If tradition is a socially embodied argument extended through time, then Willa Cather and Simone Weil’s quarrel with the boosters of the Gothic exemplifies faithfulness to the traditions of Christian sacred architecture.

Jonathan McGregor on tradition versus traditionalism

Presentism is an obsession with the present that forgets its relationship with the past, that covers history and humanity with a blanket of generic sameness that muffles difference and dulls memory.

Donato Loia reviews Charles Saumarez Smith’s The Art Museum in Modern Times

What is remarkable about Hagia Sophia’s transformations is the ways in which it was architecturally transformed in line with the politico-spatial turning points in the region’s history… These architectural changes have the power to reinforce, and even ignite, historical change.

Emre Çetin Gürer maps the space of historical change in the Hagia Sophia

Two containers with a temple complex: a ship and a mailbox. Both drip with blood drawn in white heat of colonial suspicions of rebellion and rights to autonomy.

Maggie Slaughter exposes colonialism and orientalism in a mailbox and a passenger ship

It is time to set aside the troubled histories of past confrontations and takeovers and strive for healing and reconciliation, by advocating to open the doors of these sites to all faiths who are invested in them.

Sahar Hosseini on the Hagia Sophia and spaces of encounter

A central concern remains: the timing and nature of India’s encounter with modernity. Did modernity come with the East India Company or did modernity have more ‘native’ roots?

Devin Creed looks for a different modernity in the streets of New Delhi.

The windows at Conques, seen from the outside, seem to be walled with a metal sheet.

Donato Loia examines the old and the new with Pierre Soulages’s modernist windows in a Romanesque church.

Tim Barr assembles articles for living during quarantine.