Portal:Architecture/Selected article archive/Archive 1


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A kitchen is a room used for food preparation. A modern kitchen is typically equipped with a stove or microwave oven and has a sink with water on tap for cleaning food and dishwashing. Modern kitchens often also feature a dishwasher. Some installations to store food usually also are present, either in the form of an adjacent pantry or more commonly cabinets and a refrigerator.

Although the main function of a kitchen is cooking, it can be the center of other activities as well, especially within homes, depending on its size, furnishing, and equipment. If a washing machine is present, washing and drying laundry is also done in the kitchen. The kitchen may also be the place where the family eats, provided it is large enough. Sometimes, it is the most comforting room in a house, where family and visitors tend to congregate.

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The Xanadu Houses (pronounced “ZAN-uh-du”) were a series of experimental homes, built to showcase computers and automation in the home. The architectural project began in 1979, and during the early 1980s three houses were built: one each in Kissimmee, Florida; Wisconsin Dells, Wisconsin; and Gatlinburg, Tennessee. The houses included novel construction and design techniques, and became popular visitor attractions during the 1980s.

The Xanadu Houses were notable for being built with polyurethane insulation foam rather than concrete, for easy, fast, and cost-effective construction. They were ergonomically designed, and contained some of the earliest home automation systems. The Kissimmee Xanadu, designed by Roy Mason was the most popular, and at its peak was attracting 1000 visitors every day. The Wisconsin Dells and Gatlinburg houses were closed and demolished in the early 1990s; the Kissimmee Xanadu House was closed in 1996 and demolished in October 2005. The name lives on in Bill Gates' private home. Xanadu 2.0.

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Lazar Markovich Lissitzky (Лазарь Маркович Лисицкий, November 23, 1890 – December 30, 1941), better known as El Lissitzky (Эль Лисицкий), was a Russian artist, designer, photographer, teacher, typographer, and architect. He was one of the most important figures of the Russian avant garde, helping develop suprematism with his friend and mentor, Kazimir Malevich, and designed numerous exhibition displays and propaganda works for the former Soviet Union. His work greatly influenced the Bauhaus, Constructivist, and De Stijl movements and experimented with production techniques and stylistic devices that would go on to dominate  20th century graphic design.

Lissitzky's entire career was laced with the belief that the artist could be an agent for change, later summarized with his edict, "das zielbewußte Schaffen" (The goal-oriented creation). 4 A Jew, he began his career illustrating Yiddish children's books in an effort to promote Jewish culture in Russia, a country that was undergoing massive change at the time and had just repealed its  anti-semitic laws. Starting at the age of 15, he began teaching; a duty he would stay with for the vast majority of his life. Over the years, he taught in a variety of positions, schools, and artistic mediums, spreading and exchanging ideas at a rapid pace. He took this ethic with him when he worked with Malevich in heading the suprematist art group UNOVIS, when he developed a variant suprematist series of his own, Proun, and further still in 1921, when he took up a job as the Russian cultural ambassador in Weimar Germany, working with and influencing important figures of the Bauhaus and De Stijl movements during his stay. In his remaining years he brought significant innovation and change to the fields of typography, exhibition design, photomontage, and book design, producing critically respected works and winning international acclaim for his exhibition design. This continued until his deathbed, where in 1941 he produced one of his last known works &mdash; a Soviet propaganda poster rallying the people to construct more tanks for the fight against Nazi Germany.

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Sicilian Baroque is the distinctive form of Baroque architecture that took hold on the island of Sicily, off the southern coast of Italy, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The style is recognisable not only by its typical Baroque curves and flourishes, but also by its grinning masks and putti and a particular flamboyance that has given Sicily a unique architectural identity.

The Sicilian Baroque style came to fruition during a major surge of rebuilding following a massive earthquake in 1693. Previously, the Baroque style had been used on the island in a naïve and parochial manner, having evolved from hybrid native architecture rather than being derived from the great Baroque architects of Rome. After the earthquake, local architects, many of them trained in Rome, were given plentiful opportunities to recreate the more sophisticated Baroque architecture that had become popular in mainland Italy; the work of these local architects — and the new genre of architectural engravings that they pioneered — inspired more local architects to follow their lead. Around 1730, Sicilian architects had developed a confidence in their use of the Baroque style. Their particular interpretation led to its evolving further into a personalised and highly localised art form on the island. From the 1780s onwards, the style was gradually replaced by the newly-fashionable neoclassicism.

