architecture

architecture
/ahr"ki tek'cheuhr/, n.
1. the profession of designing buildings, open areas, communities, and other artificial constructions and environments, usually with some regard to aesthetic effect. Architecture often includes design or selection of furnishings and decorations, supervision of construction work, and the examination, restoration, or remodeling of existing buildings.
2. the character or style of building: the architecture of Paris; Romanesque architecture.
3. the action or process of building; construction.
4. the result or product of architectural work, as a building.
5. buildings collectively.
6. a fundamental underlying design of computer hardware, software, or both.
7. the structure of anything: the architecture of a novel.
[1555-65; ( < MF) < L architectura. See ARCHITECT, -URE]

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I
Art and technique of designing and building, as distinguished from the skills associated with construction.

The practice of architecture emphasizes spatial relationships, orientation, the support of activities to be carried out within a designed environment, and the arrangement and visual rhythm of structural elements, as opposed to the design of structural systems themselves (see civil engineering). Appropriateness, uniqueness, a sensitive and innovative response to functional requirements, and a sense of place within its surrounding physical and social context distinguish a built environment as representative of a culture's architecture. See also building construction.
II
(as used in expressions)
client server architecture

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▪ 2008

Introduction
The new Federal Building in San Francisco was noted for its Green Architecture. A chapel designed more than 40 years earlier by Le Corbusier was built in France. Other high-profile buildings included a U.S. courthouse, a museum addition, a residential tower, and a corporate headquarters.
      For Notable Civil Engineering Projects in work or completed, 2007, see . (Notable Civil Engineering Projects (in work or completed, 2007))

      A growing trend in architecture in 2007 was interest in green architecture. Green, or sustainable, architecture referred to buildings that were designed for the efficient use of resources, especially energy, building materials, and water. (Most architects who designed green buildings also tried to incorporate the colour green into their work, such as with green indoor plantings or gardens.) One aim of green architecture was to reduce carbon-dioxide (greenhouse-gas) emissions, which were believed to be contributing to global warming, and some green buildings even produced much of their own energy, thanks to technology that used sunlight or wind power to generate electricity. (See Special Report (Green Architecture: Building for the 21st Century ).)

      Green architecture was taking root worldwide. Near Shanghai, for example, an area called Dongtan was planned to be what developers called “the world's first truly sustainable new urban development.” It was to have 80,000 inhabitants by 2020 and would be designed to not produce carbon-dioxide emissions. Europe had been the leader in the green movement, but by 2007 many U.S. cities were requiring that new commercial buildings attain a so-called LEED (“leadership in energy and environmental design”) rating from the U.S. Green Building Council. One notable new green building in the United States was the Federal Building in San Francisco. Designed by American architect Thom Mayne, the building saved energy by minimizing its use of electric lighting and by not having air conditioning. Tall windows and high ceilings allowed in plenty of natural daylight, and a system of exterior sunshades and screens helped to keep the building cool in hot weather. The sunshades and screens gave the building an unusual appearance—as if it were pulling a metal poncho over itself against the weather—and it instantly became an architectural landmark in the city.

      Another trend in architecture was a growing interest in many of the masterpieces of the Modernist Period of the 1940s–1960s. The most remarkable example was in France. A chapel for the town of Firminy was designed in 1963 by the great 20th-century Swiss architect Le Corbusier. In 2007 the building was finally built, and it turned out to be a memorable concrete building with a boldly sculptural shape that slightly resembled Corbusier's famous chapel of Ronchamps, France. In London came a complete renovation and redesign of the Royal Festival Hall, which was the centrepiece of the 1951 Festival of Britain and was originally designed by noted British architect Sir Leslie Martin. Italian architect Renzo Piano was commissioned to create an addition to the Kimbell (Texas) Art Museum, which was considered to be one of the masterpieces of 20th-century architecture by American architect Louis Kahn. Kahn's art museum at Yale University was also given a long-needed restoration, as was Yale's Art and Architecture Building by American architect Paul Rudolph. In June a famous Modernist house, the Glass House designed by American architect Philip Johnson for himself, was opened as a museum to the public by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. The house, in New Canaan, Conn., had been willed to the trust by Johnson, who died in 2005.

Awards.
      The 2007 Pritzker Prize went to British architect Richard Rogers. He first became known for the astonishing Pompidou Centre in Paris, a vast museum and cultural complex that he designed in partnership with Piano in 1971, when both architects were in their 30s. The structural frame and mechanical pipes, wires, and ducts of a building were usually hidden deep inside it, but at the Pompidou they were instead brightly coloured and displayed all over the facade. Rogers went on to design an office tower for the insurance company Lloyd's of London, a major terminal at Madrid Airport, and other buildings. He also became a noted advocate for the revival of cities. German architect Frei Otto received the Praemium Imperiale award. The Royal Gold Medal of the Royal Institute of British Architects was awarded to Edward Cullinan, and the Stirling Award for the best building by a British architect went to David Chipperfield's Museum of Modern Literature in Germany. The Aga Khan Award, given only once every three years to works of architecture in the Muslim world, was awarded to nine projects. They ranged from the large, such as the rehabilitation of parts of the cities of Nicosia, Cyprus, and Shibam, Yemen, to the small, such as a modest park with a pond in Beirut.

