Site specifics: Todd Saunders, host, ghost and visitor

This is another comment coming in the wake of my recent visit to Fogo Island for Shore Time — a gathering to discuss design, art, place [Link] [Link] It’s about the wonderful architecture of Todd Saunders [Link]. More matters of hospitality, of hosts, visitors, and the ghosts that can haunt their meeting. At Shore Time,…

Times Places Things — Fogo Island, Newfoundland

A previous post on this site mentioned a recent visit I made to Fogo Island [Link] — and where I found myself revisiting matters I had raised in a book of mine — Heritage Performance Design (2019) [Link]. Here are more comments and thoughts that have arisen after this extraordinary gathering. See also my thoughts…

Palmyra in the (archaeological) north

More legacies of antiquity, reworkings of what remains. Displacements. Funerary portraits. Loss and the burden of interpretation. I have been posting some photographs of statues from the extraordinary collections in the Glyptotek in Copenhagen. The museum also holds a large collection of funerary reliefs from ancient Palmyra, the oasis city in Syria that once served as…

Museum of Classical Archaeology

Plaster casts. Basement, Museum of Classical Archaeology, Peterhouse, Cambridge. 1976. Reprinted 2026. A precocious teenager, student of Classics, I was visiting Cambridge to talk with archaeologist David Clarke. With extraordinary generosity he gave a couple of hours to me to discuss not antiquity, but prehistory, how the field was a corrective and antidote to the…