The highly decorative Sicilian Baroque period lasted barely fifty years, and perfectly reflected the social order of the island at a time when, nominally ruled by Spain, it was in fact governed by an extravagant and hedonistic aristocracy. Its Baroque architecture gives the island an architectural character that has lasted into the 21st century.

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The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, also known as Holocaust memorial for short, is a memorial in Berlin that was opened in 2005 a block to the south of the Brandenburg Gate. It was designed by New York architect Peter Eisenman and commemorates the Jewish victims of the Holocaust perpetrated by Nazi Germany.

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Unlike many of the buildings for worship in other religions (like the cruciform plan of churches, or the dome and minarets of mosques), there has never been a single dominant style for synagogue architecture. Synagogues have been built in whatsoever style was in vogue in the place and at the time of building. Even ancient synagogues show this variation &mdash; the ruined synagogue of Merom is in severe Doric while that of Kafr Bir’im is in a Græco-Roman modification of Corinthian. Synagogues do incorporate some common features in the interior, but even that is subject to variation.

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Holkham Hall, Norfolk, England, is an 18th century country house constructed in the Palladian style for Thomas Coke 1st Earl of Leicester by the architect William Kent with advice from the architect and aristocrat Lord Burlington. Burlington's Chiswick House is the prototype for many of England's Palladian revival houses.

Holkham Hall is one of England's finest examples of the Palladian revival style of architecture, the severity of the design being closer to Palladio's ideals than many of the other numerous Palladian style houses of the period. The Holkham estate, formerly known as Neals, had been purchased in 1609 by Sir Edward Coke, the founder of the family fortune. It remains today the ancestral home of the Coke family, Earls of Leicester of Holkham.

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Floor numbering is the numbering scheme used for a building's floors; it varies depending on the level of the "first floor" and on the names given to the subterranean levels.

Rooms numbers generally start with the floor's number; occasionally the first element may be the letter repesenting the floor. In large buildings, two conventions are common:
 * Odd numbers are used for one side of the building and even for the other.
 * The second digit in the room number indicates a specific block or wing of the building.

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An ice hotel is a temporary hotel made up entirely of snow and sculpted blocks of ice and therefore an example of novelty architecture. They are built each year in the coldest regions of the world as a way to attract vacationers to resort areas. They are heavily promoted by their sponsors and have special features for travelers who are interested in novelties and unusual environments. Their lobbies are often filled with ice sculptures, and food and beverages are specially chosen for the circumstances. Due to the fact that ice melts in warm weather, ice hotels must be rebuilt each year.

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Urban planning, "city planning" or "town planning" is the discipline of land use planning which deals with the physical, social, and economic development of metropolitan regions, municipalities and neighbourhoods. Other professions deal in more detail with a smaller scale of development, namely architecture, landscape architecture and urban design. Regional planning deals with a still larger environment, at a less detailed level.

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Lighting refers to either artificial light sources such as lamps or to natural illumination of interiors from daylight. Lighting represents a major component of energy consumption, accounting for about 25 percent of all energy consumed worldwide. In major cities, light pollution is of growing concern. Artificial lighting is provided today by electric lights, but previously by Gas lighting, candles or oil lamps. Proper lighting can enhance task performance or aesthetics, while there can be energy wastage and adverse health effects of lighting. Indoor lighting is a form of fixture or furnishing, and a key part of interior design. Lighting can also be an intrinsic component of landscaping.

→ read article Russian architecture follows a tradition whose roots were established in the Eastern Slavic state of Kievan Rus'. After the fall of Kiev, Russian architectural history continued in the principalities of Vladimir-Suzdal, and Novgorod, and the succeeding states of Muscovy, the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, and the modern Russian Federation.

The medieval state of Kievan Rus' incorporated parts of what is now Ukraine and was centered around Kiev. Its influence on architectural tradition extended to the modern states of Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine. The status of Kievan Rus' as a precursor state to Russia is a somewhat politically charged issue after the fall of Soviet Union and the independence of Ukraine and Belarus.

École des Beaux-Arts ("School of Fine Arts") refers to a number of influential Art schools in France. The most famous is now located on the left bank in Paris, across the Seine from the Louvre, in the 6th arrondissement. The school has a history spanning more than 350 years, training many of the great artists in Europe. Beaux Arts style was modeled on classical "antiquities", preserving these idealized forms and passing the style on to future generations.