      The Gold Medal of the American Institute of Architects, for lifetime achievement, was awarded to Piano. Piano, 70, was best known for his art museums, such as the Menil Collection in Houston, the Beyeler Foundation and the Zentrum Paul Klee in Switzerland, and the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas. Among other notable Piano buildings were the vast Kansai Airport in Osaka and the recently opened New York Times tower in New York City. The AIA's 25-Year Award, given to a building that had proved its worth over time, went to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., by Maya Lin. Her design was chosen in a national design competition for the memorial in 1981, when she was still an undergraduate student at Yale. Commonly called the Wall, the dark granite memorial was engraved with the names of about 58,000 Americans who were killed or missing in action. The AIA also commissioned a professional poll of Americans to determine their best-loved buildings. The winner was the Empire State Building in New York City. The White House in Washington, D.C., took second place.

Notable Buildings.
 Perhaps the most widely published and admired building of the year in the U.S. was the Bloch Building, an addition to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Mo. The architect, American Steven Holl, created a design in which a series of glass-topped art galleries spilled informally down a sloping green lawn filled with sculptures. At night the galleries, illuminated from inside, looked like a row of UFOs that had just landed. Visitors were able to wander freely in and out among the interior galleries and the exterior sculpture lawns. The modernist crisp glass architecture worked as a foil to the heavier traditional limestone architecture of the older Nelson-Atkins building.

 The Wayne Morse U.S. Courthouse in Eugene, Ore., by Mayne, was a very contemporary building, surfaced in stainless steel in bold curving shapes that gave it a streamlined look. A series of terraces and stairs in front of the building were intended to provide protection against potential car bombings, while the building itself remained open and welcoming to the public. As with Mayne's Federal Building in San Francisco, the courthouse was designed with many green strategies and achieved a high LEED rating.

 Canadian-born American architect Frank Gehry created a new headquarters for IAC/InterActiveCorp in New York City on a site across the street from the Hudson River. The building featured surfaces of glass that billowed out toward the water and were intended to suggest a sailing ship. The glass was subtly whitened to cut the glare from sunlight, and it gave the interiors a beautiful, slightly snowstormlike feeling. On the Bowery in New York City, the Japanese firm SANAA, a partnership of two women architects, designed the New Museum of Contemporary Art, a memorable building that resembled six or seven glass boxes piled into a tower. Aluminum screening, suspended about 4 cm (1.5 in) from the solid aluminum facades, covered all the surfaces and made the building look as if it were made of gray vapour. Also on New York City's Lower East Side was a new residential tower known as “Blue,” by Swiss and French architect Bernard Tschumi, a freely shaped and very blue glass tower. It was one of many residential buildings by “name” architects that were sprouting in old New York City neighbourhoods such as SoHo and the Meatpacking District and providing expensive new housing in a city that was already very costly.

 American architect I.M. Pei designed a museum for paintings, ceramics, jade, and wood carvings in Suzhou, China, the city of his ancestors. The museum was arranged around a walled traditional garden of simple water and rocks, and its architecture sought to be contemporary while retaining a memory of traditional Chinese architecture. Polish American architect Daniel Libeskind added a “glass courtyard” to the Jewish Museum in Berlin, its glass roof supported by a treelike cluster of white steel branches.

Future Buildings and New Commissions.
      An incredible pace of construction continued in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates, which had been converting itself into a world tourist destination. One project, touted as the world's largest cultural development, involved the expansion of a coastal island and was to have structures designed by a roster of famous architects. (See World Affairs: United Arab Emirates: Sidebar (Gulf States' Construction Boom ).)

      In London a design was announced for an addition to the Tate Modern gallery on the south bank of the Thames River. Designed by Herzog & DeMeuron of Switzerland, the new wing was described by one magazine as “an off-kilter stack of glass boxes.” Robert A.M. Stern, known for his designs in traditional styles, was selected as the architect for the future George W. Bush presidential library, which was to be built on a college campus in Texas. In San Francisco a team led by Cesar Pelli won a competition to design a new bus-and-train terminal with a mixed-use tower that was expected to become the city's tallest building.

