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Jan 8, 2025 | 
smithsonianmag.com | Michael Snyder
In 1740, when Boston was a colonial outpost of 16,500 people, an extravagantly wealthy merchant named Peter Faneuil offered his city a gift. To replace the informal scrum of vendors gathered at the city’s docks, Faneuil proposed a modern marketplace to suit the ambitions of a growing city that, in just a few decades, would find itself hurtling toward Revolution. The project had its share of detractors, so to get it built, Faneuil and his cohort of rich merchants had to steamroll smaller traders.
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Jan 8, 2025 | 
mchnews.com | Michael Snyder
Greetings Stockport! I’m the trash guy around my house and I take my job seriously. No one has to tell me to do it… I just do it. When I have to travel for work I make sure the cans are empty before I leave. I do that, and I make coffee most mornings and that’s about it. But this […]
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Nov 19, 2024 | 
smithsonianmag.com | Michael Snyder
In 1995, when Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater was less than 60 years old, a group of engineers traveled to the rural highlands outside Pittsburgh to inspect the house’s iconic cantilevered terraces, thrust out over their waterfall in defiance of gravity—and, as it turned out, of good sense. Even before construction was completed in 1937, cracks had appeared in the concrete parapets. By the mid-1990s, the balconies had sagged in some places by more than seven inches.
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Nov 13, 2024 | 
mchnews.com | Michael Snyder
Greetings Stockport! The American experiment continues! What a difference a week makes. I don’t know if I would describe it as hope or relief, but it seems like the system has begun the long work of self-healing. Elections are the mechanism the founders put in place as a check on tyranny. That mechanism has come through to slow the move […]
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Oct 23, 2024 | 
mchnews.com | Michael Snyder
Greetings Stockport! Lets talk about the important stuff right here at the top of the page… candy! “Beggars’ Night” will be from 5:30 to 7 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 26, all over town. So please be careful if you are driving. We love our children. Tabor Ridge C of C is having a Trunk or Treat event from 4 to 6 […]
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Sep 10, 2024 | 
architecturalrecord.com | Michael Snyder
The focal point of Atelier Ars’s Promontory Villa, a sprawling six-bedroom weekend house in the pine-cloaked mountains southwest of Guadalajara, Mexico, is a totemic stone chimney rising 23 feet into an open sky against a backdrop of distant hills. Primordial and abstract—the hearth is the most ancient metonym for a home—when separated from a house, it borders on the surreal; the stone tower becomes an anchor, pinning the 9,640-square-foot home to its plot.
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Sep 4, 2024 | 
mchnews.com | Michael Snyder
Greetings Stockport! This coming Saturday I get to do two things I enjoy. Support a great cause and play golf while doing it. Mary’s House usually holds its outing on a weekend I have another commitment, but this year they moved it to September and I get to participate. I’m not a great golfer but I usually hit enough decent […]
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Sep 3, 2024 | 
architecturalrecord.com | Michael Snyder
Architects & Firms Before the Mexico City–based architect Fernanda Canales put pen to paper to design what would eventually become the striking Casa 720—a country house for a family of six set on 3.7 acres, about 90 miles southwest of the Mexican capital—she erected three wood platforms connected to the ground by rickety wood stairs: “tree houses,” Canales says, “without a tree.” The lot, traversed by a dense line of mimosa shrubs, sprawled beneath a soaring basalt crag, its edges fringed by...
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Aug 29, 2024 | 
smithsonianmag.com | Michael Snyder
Immediately after the 1969 groundbreaking for the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., Ada Louise Huxtable, then architecture critic for the New York Times, described the planned building as “the biggest marble doughnut in the world.” By the time the museum opened to the public a good five years later—a cylinder 231 feet across clad in concrete panels, hovering like an alien spacecraft alongside a sunken sculpture garden at the southern edge of the National Mall—critical...
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Aug 28, 2024 | 
mchnews.com | Michael Snyder
Greetings Stockport! The summer is winding down, but that does not mean things are slowing down. There are a number of things happening in the month of September that you will want to be a part of. Watch this column for information about church celebrations and the second annual Stocktoberfest. Last year was a great success, and this year promises […]