The origins of the school go back to 1648 when the "Académie des Beaux-Arts" was founded by Cardinal Mazarin to educate the most talented students in drawing, painting, sculpture, engraving, architecture and other media. Louis XIV was known to select graduates from the school to decorate the royal apartments at Versailles, and in 1863 Napoléon III granted the school independence from the government, changing the name to "L‘Ecole des Beaux-Arts". Women were admitted beginning in 1897.

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Flight 93 National Memorial protects the site of the crash of hijacked United Airlines Flight 93 on September 11, 2001, west of Sky Line Road in Stonycreek Township, Pennsylvania. The site will also feature a memorial to the 40 innocent victims of the hijacking, including those who fought back against the four 9/11 terrorists on board the Boeing 757-222 airplane. The current design for the memorial is a modified version of the entry Crescent of Embrace by Paul and Milena Murdoch.

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The fleur-de-lis (also spelled fleur-de-lys; plural fleurs-de-lis or -lys; an archaic spelling is fleur-de-luce) is used in heraldry, where it is particularly associated with the French monarchy (see King of France). The fleur-de-lis remains an unofficial symbol of France (along with the bees and the Napoleonic eagle), but has not been used as an official symbol by the various French republics. It is also used by various Scout organizations worldwide as part of their logo.

→ Fleur-de-lis A huge iron and glass building, The Crystal Palace was a constructed in 19th Century Britain. A rebuilt and expanded version of the building that originally housed the Great Exhibition of 1851, it stood in Upper Norwood from 1854 until 1936, and attracted many thousands of visitors from all levels of society. The name "Crystal Palace" was coined by the satirical magazine Punch. The original building was erected at the top of Sydenham Hill in Hyde Park, London to house The Great Exhibition, embodying the products of many countries throughout the world. (more…)



Deconstructivism in architecture, also called Deconstruction, is a development in Postmodern architecture beginning in the late 1980s. It is characterised by ideas of fragmentation, non-linear processes of design, an interest in manipulating ideas of a structure's surface or skin, and apparent non-Euclidean geometry, which serve to distort and dislocate some of the elements of architecture, such as structure and envelope. The final visual appearance of buildings that exhibit the myriad deconstructivist "styles" are characterized by a stimulating unpredictability and a controlled chaos.

Some of the architects involved have been influenced by the writings of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida and his ideas on Deconstruction; others have been influenced by the idea of reiterating the geometric imbalances of the Russian Constructivist movement. In addition to constructivism there are also similarities in deconstructivism to other art and architectural movements such as modernism, postmodernism, cubism, expressionism, minimalism and contemporary art. The attempt of deconstructivism throughout, is to move architecture away from what they see as the constricting 'rules' of modernism such as "form follows function", purity of form, truth to materials, and expression of structure. Important events in the history of the deconstructivist movement include the many projects for the 1982 Parc de la Villette architectural design competition, such as the collaboration of Jacques Derrida and Peter Eisenman; and the selected final project by Bernard Tschumi. Other major events were the 1988 Museum of Modern Art Deconstructivist architecture exhibition organized by Philip Johnson and Mark Wigley in New York; and the 1989 opening of the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio, designed by Peter Eisenman.

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Casa da Música is a major concert hall space in Porto, Portugal. It was designed by the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, and was built as part of Porto's project for European Culture Capital in 2001 but was only finished in the first half of 2005 and immediately became an icon in the city. The Building engineers were Ove Arup - London together with Afassociados, Oporto.

Casa da Música was built just across from one of the main traffic centers of the city, Rotunda da Boavista. The place where the building now sits used to be a holding place for the electric cars that ran in Porto. Although construction ran over schedule 4 years and cost roughly 100M€ the building process brought new engineering challenges in order to build the odd shape that it has.

The building's design has been highly acclaimed worldwide. Nicolai Ouroussoff, architecture critic from the New York Times, classified it as the "most attractive project the architect Rem Koolhaas has ever built" and saying it's "a building whose intellectual ardor is matched by its sensual beauty". He also compares it to the "exuberant design" in Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. "Only looking into the original aspect of the building, this is one of the most important concert halls built in the last 100 years", comparing it to the Walt Disney Concert Hall, in Los Angeles, and the Berlin Philharmonic auditorium.

Although the opening day concert took place on the 14th with Clã and Lou Reed the space was inaugurated on April 15, 2005 by the Portuguese president. The Prime-minister and many other notable politicians and Porto society were present at that moment for the concert by the Orquestra Nacional do Porto.