Exhibitions, Controversies, and Preservation.
      The most significant exhibition of the year was probably a triple-threat showing of the work of Robert Moses, the powerful official who dominated city planning in New York City through much of the 20th century. Three New York museums documented the Moses years, when he built innumerable bridges, parks, roads, and swimming pools throughout the city. The gist of the shows was to argue that although Moses was often ruthless and dictatorial in forcing through his improvements despite opposition by the neighbourhoods that were sometimes damaged by them, the city needed most of what he did. Moses often clashed with the writer Jane Jacobs, an opponent of centralized planning whose views came to dominate in the post-Moses era. New York's Municipal Art Society mounted a counter-Moses exhibit, “Jane Jacobs and the Future of New York.” Also in New York City was “The Park at the Center of the World,” an exhibit of proposals by five teams of designers for the future of Governors Island, a former military and U.S. Coast Guard post in the middle of New York Harbor. “Le Corbusier: The Art of Architecture,” sponsored by the Netherlands Architecture Institute, exhibited more than 450 drawings and other works by the architect. The exhibition opened in Rotterdam and moved to Weil am Rhein, Ger., at the end of the year.

      Controversy surrounded a proposal by Boston Mayor Thomas Menino to build a new city hall and abandon the one built in 1967 by architects Kallmann and McKinnell. The building had been voted the seventh greatest building in U.S. history in a 1976 poll of architects and historians, but its raw concrete appearance, in the so-called Brutalist style of architecture, had gone out of fashion.

      The U.S. National Trust for Historic Preservation announced its annual list of the 11 most endangered places. The list included motels on Route 66, now bypassed by interstate highways, and Brooklyn's industrial waterfront, now threatened by rapid gentrification and new construction.

Deaths.
      Kisho Kurokawa (Kurokawa, Kisho ), Japanese architect and theorist, died at the age of 73. Early in his career he cofounded the Metabolist movement, which sought a machine-age aesthetic. Herbert Muschamp (Muschamp, Herbert Mitchell ), who had been a controversial architecture critic of the New York Times from 1992 to 2004, died at age 59. Other notable figures who died during the year included Giorgio Cavaglieri, a leading architect in the American preservation movement, Colin St. John Wilson, architect of the 1997 British Library, and Russell Johnson, a leading performance acoustician.

Robert Campbell

▪ 2007

Introduction
New towers were all the rage in 2006, and the competition for the “world's tallest” title remained elusive; plans for New York City's “ground zero” and the hurricane-blighted New Orleans were revised repeatedly, but little actual construction took place.
      During 2006 cities worldwide were preoccupied with building new skyscrapers or making plans to erect them in the future. In the Middle East the small emirate of Dubai was becoming a forest of tall buildings, many of which were designed by famous architects. According to Architectural Record magazine, there were almost 300 high-rise buildings under construction in Dubai during the year, and many more were planned. The Burj Dubai, designed by the American firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, was intended upon completion to be the tallest building in the world, at over 600 m (1,970 ft), but the Pei Partnership of New York (headed by two sons of the celebrated architect I.M. Pei) immediately announced plans for a higher Dubai tower.

      In an attempt to make new towers memorable landmarks, they were often given strange shapes. Several were designed to twist, like a licorice stick. In China the 305-m (1,000-ft) Pearl River Tower, by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, was designed with two large holes that would capture wind to drive turbines and generate electricity. In Chicago famed architect Santiago Calatrava was designing another candidate for the world's tallest—a 600-m (2,000-ft) building in a spiral shape. Though it was not certain that all of these towers would be built, the ones that would be constructed would change the skylines of many cities significantly. In New York City a final design was announced for the Freedom Tower, on the site of the World Trade Center. At 541 m (1,776 ft), this building too was originally intended to be the tallest in the world, but it seemed modest in comparison with newer designs.

Awards.
      The 2006 winner of the Pritzker Prize was Brazilian Paulo Mendes da Rocha (Mendes da Rocha, Paulo ) (see Biographies), who, though he had built little outside his own country, was nationally known for his boldly shaped buildings, ranging from huge sports stadiums to small private houses. In an attempt to avoid fashionable slickness, his buildings were often built of plain, unfinished concrete.

      Modernist Edward Larrabee Barnes, who died in 2004, received the top American honour, the Gold Medal of the American Institute of Architects (AIA). His best-known building was the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Deer Isle, Maine, which in 1994 received the AIA's 25-Year Award, for a building that had stood the test of time. Some of his other well-known designs included the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minn., the IBM Building in New York City, and the Dallas Museum of Art. The 25-Year Award for 2006 went to the tiny Thorncrown Chapel in Eureka Springs, Ark., by architect E. Fay Jones, who died in 2004. The modest chapel was made of ordinary pine that imitates the branching trees around it. In a poll in the centennial year of 2000, AIA members voted it the fourth greatest building in American history.

