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Arts & Culture / Art & Artists

The Mapungubwe National Park Interpretive Center in South Africa is John Ochsendorf's most famous work.

With Ancient Arches, the Old is New Again

An MIT professor shows how ancient architecture can be the basis for a more sustainable future

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Letters

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The World’s Great Structures Built With Legos

For 15 years, Adam Reed Tucker was an architect. Now, he constructs models of famous buildings with thousands of Legos

Field Beach, c. 1850s, Mary Blood Mellen.

Women Who Shaped History

The Grand Women Artists of the Hudson River School

Unknown and forgotten to history, these painters of America’s great landscapes are finally getting their due in a new exhibition

Movie Starlet and Reporters, Norman Rockwell, 1936.

Norman Rockwell’s Storytelling Lessons

George Lucas and Stephen Spielberg found inspiration for their films in the work of one of America’s most cherished illustrators

In Blade Runner, pollution and overpopulation have transformed cities such as Los Angeles into depressing megacities.

What Movies Predict for the Next 40 Years

From Back to the Future to the Terminator franchise, Hollywood has many strange and scary ideas of what will happen by 2050

Yup'ik tobacco box

What’s Up

Christo's 24.5-mile-long, 18-foot-high Running Fence graced the hills of two California counties for two weeks in September 1976.

Christo’s California Dreamin’

In 1972, artists Christo Jeanne-Claude envisioned building a fence, but it would take a village to make their Running Fence happen

Harvey Tananbaum says Chandra has "offered us clues about ... the universe's ultimate destiny."

Far Sighted

The Chandra X-Ray Center at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Laboratory helps scientists observe a fantastic range of phenomena

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Letters

Readers Respond to the April Issue

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Letters

Readers Respond to the March Issue

"Why Design Now?" is an exhibit at New York City's Cooper-Hewitt where designers address social and environmental issues.

What’s Up

Veterinary dentist Barron Hall was called to help a 15-year-old female western lowland gorilla who had a fractured tooth.

Q and A with Barron Hall, Veterinary Dentist

Root canals on cheetahs, lions and gorillas is just another day at the office for veterinary dentist Barron Hall

Rare correspondence—carried by a vanished courier—is one of only "two pieces of what collectors call 'interrupted mail' from the Pony Express," says Postal Museum curator Daniel Piazza.

A Rare Pony Express Artifact

A letter that took two years to reach its destination evokes the hazards of the Pony Express

G. Wayne Clough became the first Smithsonian Secretary to travel to Antarctica.

Antarctica!

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Letters

Readers Respond to the February Issue

Worry over the exquisite art—including an image of the protector goddess Tara—has fueled photographer Aditya Arya's efforts.

Glimpses of the Lost World of Alchi

Threatened Buddhist art at a 900-year-old monastery high in the Indian Himalayas sheds light on a fabled civilization

Cobalt Blue Series is among the 162 rare Viennese works selected to be on display at the Cooper-Hewitt, in New York City starting April 23.

What’s Up

In a letter to the Daguerreian Journal in 1851, Levi Hill claimed to have invented color photography.

A 160-Year-Old Photographic Mystery

In 1851, Levi Hill claimed he invented color photography. Was he a genius or a fraud?

The National Museum of Natural History, opened in 1910, is the largest museum on the National Mall.

Two Centennials for the Smithsonian

In 2010, the Institution celebrates two seminal events – the founding of its Natural History Museum and the inauguration of its research in Panama

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