Cathleen McGuigan

"U2 is turning itself into the rock phenomenon of 1987."

As Western economies begin to recover, extravagant, eye-popping architecture is giving way to a subtler new aesthetic. In the U.S. and Europe, architectural values are shifting from can-you-top-this designs toward more efficient, functional building.

Mark Rothko and selling out in the art world.

Every day, the headlines are heartbreaking: the children orphaned in Haiti, the victims of bomb blasts in Baghdad—to say nothing of all the people who don't make the news with their pink slips or foreclosure notices.

What bride wouldn't be thrilled by the gift of a splendid new house, big enough for a growing family? Yet in 1908, when 26-year-old Franklin D. Roosevelt came home for the first time to 49 East 65th Street, just off New York's Park Avenue, he found his wife, Eleanor, in tears. "This was not her house, she sobbed," according to the biographer Joseph Lash. "She had not helped plan it, and this wasn't the way she wanted to live." The brick-and-limestone townhouse had been built by Franklin's...

Today, except for a few projects like the moribund TWA terminal at JFK, Eero Saarinen is better known for his furniture than his buildings. His "womb" chairs and pedestal tables (designed, he said, to "clear up the slum of legs" in the American home) are still big sellers for Knoll.

When President Eisenhower stuck a silver shovel in the dirt at the groundbreaking for Lincoln Center in 1959, he talked about America's desire to share "the good things of life with all our citizens." The architects of the arts complex apparently didn't get the message.

Gritty yet glamorous, Palermo is a poor man's Rome.

The Guggenheim was Wright's last great building. What happened to the first?

With designer architecture, it's the quality—not the size—that matters.

Tom Stoppard's adaptation of 'The Cherry Orchard' is timely, though he won't admit it.

Of all the astonishing works in Cai Guo-Qiang's exhibition "I Want to Believe" at New York's Guggenheim Museum, the one I can't get out of my head is "Head On." The piece consisted of 99 full-size synthetic wolves stampeding up the museum's spiral ramp with such force that the front of the pack lifts up into an arc of flight, like Santa's reindeer—only to crash headlong into a wall of glass.

America's boutique architecture firms mix avant-garde designs with local color.

A trio of memoirs tells all about the lives of Hollywood heartthrobs.

The quirky 'lollipop' building is finally reborn.

After a closely watched international search, the trustees of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York have chosen a new director—only the ninth in the Met's 138-year history—and they found him right under their noses: tapestries specialist Thomas Campbell, 46.

Sustainable buildings are virtuous, but they can be ugly. Only a few designs are truly great.

The buzz on "The New York City Waterfalls" was loud enough that a boatload of reporters chugged out into New York Harbor one recent steamy morning with the installation's artist, Olafur Eliasson, and Mayor Michael Bloomberg for a first, up-close look at the project: four cascades, ranging in height from 90 to 120 feet, installed at sites along the East River.

Buckminster Fuller's inventions didn't always work, but his ideas still inspire.

The year's top Broadway musicals may be hip, but they're old-fashioned, too.

The subprime mortgage crisis hasn't bruised one chunk of the real-estate market: top vintage modern houses. This week, two midcentury classics hit the auction block.

Julie Andrews's memoir reveals a lonely childhood that could have used a spoonful of sugar, or two.

Pritzker Prize winner Jean Nouvel on his battle to reshape a world of cities that all look the same.

'South Pacific' is getting its first Broadway revival in nearly 60 years, and it looks as good as new.

How the new Bank of America building will save energy and let its occupants breathe easy.

The battle for the Akita, the samurai of dogs.

Gunpowder is a pretty destructive art material. Cai Guo-Qiang uses it on paper and in sculpture-like pyrotechnics. The results are explosive—and gorgeous.

The camera loved Lee Miller, and so did a long string of men. But she was able to turn her beauty and her talent into an unlikely, and daring, second career.

If you're suffering from P.P.E.—Premature Political Exhaustion—and wondering how you'll make it to this fall's election, here's an antidote. "November," a new Broadway comedy by David Mamet, introduces you to a candidate you'd never vote for, no matter what your partisan leanings.

Haven't seen enough Jane Austen movies lately? Good, because PBS now has all six novels on film.