      The AIA also announced its annual list of the best new buildings by American architects. Of the 11 winners, among the better known were the Children's Museum of Pittsburgh, by Koning Eizenberg; the William J. Clinton Presidential Library and Museum in Little Rock, Ark., by Polshek Partnership Architects; the Museo Picasso in Málaga, Spain, by Gluckman Mayner Architects; the Ballard Public Library in Seattle, by Bohlin Cywinski Jackson; and the Joseph A. Steger Student Life Center at the University of Cincinnati, Ohio, by Moore Ruble Yudell. The latter partnership also won the AIA's Firm of the Year Award. The Praemium Imperiale for architecture, awarded by the Japan Art Association, was given to Yoshio Taniguchi, best known for his art museums, including a renovation and addition to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. The Royal Gold Medal of the Royal Institute of British Architects went to Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, winners of the 2001 Pritzker Prize. They were also best known for art museums, including the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco and the Tate Gallery of Modern Art in London. Tate Modern also announced a design by Herzog and de Meuron for an addition to the museum, which, in artists' renderings, resembled a freely shaped glass iceberg.

Notable Buildings.
       Wales opened a new National Assembly Building, which was designed by British architect Richard Rogers. The structure featured a dramatic undulating roof, like a row of hills—“rippling and swelling like a shaken carpet,” as one writer put it—and an enormous conical wood funnel, which aimed daylight and fresh air down into the building's round chamber, where debates would be held. The building, which reflected the growing trend toward designs that were ecologically responsible, would consume as little energy as possible. In all but extreme temperature conditions, it was naturally ventilated, without mechanical heating or cooling. Rogers also found prominence in the U.S., where it was announced that he would design one of three new towers to be built beside the Freedom Tower. Fumihiko Maki and Norman Foster, both Pritzker Prize laureates, were named as designers of the other two.

 In New York, British architect Foster designed the much-discussed 40-story Hearst Tower, which stood atop a six-story older building, designed in 1928 by Viennese architect Joseph Urban. Urban's building was surfaced in traditional limestone and designed in the Art Deco style of the 1920s. Foster's addition, totally different, was a glass box framed in steel beams that formed huge triangles. The old building was converted to serve as a vast lobby beneath the new building. Some observers criticized the new tower for having nothing to do with the older building. Others praised it for the same reason, arguing that the juxtaposition of total opposites was characteristic of the brashness of New York.

 One of the remarkable buildings of the year was the Mercedes-Benz Museum in Stuttgart, Ger. The building, designed by UN Studio of Amsterdam, was a stack of spiraling ramps and floors in a pattern that reminded some observers of the double-helix pattern of DNA. Cars and other displays were on nine levels. Clad in shimmering silver panels, the museum also recalled the streamlined design of the classic Mercedes Silver Arrow racing cars.

      Architects found new ways to make sports stadiums spectacular and memorable. In Munich, Herzog and de Meuron designed a soccer stadium that was nicknamed “the Ring of Fire.” Shaped like a doughnut or a tire, the entire stadium could be made to blaze with colour. Its outside surface was covered with translucent plastic pillows—they were installed by a team of more than 50 industrial climbers—and the pillows glowed with the light of at least 4,000 lamps. The whole stadium, seen from outside, became a vivid circle of red, blue, or white, depending on which team was playing in it. Near Phoenix, American Peter Eisenman designed a football stadium in which the entire grass playing field could be pulled out like a drawer into the open air, so that the grass could be kept healthy. An adjustable retractable roof helped shade fans from the desert sun.

      Museums continued to proliferate. In Rome a small new museum was created to contain and display the Ara Pacis—the Latin words mean “Altar of Peace”—a historic artifact originally built in the year 9 BC by Augustus Caesar, the first Roman emperor. The museum was designed by American architect Richard Meier in the crisp Modernist white-walled style for which he was known. Meier's design generated a lot of controversy when it was first proposed, but by the time the museum opened, it seemed to please most Romans. In Paris the new Musée du quai Branly—devoted to the indigenous art of Africa, Asia, and other parts of the non-European world—opened on a site along the Seine River. Designed by French architect Jean Nouvel, the building was deliberately shapeless so as not to imitate Western construction. Raised one story above the ground, it seemed to float like a dirigible above a garden made up mostly of plants brought from Asia.

  Italian architect Renzo Piano designed an addition to the Morgan Library & Museum in New York City, home to a collection of rare books, manuscripts, and other historic items. Piano created a skylit all-glass atrium that filled the space between the Morgan's three older buildings and joined with them into a single structure. Also new were an underground auditorium and a top-floor reading room. Daniel Libeskind's spectacular design for the newly opened Denver Art Museum featured a dramatic free-form pile of sharply angular shapes of shining titanium. Resembling a frozen explosion, the building became an instant city landmark. American architects Machado and Silvetti revamped the Getty Villa, a museum built in 1974 in Malibu, Calif., by oil magnate J. Paul Getty for his art collection. The new Villa, which would house only historic Greek and Roman artifacts, was surrounded by rock gardens, an outdoor amphitheatre for plays and concerts, a restaurant, an entry pavilion, a winding approach path, and workshops for the care of the art.

