The annual Virginia Festival of the Book begins today and the lineup features opportunities galore to revel in Charlottesville’s love of the literary arts. Here are some must-attend events from this five-day celebration of the written word.
For weekly newspaper writers, commenting on the news is generally limited to an occasional jab or quip. And even in subjective columns and reviews, sweeping ideas that come more from the heart than the mind are left by the wayside. That's all well and good. But for the first issue of 2008, we wanted to do something different: a year in review with a completely personal touch.
By Will Goldsmith and Scott Weaver When the dust clears on November 6, we’ll have somewhere between two and six new leaders on the biggest local offices, Charlottesville City Council and the Albemarle County Board of Supervisors (bear with us, we’re writing this on deadline). Here at C-VILLE, we stepped back to look at councilors […]
It’s easy to forget they’re there—after all, you can see right through them. But make no mistake: There aren’t many parts of your house more important than the windows. They affect the way it feels to be inside and the way the place appears from outside—so keeping them looking sharp is a must. They’re a […]
“As wood grew scarce in England and France, laws were decreed limiting its use among commoners…In the mid-1600s, the British authorities decreed that Virginians who owned a hundred acres or more must build in brick.”—James Howard Kunstler, The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-made Landscape Kansas City, come to meHow one […]
StreamWatch volunteer training Get in the flow of cleaning up local water If you join StreamWatch’s band of volunteers, you’ll collect samples of Sowbugs, fly larvae and other creepy crawlies to check the Rivanna’s livability. If you were leafing through this year’s picks for the C-VILLE 20 last month, you may have noticed John Murphy, […]
The most interesting thing about faux simplicity is that it’s anything but simple, actually requiring more trouble and expense than most decorating styles. The aesthetic isn’t based on giving up possessions but on having lots of custom closets and cabinets that conceal them from view.—Winifred Gallagher, House Thinking: A Room-by-Room Look at How We Live […]
Wage clean air with the peace lily and other houseplants. Places in a planned utopiaBelvedere development will sell a green vision Can you create a sustainable community nearly out of thin air? Local development company Stonehaus is betting it can. Its 675-unit Belvedere development broke ground on May 10, beginning a five- to six-year buildout […]
But is it design?“Modernism” shows museumgoers how we lost our frills These days, we’re used to living with a mix of the modernist and the traditional. Just look at the Downtown Mall, where the blunt outlines of the fountain in Central Place sit within view of many century-old facades. It’s easy to forget that modernism […]
By Will Goldsmith, Erika Howsare and Meg McEvoy More than anything else, the big zoning changes enacted earlier this decade in both Charlottesville and Albemarle are about density. The idea: Cluster development near work centers, pack all the new people into as little space as they will accept, and locate places to shop nearby so […]