History of architecture
[6] It has been argued that nest-building practices were crucial to the evolution of human creativity and construction skill moreso than tool use, as hominins became required to build nests not just in uniquely adapted circumstances but as forms of signalling.[12] In 2000, archaeologists at the Meiji University in Tokyo claimed to have found 2 pentagonal alignments of post holes on a hillside near the village of Chichibu, interpreting it as two huts dated around 500,000 years old and built by Homo erectus.Ancient Greek temples usually consist of a base with continuous stairs of a few steps at each edges (known as crepidoma), a cella (or naos) with a cult statue in it, columns, an entablature, and two pediments, one on the front side and another in the back.Ornaments used by Ancient Greek architects and artists include palmettes, vegetal or wave-like scrolls, lion mascarons (mostly on lateral cornices), dentils, acanthus leafs, bucrania, festoons, egg-and-dart, rais-de-cœur, beads, meanders, and acroteria at the corners of the pediments.The Glauberg Celtic hillfort[67] or oppidum in Hesse, Germany, is consisting of a fortified settlement and several burial mounds, "a princely seat of the late Hallstatt and early La Tène periods.Considering the logistical difficulties and slower pace of life in the Himalayas, artisans have that the time to make intricate wood carvings and paintings accompanied by ornamental metal work and stone sculptures that are reflected in religious as well as civic and military buildings.The introduction of Buddhism in the mid 6th century, via the neighbouring Korean kingdom of Paekche, initiated large-scale wooden temple building with an emphasis on simplicity, and much of the architecture was imported from China and other Asian cultures.Angkor, in present-day Cambodia, was its capital city, and most of its surviving buildings are east-facing stone temples, many of them constructed in pyramidal, tiered form consisting of five square structures with towers, or prasats, that represent the sacred five-peaked Mount Meru of Hindu, Jain and Buddhist doctrine.Islam does not encourage the worship of idols; therefore the architecture tends to be decorated with Arabic calligraphy (including Qur'anic verses or other poetry) and with more abstract motifs such as geometric patterns, muqarnas, and arabesques, as opposed to illustrations of scenes and stories.Nevertheless, Romanesque remains a useful word despite its limitations, because it reflects a period of intensive building activity that maintained some continuity with the classical past, but freely reinterpreted ancient forms in a new distinctive manner.[167] Gothic architecture began with a series of experiments, which were conducted to fulfil specific requests by patrons and to accommodate the ever-growing number of pilgrims visiting sites that housed precious relics.As confirmed by Suger, the desire for more stained-glass was not necessarily to bring more daylight into the building but rather to fill the space with a continuous ray of colorful light, rather like mosaics or precious stones, which would make the wall vanish.His writings covered numerous subjects, including history, town planning, engineering, sacred geometry, humanism and philosophies of beauty, and set out the key elements of architecture and its ideal proportions.Although some artists and architects, such as Filippo Brunelleschi (1377–1446), Donatello (circa 1386–1466) and Leon Battista Alberti, are reported to have made studies of Roman sculpture and ruins, almost no direct evidence of this work survives.By the 1480s, prominent architects, such as Francesco di Giorgio (1439–1502) and Giuliano da Sangallo (circa 1445–1516), were making numerous studies of ancient monuments, undertaken in ways that demonstrated that the process of transforming the model into a new design had already begun.Born in the painting studios of Bologna and Rome in the 1580s and 1590s, and in Roman sculptural and architectural ateliers in the second and third decades of the 17th century, the Baroque spread swiftly throughout Italy, Spain and Portugal, Flanders, France, the Netherlands, England, Scandinavia, and Russia, as well as to central and eastern European centres from Munich (Germany) to Vilnius (Lithuania).The Portuguese, Spanish and French empires and the Dutch treading network had a leading role in spreading the two styles into the Americas and colonial Africa and Asia, to places such as Lima, Mozambique, Goa and the Philippines.Both Baroque and Rococo buildings try to seize viewers' attention and to dominate their surroundings, whether on a small scale such as the San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane in Rome, or on a massive one, like the new facade of the Santiago de Compostela Cathedral, designed to tower over the city.The earliest Baroque ideal city is Zamość, built north-east of Kraków (Poland) by the Italian architect Bernardo Morando (c. 1540-1600), being a centralized town focusing on a square with radiating streets.