Controversies.
      The site in New York City where the twin-towered World Trade Center was destroyed by terrorists on Sept. 11, 2001, and the city of New Orleans and its Gulf Coast environs, victims of a devastating hurricane and flood in 2005, continued to generate architectural controversy.

      At “ ground zero,” cost projections for the proposed memorial designed by Michael Arad were approaching $1 billion, and the design was being modified to cut costs. Meanwhile, construction began on the Freedom Tower, by architect David Childs of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. In order to certify that the tower would be safe from car or truck bombs, the New York City Police Department required that the lowest 60 m (200 ft) of the structure be built of solid concrete. Childs proposed to cover the concrete with a skin of bright glass and metal, but critics complained that this would be mere architectural cosmetics. Meanwhile, Seven World Trade Center opened; the 52-story office tower was the first new building to be built on the terrorism site. There was little enthusiasm for its design, however, and few tenants rented space. Though other architects were at work on the site, including Foster, Maki, Rogers, and Calatrava (with a birdlike train station), progress seemed hopelessly inadequate.

      In New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, architects bickered over what kind of architecture should replace the lost houses and other buildings. Traditionalists argued for homes similar in character to those that were lost, while Modernists said that such houses would be as fake as Disneyland and hoped for something more representative of the times. Despite a great deal of talent and effort on both sides, at year's end little had been built, largely because of funding problems and inadequate support from government.

Preservation.
      In New Jersey a bathhouse built in 1957 for the Trenton Jewish Community Center, which had long been abandoned and was considered to be a target for demolition, got a possible reprieve when Mercer county promised to buy and restore it. The small building, built mostly of concrete blocks, was considered one of Louis Kahn's landmark designs. Frank Lloyd Wright's badly deteriorated 12-building campus for Florida Southern College, under construction from 1939 to 1958, received a Getty grant and other funds to begin what was expected eventually to be a $50 million restoration. Many Modernist buildings in the U.S., especially custom-designed houses, were thought to be increasingly endangered owing to rising real-estate prices. Many of these modest homes were being purchased and demolished by new owners who replaced them with bigger (and usually far less architecturally significant) dwellings.

Deaths.
      Losses in architecture included Allan Temko, author, scholar, and the longtime architecture critic of the San Francisco Chronicle, and Harry Seidler, who, though born in Vienna and educated in Great Britain and the U.S., was for many years a leading architect in Australia, where he helped introduce Modernism.

Robert Campbell

▪ 2002

Introduction
      The top architectural story in 2001 was the collapse of the World Trade Center towers in New York City following the September 11 terrorist attacks. Architects and others debated the long-term impact of the disaster. Would the world stop building skyscrapers? Would the threat of terrorism lead people to abandon cities? A number of groups in New York City, including the American Institute of Architects (AIA), the Regional Plan Association, and the Municipal Art Society, joined with city planners and business leaders in informal task-force groups to formulate a redevelopment plan for the site. Proposals ranged from reconstructing the towers exactly as they were to leaving the entire 6.5-ha (16-ac) site as an open-space memorial. Some businesses left the area in fear of further attacks. As a result, a preservation group, the World Monuments Fund, added “Historic Lower Manhattan” to its list of Most Endangered Sites in the world. The twin collapse was scrutinized by engineers, who noted that the intense fire and heat—(upwards of 1,093 °C [2,000 °F]) generated by the explosion of jet fuel aboard the two jetliners that slammed into the towers—had weakened the towers' steel supports and thus caused them to buckle and the floors to cascade nearly straight down. The towers, capable of withstanding hurricane-force winds and ordinary fires, had not been built to withstand an assault of this magnitude. Though they had never been widely admired as works of architecture, the towers' departure was viewed as a human tragedy, an economic disaster, and a blow to Manhattan's great architectural skyline.

Awards.
      The world's most coveted architectural honour, the $100,000 Pritzker Architecture Prize, was awarded to the Swiss partnership of Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron. (See Biographies (Herzog, Jacques, and de Meuron, Pierre ).) They were also the architects of a proposed addition to the de Young Museum in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, a design some thought imposing for the site; it had not been approved by year's end.

