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Lisa Rochon decries the treatment of architect Arthur Erickson’s buildings in Canada. He “is the éminence grise of modernism in this country. He led a postwar movement of design that extends landscape through architecture, something Canada’s new generation of award-winning practitioners have absorbed into their own thinking. It’s easy to blame lack of money. Or zoning. Running through all of these moronic moves is a lack of will to safeguard our national treasures.”

The new memorial fountain to Diana, Princess of Wales, is about to be christened in London’s Hyde Park. “The memorial fountain is like this: a surprising, yet ultimately gentle drawing together of unlikely family, friends and supporters of the late princess, and design professionals. It is a very English compromise, one that will neither frighten the horses plodding around Hyde Park, nor offend any of the millions of people who will pass this way to dip a toe, as it were, into Diana’s memory.”

“Chances are there would have been some degree of opposition sooner or later had anyone suggested building a 10-story, 175-ton nickel-surfaced teardrop suspended within a bronze-clad tower on a pier across the water from the World Trade Center site as a 9/11 memorial. But when the artist turns out to be Zurab Tsereteli, a Russian sculptor whose works — like a 300-foot statue of Columbus or a 165-foot Peter the Great — are so controversial that opponents once threatened to wire Peter with explosives and blow him up, another level of tumult is pretty much guaranteed.”