I'm not a Catholic, but it's still nice to honor December 4 because it's the feast day of Saint Barbara. According to Catholic beliefs, the martyred Barbara offers special protection for architects and stone masons because her troubled life included imprisonment in a tower. Barbara isn't the only patron saint for architects, however. Saints Bernward and Thomas the Apostle have also been associated with the building trades.
Learn more:

• Barbara - The Name and the Legend
• A Day to Honor Saint Barbara

Modernism Week in Palm Springs, California is promising to be the biggest event ever with a city-wide celebration of Desert Modernism and a rare chance to see inside the mountain-side Frey House II by Albert Frey.

Also in 2010, Palm Springs will celebrate the 84th birthday of architect Donald Wexler with tours of Wexler-designed celebrity homes, Wexler's historic Steel Development Houses, Wexler tract homes in El Rancho Vista Estates, and Wexler's own Palm Springs home.

Make your reservations soon and you might get to stay in one of those nostalgic 1950s-era hotels that Palm Springs is so famous for.

Details:

• January 22-24, 2010: Wexler Weekend
• February 12-21, 2010: Modernism Week 2010

Have you visited Palm Springs? Tell us what you saw!

_{Above: Completed in 1963, Albert Frey's International Style Frey House II is set in the craggy mountainside overlooking Palm Springs, California. Photo © Jackie Craven}

December 1 is the birthday of Minoru Yamasaki, who designed the World Trade Center buildings that were destroyed in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Yamasaki was born in Seattle, Washington in 1912. He became noted for impressive, sculptural buildings such as the Lambert-St. Louis Municipal Air Terminal, the American Concrete Institute, the Reynolds Metal Company, and the U.S. science pavilion at the 1962 Seattle Exposition.

For information about reconstruction on Ground Zero, visit our World Trade Center Resources page.

^{Photo © Mary Ann Sullivan, Digital Imaging Project}

The Italian Renaissance master Andrea Palladio is to architecture what Julia Child is to cooking. He borrowed ideas from the past, added his own insights, and created a straightforward approach to design that builders anywhere could follow. American statesman Thomas Jefferson modeled his own home after Palladio's architecture. Chances are your own home reflects "Palladian" ideas.

November 30, is Andrea Palladio's birthday. He was born in 1508.

• Andrea Palladio - Biography
• Andrea Palladio - Books
• Renaissance Architecture

^{Photo: The Basilica by Andrea Palladio © Mary Ann Sullivan, Digital Imaging Project}