      Jean Nouvel of France received the Praemium Imperiale of the Japan Art Association for lifetime achievement. He also was the recipient of the Gold Medal of the Royal Institute of British Architects. Nouvel was best known for his transparent all-glass buildings, such as the Arab Institute and the Cartier Foundation, both in Paris. Japanese architect Takao Ando was the winner of the Gold Medal of the American Institute of Architects. Ando's Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, housing a collection of modern art, opened in St. Louis, Mo., in October. Like such Ando works as the Noashima Contemporary Art Museum and the Church on the Water in Japan, it was an elegant, minimal building of pale concrete. The AIA 25-Year Award, for a building that had proved its merit over time, went to the Weyerhaeuser Headquarters (1971) near Tacoma, Wash.; it was designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and landscape architect Peter Walker. The AIA also announced 14 recipients of its annual architecture Honor Awards. Among the more notable were Antunovich Associates and McClier's restoration and recycling of the Burnham Hotel (named after its original architect, Daniel Burnham) in Chicago; Fox & Fowle Architects' exterior design of the Condé Nast Building office tower in Times Square, New York City; and Tod Williams Billie Tsien & Associates' design of the Williams Natatorium, a skylighted pool at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Mich. Among the 12 recipients for interior spaces were Skidmore, Owings & Merrill's Jin Mao Tower in Shanghai and Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates' restoration of Radio City Music Hall in New York City. “A Civic Vision for Turnpike Air Rights in Boston,” an urban-design plan by Goody, Clancy & Associates in collaboration with neighbourhood groups, claimed one of the four awards for urban design.

      The Aga Khan Award for Architecture, given every three years for architecture in the Islamic world, was presented as scheduled in Aleppo, Syria, on November 6. Among the world's most respected prizes, the Aga Khan Awards dealt with social as well as purely architectural issues. Among the nine project winners were “New Life for Old Structures,” a program to restore buildings in Iran; Barefoot Architects, a rural self-help group in Tilonia, India; and the Nubia Museum, Aswan, Egypt, which housed the culture of Nubia (“Land of Gold”), an ancient area that was partly submerged by the Aswan High Dam in 1971.

Civic and Cultural Buildings.
      Perhaps the most notable new building of 2001 was the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, the new library located on the harbour in Alexandria, Egypt, designed by the firm Snøhetta of Oslo. Snøhetta's members were young and unknown in 1989 when their design was selected in a competition that received 524 entries from 77 countries. The library's outstanding feature was a circular reading room with floors that terraced down under a dramatic sloped roof; as one critic described, “A huge inclined silver disk appears to be rising over the sea.” The round reading room was undoubtedly influenced by the famous 1857 reading room in the British Museum in London, where Karl Marx and many others wrote their books. (See Sidebar. (Bibliotheca Alexandrina )) A notable renovation was that of a courtyard around the reading room of the British Museum. In British architect Sir Norman Foster's design, the courtyard was roofed in a delicate glass structure that curved like a hanging fabric, creating a memorable space that was renamed the Queen Elizabeth II Great Court.

      The vast new chancellery building designed by architects Axel Schultes and Charlotte Frank opened near Foster's glass-domed Reichstag in Berlin. The new structure, which contained eight times the floor space of the U.S. White House, was criticized by some as being bombastic and inefficient. In Sendai, Japan, architect Toyo Ito created a new arts centre called the Sendai Mediatheque. Though the transparent glass structure looked like a watery aquarium from the outside—its seven floors were held up by clusters of slanting columns meant to look like seaweed swaying underwater—inside it housed a great variety of art and media centres for public use.

      In Wisconsin Spanish architect and engineer Santiago Calatrava created a new entrance wing for the Milwaukee Art Museum. Its outstanding feature was a 66-m (217-ft)-wide sunshade, which was intended to open and close like a bird's wings over the glass roof of the entry pavilion. The museum hoped that the spectacular building would put the city on the world tourist map and thus do for Milwaukee what architect Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, did for that city. In that regard, Milwaukee typified the recent rush by cities and institutions to hire one of the 20 or 30 world “star” architects who, like Gehry, were capable of producing memorably sculptural buildings.

      Two small chapels in Japan were also notable. Tadao Ando's Komyo-ji, a temple for a Buddhist sect in Saijo, was a symphony of elaborately interlocking wood columns and beams, a type of architectural forest. Takashi Yamaguchi's White Temple near Kyoto, by contrast, was a tiny one-room box, pure white both inside and out, bathed in mysterious light that made it feel as if it were floating.

Commercial Buildings.
      One of the most amazing efforts to date of American architect Frank Gehry was the DG Bank in Berlin, located on the Pariser Platz near the Brandenburg Gate. The building's exterior was straitjacketed by rigid rules that governed height, materials, and the size of openings. The rules were established by the city of Berlin in an effort to make new buildings on the famous square look compatible with one another. Gehry responded by designing a simple, elegant limestone building on the outside, but he broke loose in the interior with a dramatic atrium. The atrium had a delicate glass floor and roof, both warped into improbable shapes, and in its middle, seeming to float in the space, was a conference room sheathed in stainless steel and shaped like a horse's head.