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The Falkirk Wheel, named after the nearby town of Falkirk in central Scotland, is a rotating boat lift connecting the Forth and Clyde Canal with the Union Canal, which at this point differ by 24 metres, roughly equivalent to the height of an eight story building.

The Wheel, which has an overall diameter of 35 metres, consists of two opposing arms which extend 15 metres beyond the central axle and which take the shape of a Celtic-inspired, double headed axe. Two sets of these axe shaped arms are fixed, about 25 metres apart, to a 3.5 metre diameter axle. Two diametrically opposed water filled caissons each with a capacity of 80,000 gallons, (320 tons each), are fitted between the ends of the arms.

These caissons always weigh the same whether or not they are carrying their capacity of 600 tonnes of floating canal barges as, according to Archimedes' principle, floating objects displace their own weight in water, so when the boat enters the amount of water that leaves the caisson is exactly the same as the weight of the boat. This keeps the wheel balanced and so, despite its enormous mass, it rotates through 180° in less than four minutes while using very little power. It takes just 22.5 kilowatts (kW) to power the electric motors, which consume just 1.5 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of energy in four minutes, roughly the same as boiling eight kettles of water.

The Wheel is the only rotating boat lift of its kind in the world, and is regarded as an engineering landmark for Scotland. The United Kingdom has one other boat lift: the Anderton Boat Lift in Cheshire. The Falkirk Wheel is actually an improvement on the Anderton Boat Lift and makes use of the same original principle: two balanced tanks, one going up and the other going down.

On 24 May 2002, Queen Elizabeth II opened the Falkirk Wheel as part of her Golden Jubilee celebrations. The opening had been delayed by a month due to flooding caused by vandals who forced open the Wheel's gates.

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Geometry (Greek γεωμετρία; geo = earth, metria = measure) arose as the field of knowledge dealing with spatial relationships. Geometry was one of the two fields of pre-modern mathematics, the other being the study of numbers. In modern times, geometric concepts have been generalized to a high level of abstraction and complexity, and have been subjected to the methods of calculus and abstract algebra, so that many modern branches of the field are barely recognizable as the descendants of early geometry. (See areas of mathematics and algebraic geometry.)

Early geometry
The earliest recorded beginnings of geometry can be traced to ancient Egypt (see geometry in Egypt), the ancient Indus Valley (see Harappan Mathematics), and ancient Babylonia (see Babylonian mathematics) from around 3000 BC. Early geometry was a collection of empirically discovered principles concerning lengths, angles, areas, and volumes, which were developed to meet some practical need in surveying, construction, astronomy, and various crafts. Among these were some surprisingly sophisticated principles, and a modern mathematician might be hard put to derive some of them without the use of calculus. For example, both the Egyptians and the Babylonians were aware of versions of the Pythagorean theorem about 1500 years before Pythagoras; the Egyptians had a correct formula for the volume of a frustum of a square pyramid; the Babylonians had a trigonometry table.

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Orthographic projection is a means of representing a three-dimensional object in two dimensions. It uses multiple views of the object, from points of view rotated about the object's center through increments of 90°. Equivalently, the views may be considered to be obtained by rotating the object about its center through increments of 90°.

The views are positioned relative to each other according to either of two schemes: first-angle or third-angle projection. In each, the appearances of views may be thought of as being projected onto planes that form a transparent "box" around the object:

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Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc (January 27, 1814 – September 17, 1879) was a French architect and theorist, famous for his restorations of medieval buildings. Born in Paris, he was as central a figure in the Gothic Revival in France as he was in the public discourse on "honesty" in architecture, which eventually transcended all revival styles, to inform the moving spirit of Modernism. Sir John Summerson considered that "there have been two supremely eminent theorists in the history of European architecture&mdash;Leon Battista Alberti and Eugène Viollet-le-Duc" (Summerson 1948).

As an Architectural Restorer
In the early 1830s, the beginnings of a movement for the restoration of medieval buildings appeared in France. Viollet-le-Duc, returning in 1835 from a study trip to Italy, was ordered by Prosper Merimée to restore the Romanesque abbey of Vézelay. This work marked the beginning of a long series of restorations; Viollet-le-Duc's restorations at Notre Dame de Paris brought him into national attention.

→ read article Louis Henry (Henri) Sullivan (September 3, 1856–April 14, 1924) was an American architect, called the "father of modernism". He is considered by many as the creator of the modern skyscraper, was an influential architect and critic of the Chicago School, and was a mentor to Frank Lloyd Wright.

