Category: Architecture

Mount Auburn Cemetery in Spring

Mount Auburn Cemetery in Watertown and Cambridge, Massachusetts, was founded in 1831 and became a model for the American ‘rural’ cemetery movement. It was listed on the United States National Register of Historic Places in 1975 and received National Historic Landmark designation in 2003. In an earlier article on ‘A Landscape of Memory: Mount Auburn Cemetery‘, some …

The Absence of Equality and Seeking the Change: The New National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), Washington, D.C.

The National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) opened on September 24, 2016, in Washington, D.C., in a ceremony led by U.S. President Barack Obama. It is a Smithsonian Institution museum and has over 36,000 objects in its collection. It is a tour de force in covering extremely important, tough, and still often ignored subject areas within public …

A Landscape of Memory: Mount Auburn Cemetery

Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge and Watertown, Massachusetts, is a sacred place, a burial place, a pleasure ground, a work in progress. Mount Auburn Cemetery was founded in 1831 and became a model for the American ‘rural’ cemetery movement. The idea to create suburban landscaped cemeteries goes back to ideas by architects such as Sir Christopher Wren …

Watching the Royals Die: The plight of the Chinar Tree in Kashmir

Greater Kashmir, one of the main newspapers in Kashmir, published the article ‘Watching the Royals Die’ by Jaasindah Mir and Jan Haenraets about the plight of the endangered Chinar trees in Kashmir. To view the full text as Pdf, go to this LINK (790 KB). These royals are the Chinar trees, the booyn, of our Kashmiri land. …

Save the Chinar: The Endangered Heritage of the Oriental Plane Trees of Kashmir (Intro)

The Chinar, the Oriental (Eastern) Plane tree (Platanus orientalis), is living heritage of Kashmir. It is a majestic tree that can be found throughout the landscape of the valley, hillsides and cities. The oldest found Chinar is thought to have been planted in the year 1374. Their number has since the 1970s been in a steady decline with over 25,000 trees …