Contributor

David Greusel

David Greusel has worked as an architect for more than thirty years with several Midwestern firms of varying sizes. He is founding principal of Convergence Design, a Kansas City-based practice specializing in places where people gather. While with another firm, he was lead designer for two major league ballparks: Minute Maid Park, home of the Houston Astros, and PNC Park, home of the Pittsburgh Pirates. In 2009, David was named a Fellow in the American Institute of Architects.

David has also for several years been a cast member and writer for Right Between The Ears, a radio comedy program broadcast on public and satellite radio.

Intentional Isolation in Suburbia

Social Isolation Symposium: Stories of hope and of heartbreak

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More From This Contributor

Unconventional Wisdom

Jacobsen’s insight into the degree to which the suburbanization of North America has been bad for church and community life is stunning—even more so if you had not previously considered the possibility.

The Giant Beanstalk

I fear that my profession is much more in thrall to fashion than to common sense.

Museum of Data

Google’s efforts to “organize the world’s information” fail to recognize that some things are not reducible to information.

Machines for Selling

What the layout of supermarkets tells us about the grocery business, about our own nutrition, and about a loss of neighbourhood watchfulness.

The Art of the Spreadsheet

What we miss when we limit creativity to “the arts” is the innumerable ways that humans express their creative nature in all kinds of work.

The Profit Motive

While it’s easy to paint greedy hedge fund managers in sinister colours, there is much about business profits to be thankful for.

Armies of Egypt

Is working for a large corporation a substitute for humble dependence on God’s providence?

What Hath Lenoir Wrought?

The internal combustion engine reflects a persistent problem with technology: we consistently underestimate its potential impact—on the environment, on our culture, and on our lives.

These Witnesses

How much better would a wedding be if the guests were actually called upon by the officiant to pledge their lifelong devotion to upholding the couple’s vows to the extent they have the opportunity?

Just Business

Walmart must exist, because logic exists. But do we want to live where price is god, efficiency is the watchword, and grace is not only unnecessary but undesirable?

Tessa’s Virtue

I saw a particular kind of delight on the face of Tessa Virtue before Monday night’s ice dancing final at the 2010 Winter Olympic Games. It was the joy of mastery.

Vocational Rehab

I’m not opposed to college—for those whose future plans require it. But I hope the Great Recession has shown we really do need more handmade cabinets, and fewer cube dwellers.

Astronomical

No one is saying that sinking a three-pointer at the buzzer is better than teaching kindergarten—at least I hope no one is. But it is more amazing.

Sunlight is “old school”

I am perfectly amenable to designing windowless classrooms for robots. But human souls—even prisoners’—need contact with the outside world.

Silver Medal

What is it about second place that prompts so many of us to label it “losing?” Perhaps it helps us feel better about ourselves?

Industrial Gothic

So what’s wrong with pragmatism in architecture? Plenty, as it turns out.

Turn Two

Baseball’s double play is a work of art, a four-second hymn of praise, very nearly a miracle. Compared to a full-length ballet, the double play is almost infinitesimally brief. But in sheer beauty and poetry, it is the equal.

In-flight refueling

McDonald’s is emblematic of libraries-turned-media-centres, and hospitals-turned-medical-centres: the human has become inhuman. And yet, like so many things in modern life, the fault, dear Brutus, lies not in McDonald’s, but in ourselves.

Learning by osmosis

I think that architectural training in North America is more wrong than right. It is based on an Enlightenment model of learning, imagining that verbal and/or written communication equals knowledge transfer equals education.
After toiling in invaluable apprenticeships, and learning mostly by overhearing, I beg to differ.

Two shades of green

The green movement, as commonly understood, embodies one idea I believe Christians should heartily endorse, and one I believe we should equally heartily reject.

Art museum: cathedral or cancer?

With the eclipse of religion in the West, the art museum has replaced the cathedral as the building type with the greatest architectural, social, and spiritual significance in a community. One could cite many facts to support this claim, but only one is needed: the commissions sought by and awarded to the most highly regarded architects in our day. Nine out of ten are for museums.

Why architecture matters

Churchill was right: we shape our buildings, and thereafter they shape us. And many of us, disinterested in architectural style wars as we may be, may soon fully understand the consequences of being raised in neighbourhoods without character, without particularity, without the sacred quality of place. The same philosophies that shape our literature, music, and the rest of our contemporary culture also underpin our architecture. And like the rest of culture, the stewardship of excellent architecture must be reclaimed for Christ.