       Notable Civil Engineering ProjectsThough the Austrian firm Coop Himmelblau, led by Wolf Dieter Prix and Helmut Swiczinsky, had long been known for its radically modern, or “deconstructivist,” buildings that were so pitched that they seemed to be frozen at the moment before they collapsed—its SEG Apartment Tower in Vienna was less unconventional than some of its other designs. The publicly funded “social housing” development tilted in a way that reminded some of the Leaning Tower of Pisa in Italy, but it also contained a 14-story “climate lobby” that helped the building ventilate itself naturally. In Sydney, Australia, Italian Renzo Piano designed Aurora Place, a 41-story office tower with an 18-story apartment building next to it. Sail-like glass shapes rose from the top of the tower, recalling the shapes of the Sydney Opera House nearby. In New York City high-fashion French architect Philippe Starck converted a 1920s brick women's residence into a super elegant hotel called Hudson, which featured inventively theatrical indoor and outdoor lobby spaces. See also the table Notable Civil Engineering Projects.

Exhibitions.
      The year's most remarkable exhibitions were all in New York City. “Frank Gehry, Architect” filled the great spiral of Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum. On display were 40 projects by the master Los Angeles architect rendered in photos, drawings, and hundreds of models. Among the projects shown was a design for a new branch of the Guggenheim, to be built over the water in New York's East River, which would be 10 times the size of Wright's Guggenheim. By year's end, however, a downturn in the American economy had dampened enthusiasm for the proposal. A double exhibit on the modernist Ludwig Mies van der Rohe opened simultaneously at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). “Mies in Berlin” at MoMA showcased his early work in Europe, including such masterpieces as the Barcelona Pavilion and Tugendhat House. The exhibit also explored Mies's early development and the sources from which he learned. “Mies in America” at the Whitney focused on his later work after he immigrated to the United States, including such icons as the Seagram Building in Manhattan and the Farnsworth House in Plano, Ill. The latter had been a concern to preservationists, but during the year it was purchased from a private owner by the state of Illinois, which would maintain it and open it to the public. “Exploring the City: The Norman Foster Studio” filled a large space in the British Museum, next door to the architect's new Queen Elizabeth II Great Court. The exhibit included detailed models of projects from all over the world as well as some of the 900 sketchbooks the architect had filled over the years. “The Architecture of R.M. Schindler,” at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, showcased the work of the visionary early California modernist. “Albert Kahn: Inspiration for the Modern,” at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, displayed the work of the designer of such industrial giants as the Ford River Rouge Plant. “Out of the Ordinary: The Architecture and Design of Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown & Associates,” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, was a summary of the life work of the influential firm, whose members espoused the virtues of ordinary vernacular and commercial architecture. “Frank Lloyd Wright and the Art of Japan: The Architect's Other Passion,” at the Japan Society in New York City, explored the architect's secondary career as a collector and dealer in Japanese prints.

Preservation.
      The Leaning Tower of Pisa was at last stabilized by the simple method of removing earth from its high side so that side would settle. The tower was slowly straightened by one degree to restore it to its tilting angle of 163 years earlier, considered safe. The Kaufmann Conference Center, a Manhattan interior that was one of only four American works by the great Finnish architect Alvar Aalto, was withdrawn from a proposed sale and was to be preserved. Preservationists in New York were also concerned about the fate of the TWA Terminal at John F. Kennedy International Airport (1962) by Eero Saarinen. The owner wished to remove part of the building and convert the remainder into a restaurant or another use. The National Trust for Historic Preservation released its annual “Eleven Most Endangered Places” in the U.S. Among them was another modern building—the CIGNA Campus in Bloomfield, Conn., a classic example of “corporate modernism” designed in 1957 (as the Connecticut General Life Insurance headquarters) by Gordon Bunshaft—which was slated to become a golf course. Others on the list were Ford Island at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, threatened by redevelopment, and Los Caminos del Rio, a 322-km (200-mi) stretch of land along the lower Rio Grande in Texas, home to Hispanic and Anglo historic sites. At Yale University it was announced that the landmark Art and Architecture Building (1963) by Paul Rudolph would be restored by New York architect David Childs of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and that a new companion building next door, for the art history department, would be designed by Richard Meier.

Controversies and Future Buildings.
      The World War II Memorial, on the Mall in Washington, D.C., was under construction at year's end after having survived a court challenge by its critics, who hoped to overturn a law passed by Congress in May that cleared the way for the project. The designer, whose proposal won a national competition, was Friedrich St. Florian of Providence, R.I. Meanwhile, a federal task force published a Memorials and Museums Master Plan, which suggested that future memorials in Washington be sited elsewhere than on the Mall. In San Francisco the city's planning board approved—over the objection of its staff—a design by Pritzker Prize winner Rem Koolhaas of The Netherlands for a new headquarters for Italian clothier Prada, but the company later abandoned the project. The Koolhaas design was sheathed in a stainless-steel skin perforated by 8,000 holes, described by opponents as a “cheese grater.” In New York City, hotelier Ian Schrager nixed plans for a new hotel by Koolhaas and Herzog & de Meuron. Their hotel would have featured a differently shaped window for each room. A design for a presidential library in Arkansas for former president Bill Clinton was unveiled by architect James Stewart Polshek of New York, but the project was delayed by cost problems and by an owner who sued to prevent the city from taking the land. Polshek's design, in a park by the Arkansas River, included a wing that cantilevered out over the water. In Chicago a new lakefront Millennium Park, including a band shell by Frank Gehry, was also troubled by cost overruns. Diller + Scofidio of New York City, a partnership long known for its art installations, was chosen for its first major architectural job, a new Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. A slowing economy also put this project in jeopardy.

