In its old and new headquarters buildings, Alabama Power Company has given the state some of its finest urban architecture. Birmingham architectural firm Warren, Knight and Davis designed the 1925 Art Deco skyscraper, with its eye-catching form and colorful brick-and-tile ornamentation near the top. The sixteen-story building introduced new skyscraper forms to Birmingham, as the horizontal cornice cap of the Chicago School gave way to the vertical emphasis seen in this building’s terminus. Here, the tower is a slender brick shaft rising from its limestone base to a peaked red-tile roof. Above the tall, limestone-framed entrance, ...more

The Waffle House Museum preserves the first Waffle House restaurant, which opened in 1955 after neighbors Joe Rogers Sr. and Tom Forkner decided the Atlantic suburb of Avondale Estates needed a 24-hour restaurant. Their roadside restaurant became an empire that now boasts 1,700 restaurants in twenty-five states. Waffle Houses can be found at most interstate crossroads throughout the south and at multiple suburban and small town sites elsewhere in the region. The original Avondale Estates restaurant, a simple brick box with a floor-to-ceiling plate glass storefront, has been restored to its 1955 look, with original ...more

It is an ongoing architectural challenge to design a traditional building type in ways that relate to contemporary sensibilities—without thoroughly diverging from tradition. Steven Holl’s Chapel of St. Ignatius, completed in 1997 on the campus of Seattle University between Broadway and Madison Street in the Capitol Hill neighborhood just east of downtown Seattle, faced such a challenge. The chapel blends an ancient program of a church, replete with bell tower, narthex, nave, and choir, with modern materials, abstraction, and a regional desire to reach out and capture the often elusive northwest light. Holl claimed that his design was “forward looking, but anchored in the past.” ... more

One of central Virginia's few examples of Ruskinian Venetian Gothic, the Miller School, with its polychrome brick and weighty scale, recalls English “redbrick” universities. The will of Samuel Miller (1792–1869), who was born nearby and who amassed a considerable fortune in tobacco and agricultural commodities, provided for the establishment of an institution for the education and maintenance of the orphaned and poor children of Albemarle County. The result was a school devoted to industrial arts and manual labor. ... more