Biography
Louis Sullivan was born in Boston, to an Irish-born father and a Swiss-born mother both of whom immigrated to the United States in the late 1850s. While attending high school Sullivan met Moses Woolson, whose teachings made a lasting impression on him, and nurtured him until his death. After graduating from High school, Sullivan studied architecture briefly at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Learning that he could both graduate from high school a year early and pass up the first two years at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology by passing a series of examinations, Sullivan entered MIT at the age of 16. After one year of study, he moved to Philadelphia and talked himself into a job with architect Frank Furness.

The Depression of 1873 dried up much of Furness’s work, and he was forced to let Sullivan go. At that point Sullivan moved on to Chicago in 1873 to take part in the building boom following the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. He worked for William LeBaron Jenney, the architect often credited with erecting the first steel-frame building. After less than a year with Jenney, Sullivan moved to Paris and studied at the École des Beaux-Arts for a year. Renaissance art inspired Sullivan’s mind, where he was influenced to relate his architecture to emulate Michelangelo's spirit of creation rather than replicate the styles of earlier periods. He returned to Chicago, not yet out of his 18th year. He began work for the firm of Joseph S. Johnston & John Edelman as a draftsman. Johnston & Edleman were commissioned for interior design of the Moody Tabernacle, which was completed by Sullivan. In 1879 Dankmar Adler hired Sullivan; a year later, he became a partner in the firm. This marked the beginning of Sullivan's most productive years.

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Brick is an artificial stone made by forming clay into rectangular blocks which are hardened, either by burning in a kiln or sometimes, in warm and sunny countries, by sun-drying.

History
In the Near East and India, bricks have been in use for more than five thousand years. The Tigris-Euphrates plain lacks rocks and trees. Sumerian structures were thus built of plano-convex mudbricks, not fixed with mortar or with cement. As plano-convex bricks (being rounded) are somewhat unstable in behaviour, Sumerian bricklayers would lay a row of bricks perpendicular to the rest every few rows. They would fill the gaps with bitumen, straw, marsh reeds, and weeds.

The Ancient Egyptians and the Indus Valley Civilization also used mudbrick extensively, as can be seen in the ruins of Buhen, Mohenjo-daro and Harappa, for example. In the Indus Valley Civilization particularly, all bricks corresponded to sizes in a perfect ratio of 4:2:1, and made use of the decimal system. The ratio for brick dimensions 4:2:1 is even today considered optimal for effective bonding.

The Romans made use of fired bricks, and the Roman legions, which operated mobile kilns, introduced bricks to many parts of the empire. Roman bricks are often stamped with the mark of the legion that supervised its production. The use of bricks in Southern and Western Germany, for example, can be traced back to traditions already described by the Roman architect Vitruvius.

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Frank Lloyd Wright (June 8, 1867 – April 9, 1959) was one of the most prominent and influential architects of the first half of the 20th century. He not only developed a series of highly individual styles over his extraordinarily long architectural career (spanning the years 1887-1959), he influenced the whole course of American architecture and building. To this day he probably remains America's most famous architect.

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Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, widely known as Le Corbusier (October 6, 1887– August 27, 1965), was a Swiss (naturalized French) architect, famous for his contributions to what is now called modernism, or the International Style. He was a pioneer in theoretical studies of modern design and was dedicated to providing better living conditions for the residents of crowded cities. His career spanned five decades, with iconic buildings constructed across central Europe, India, Russia, and one structure in the United States. He was also an urban planner, painter, sculptor, writer and furniture designer. (more…)



Bauhaus is the common term for the Staatliches Bauhaus, an art and architecture school in Germany that operated from 1919 to 1933, and for the approach to design that it developed and taught. The most natural meaning for its name (related to the German verb for "build") is Architecture House. Bauhaus style became one of the most influential currents in Modernist architecture.

The Bauhaus art school existed in three different cities (Weimar from 1919 to 1925, Dessau from 1925 to 1932, and Berlin from 1932 to 1933), under three different architect-directors (Walter Gropius from 1919 to 1928, Hannes Meyer from 1928 to 1930, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe from 1930 to 1933). These changes of venue and leadership meant a constant shifting of focus, technique, instructors, and politics. When the school moved from Weimar to Dessau, for instance, although it had been an important revenue source, the pottery shop was discontinued. When Mies took over the school in 1930, he transformed it into a private school, and would not allow any supporters of Hannes Meyer to attend it. (more…)

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