[199] Domestic Rococo abandoned Baroque's high moral tone, its weighty allegories and its obsession with legitimacy: in fact, its abstract forms and carefree, pastoral subjects related more to notions of refuge and joy that created a more forgiving atmosphere for polite conversations.Excavations during the 18th century at Pompeii and Herculaneum, which had both been buried under volcanic ash during the 79 AD eruption of Mount Vesuvius, inspired a return to order and rationality, largely thanks to the writings of Johann Joachim Winckelmann.In the same year, Étienne La Font de Saint-Yenne, criticized how Louis XIV's great east façade of the Louvre, was all but hidden from views by a dense quarter of modest houses.Today, from Bucharest to Buenos Aires and from San Francisco to Brussels, the Beaux-Arts style survives in opera houses, civic structures, university campuses commemorative monuments, luxury hotels and townhouses.Focusing on natural forms, asymmetry, sinuous lines and whiplash curves, architects and designers aimed to escape the excessively ornamental styles and historical replications, popular during the 19th century.Modernism reached its peak during the 1930s and 1940s with the Bauhaus and the International Style, both characterised by asymmetry, flat roofs, large ribbon windows, metal, glass, white rendering and open-plan interiors.Despite that it is an example of modern architecture, elements of the style drew on ancient Egyptian, Greek, Roman, African, Aztec and Japanese influences, but also on Futurism, Cubism and the Bauhaus.The antithesis of nearly every other architectural movement that preceded it, the International Style eliminated extraneous ornament and used modern industrial materials such as steel, glass, reinforced concrete and chrome plating.Named by the architect Philip Johnson and historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock (1903–1987) in 1932, the movement was epitomized by Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, or Le Corbusier and was clearly expressed in his statement that 'a house is a machine for living in'.It seems the term was originally coined by Swedish architect Hans Asplund (1921–1994), but Le Corbusier's use of the description béton brut, meaning raw concrete, for his choice of material for the Unité d'habitation was particularly influential.Important events in the history of the Deconstructivist movement include the 1982 Parc de la Villette architectural design competition (especially the entry from the French philosopher Jacques Derrida and the American architect Peter Eisenman[297] and Bernard Tschumi's winning entry), the Museum of Modern Art's 1988 Deconstructivist Architecture exhibition in New York, organized by Philip Johnson and Mark Wigley, and the 1989 opening of the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, designed by Peter Eisenman.
Architectural History (journal)A History of ArchitectureHistory of constructionThe Architect's DreamThomas ColeHistory of artPrehistoricAncientMedievalPre-RomanesqueRomanesqueGothicRenaissanceMannerismBaroqueRococoNeoclassicismRevivalismRomanticismRealismPre-RaphaelitesModernImpressionismSymbolismDecorativePost-ImpressionismArt NouveauFauvismExpressionismCubismContemporaryPostmodernConceptualismMinimalismPeriods in Western art historyMesopotamianEgyptianHittitePersianSouth ArabianOttomanArt of Central AsiaArt of East AsiaChineseHong KongTaiwanJapaneseKoreanTibetanArt of South AsiaIndianBhutaneseArt of Southeast AsiaIndonesianFilipinoVietnameseMyanmarMalaysianCambodianSingaporeanBruneianArt of EuropeMinoanCycladicEtruscanDacianCelticScythianHellenisticIberianByzantineAnglo-SaxonOttonianVikingArt of AfricaYorubaArt of the AmericasPre-ColumbianMuiscaArt of OceaniaAustralianCook IslandsHawaiianPapuanReligionsBuddhistChristianCatholicProtestantIslamicManichaeanTaoistSculpturePaintingPotteryCalligraphyPhotographyGraphic artsDigital artAbstractArt historyArt movementFigurativeFuneraryNaïveNarrativeNaturalistarchitectureurbanismcivil engineeringmilitarylandscape architecturecast ironreinforced concreteBeaux Artsgreat apesconstruct "nests" for sleepingChimpanzeesOrangutanssignallingArdipithecusAustralopithecusrock shelterrock artLascauxBruniquel Cave