“Architecture is the way we commit to a political philosophy in a lot of ways.” Van Lewis says it almost in passing, but it carries weight. It suggests buildings aren’t neutral containers for life — they record what a city believes about itself, or at least what it’s […]
Construction is underway on the Larry H. & Gail Miller Arts Center, a new regional venue set to expand arts access in Salt Lake County’s southwest valley. A March 19 groundbreaking in Downtown Daybreak brought together civic leaders, arts advocates, and community members to mark the start of […]
Fans of Aaron Sorkin’s The West Wing may remember the show’s famous jab at the Mercator projection, a map so ubiquitous we mistake it for neutral. Little could those viewers have known, back in the George W. years, how much that same projection would come to shadow a […]
Park City’s public art program started with an accounting error. David Chaplin was going through the books of the Park City Arts Foundation when he came across a felicitous accounting error. Chaplin, an avid skier, professional artist and instructor at the high school and college level, had moved […]
When Jo Roper came to Utah in the early 1960s, she was already an accomplished sculptor. Trained at Southwest Missouri State College and at Cranbrook Academy of Art, she had spent more than a decade teaching, exhibiting, and working across the Southwest, particularly in New Mexico, where she […]
For more than a century, the Pickle Building stood along 400 West, first as part of Salt Lake City’s industrial infrastructure and, more recently, as a marker of the Granary District’s creative ambitions. On the morning of May 22, 2025, it was abruptly demolished—an act that erased a […]
In certain respects the spaces couldn’t be more different. The one is a wide, dimly-lit, makeshift sort of space, tucked away in an untrafficked area on the second floor of the University Place Mall in Orem. The other is a sprawling mansion, perched on a hill, surrounded by […]
Making a shy curtsy — like a Degas ballerina — the bus stop/shelter at the southeast corner of 2505 East Parleys Way is an appropriate welcome and nod of approval for the performance of a new type of building: one that is more than sustainable. This building’s self-image […]
It’s not every artist who can get their own museum. Certainly, no Utah artist has.* But to hear talk at the ribbon cutting of the new Southern Utah Museum of Art (SUMA), it seems Jimmie Jones has come close. Jones was the impetus behind the sweeping white structure […]
It isn’t often that a humanmade structure in the shadow of Zion Canyon captures the interest of the art community surrounding Zion National Park, but this month the historic Rockville Bridge has done just that, in the aptly named “Rockville Bridge Exhibition and Sale” June 1-July 11 […]
Like a well-constructed sentence, the parts of the Marmalade Branch are coordinated and subordinated. Pride of place—the subject of the sentence, if you like—goes to the striped silver-gray plane that forms the highest part of the roof, then bends down sharply at front and back to enclose the dominant volume like a bracket. Like any main clause, it names its subject.
The Weber County Library System took advantage of the extra day this leap year to unveil their newest branch and home to their regional Headquarters Library at 2039 W. 4000 South in Roy. The new brick and glass building, in a large park setting, features 52,000 square […]
I’ve never seen a convincing example of divine intervention in the affairs of men, but those who believe they have may take comfort from something that happened as I was waiting to enter the Provo Center Temple during its continuing open house. While awaiting the film that introduces […]
Forget the “marketplace of ideas.” I say: put small gloves on ideas, stick ‘em in a cage with an opponent of comparable capabilities and gravitas, and let them “go toes.” Eye to eye. Mano a mano. Mixed Mental Arts Fight Club (MMA FC).
Here’s what I’m talking about: David Ross Scheer’s The Death of Drawing, where the idea-rassle between Drawings and Simulations finds enthusiastic sponsors in philosophical categories like ethics, epistemology and ontology.
When I was a little kid in the late 1950s and early 1960s, I was enamored of the City and County Building on Washington Square. My father, Carleton Caine Alder, worked there for years as the chief deputy county treasurer and when I visited Dad, I wandered around […]
Two steps up on the east side of the third floor of Westminster College’s flagship Converse Hall is a small sitting area framed by a steep pedimented gable and the large, east-facing window. Four lounge chairs — three covered in a faded maritime-blue fabric made of knotted-thread polyester […]
Once again, Park City’s Kimball Art Center has had to send their BIG (Bjarke Ingels Group) architects back to the drawing board for their 10 million dollar renovation project. The original design, first revealed in early 2012 (see our article here), caused some issues with locals, who took […]
In the late 1960s Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke collaborated on a film and a novel, both titled 2001: A Space Odyssey. In each, monoliths inexplicably appear and trigger epic changes, but the monoliths differ between the two media: in Kubrick’s movie, the monoliths are large, black, and […]
In Utah’s newer neighborhoods, it is difficult to tell one LDS meetinghouse from another. A continuing process of central planning and modular design has meant that over the past half-century LDS ward houses have come to look more and more alike: increasingly large parking lots surround a […]
