kibbutz (Read More…)
Topos
Mint Plaza in San Francisco
Published in Topos, Wednesday, July 1, 2009
Just three years ago, this stretch of Jessie Street in downtown San Francisco was a gritty back alley, populated by parked cars, pigeons, and the down-and-out. On one side of the street sat a Vietnamese sandwich shop and a budget SRO hotel; on the other hulked the granite and sandstone Old Mint, a Greek Revival building (Read More…)
The New York Times Style Magazine
The Skill Set
Published in The New York Times Style Magazine, Sunday, May 17, 2009
Indian artisans are breathing new life into old traditions.
If you close your eyes and block out the visual cues — the red ocher 18th-century buildings, the brightly colored bazaars, the monkeys scrambling maniacally over the dusty rooflines — you would still know you were in Jaipur, India. The country’s center of traditional craftsmanship has a distinctive soundtrack (Read More…)
The New York Times
Prayers at an Exhibition: Bhutan’s Art and the Monks Who Protect It
Published in The New York Times, Friday, September 5, 2008
Travel + Leisure
Sacred Acts
Published in Travel + Leisure, Friday, August 1, 2008
As the pace of change quickens in Bhutan, so do efforts to preserve its centuries-old Buddhist art. Jaime Gross heads into the Himalayas to report.
Driving Bhutan’s single highway, a serpentine road hacked precariously into the side of a mountain and perpetually under repair, is an exercise in nerve. It averages 20 curves per mile, and requires honking before every one to warn the overloaded trucks and grazing cows that lurk around each bend. (Read More…)
Town & Country Travel
Palm Springs Forward
Published in Town & Country Travel, Tuesday, July 1, 2008
A determined group of midcentury modern devotees is helping this kitschy desert city embrace its future while preserving its past.
“Modern architecture is like a black dress or a trench coat: it’s classic, and you can’t get tired of it,” declares Los Angeles fashion designer Trina Turk. We’re sitting in the living room of her 1936 weekend house in Palm Springs, California, known as the Ship of the Desert (Read More…)
Travel + Leisure
Preservation: Illinois
Published in Travel + Leisure, Thursday, April 1, 2004
Mies van der Rohe’s love-it-or-hate-it celebration of Modernism endures as a cautionary tale on the merits of glass houses.
The Farnsworth House in Plano, Illinois, about 60 miles southwest of Chicago, is revered as one of the world’s most important Modernist icons. But architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s masterpiece—the glass-walled embodiment of his dictum Less is more—provoked scathing criticism upon its completion in 1951. Edith Farnsworth, the wealthy Chicago physician who had commissioned the house, declared the transparent structure unlivable and filed suit against Mies. She lost the case—she had, after all, approved the plans—and grudgingly spent weekends in her glass box for the better part of two decades. (Read More…)
My best-laid plans were scrapped the moment I arrived in Oaxaca City. “You want to see the real, authentic Mexico, right?” asked Alejandro Ruiz, one of the city’s most renowned chefs, as he giddily steered his SUV through narrow cobblestoned streets (Read More…)