Deaths.
      Among the notable architects who died during the year were Morris Lapidus, famed for the gaudy hotels he built in Miami, Fla., notably the Fontainebleau and Eden Roc (see Obituaries (Lapidus, Morris )); Ian McHarg, considered by many the founder of modern landscape architecture and planning in the U.S. and the author of the seminal book Design with Nature (1969); and Steven Izenour, a longtime partner in Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates and coauthor of Learning from Las Vegas (1972).

Robert Campbell

▪ 2001

Introduction
      Two broad architectural trends—Green Architecture and the growing role of computers—seemed more important in 2000 than any individual architect or new building.

      Green Architecture was a worldwide movement that was dedicated to constructing buildings that were designed to be kind to the environment. These environmentally friendly structures were sparing in their use of water and energy, and they emitted little of the greenhouse-gas emissions that contributed to global warming. Though the green movement was strongest in Europe, it had begun to gain advocates in the United States as well. In March the Architectural League of New York sponsored an exhibition that embodied the movement. “Ten Shades of Green” showcased eight European buildings, an Australian building, and four American houses. Through new technologies some of the buildings generated more energy than they consumed. Writing on the show, British critic Peter Buchanan remarked, “Soon no building will be considered first-rate if it is not also green.” Green attitudes were also a factor in the revival of older cities, especially in the United States, owing to the fact that densely populated cities consumed less energy per capita than did suburban and rural areas. A standout among the many notable examples of green design in Europe was a building for the Dutch Institute for Forestry and Nature Research by architects Behnisch, Behnisch & Partner. In lieu of mechanical ventilation, a system of gardens, which was interwoven among the offices, provided fresh air and insulation.

      The other major architectural trend was the increasing use of computers to influence the appearance of buildings. By working with the aid of computers, architects and builders were able to create buildings of almost any shape. The result was a trend toward what some called biomorphic or Blob Design. The architects who embraced this new trend were nicknamed “Blobmeisters.” An example of this conceptual phenomenon was the Experience Music Project (EMP), the new rock-and-roll museum in Seattle, Wash. Designed by American Frank O. Gehry, whom many considered the world's most influential architect, and funded by software billionaire Paul Allen, the EMP consisted of huge muffinlike shapes covered in reflective metal skin, some of which changed colour as museum patrons moved around them. The Venice Biennale of Architecture exhibit was dominated by biomorphs, including the U.S. pavilion designed by Blobmeister Greg Lynn of California and others. In Venice the natural shapelessness of this kind of architecture was emphasized by video projections on many of the surfaces, which suggested that the architecture of the future might be more virtual than solid.

Awards.
      Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas was the recipient of the Pritzker Architecture Prize, the world's top award for architecture. Koolhaas was best known for his irreverent and influential thinking and writing in such books as Delirious New York (1994) and S, M, L, X (1998) rather than for any of his individual buildings. He argued that architecture should not be an elitist art and that architects should accept and collaborate with the realities of globalization and international commerce. British architect Richard Rogers received the Praemium Imperiale, which was offered by the Japan Art Association. Rogers was known as the co-designer of the Pompidou Centre in Paris and the architect of the Lloyds Building in London. The biannual Mies van der Rohe Prize for Latin American architecture, which is awarded to a building rather than to an architect, went to the State Pinoteca in São Paulo, Braz. Michael Graves won the Gold Medal of the American Institute of Architects (AIA), which, like the Pritzker, is for lifetime achievement. Graves, who is generally regarded as a Postmodernist, had revived themes from the architecture of different eras of the past. Among his notable works were the public library in San Juan Capistrano, Calif.; two hotels at Disney World in Florida; the Humana Building in Louisville, Ky.; and The Netherlands Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport at The Hague. Graves also produced tableware and other household objects. (See Art, Antiques, and Collections: Special Report (Design for the Third Millennium ).) The AIA's 25-Year Award, for a building that has proved its merit over time, went to the Smith House in Darien, Conn., designed by Richard Meier. The AIA also announced 38 winners of its annual Honor Awards. Among the more prominent recipients were Meier's Getty Center in Los Angeles; Bernard Tschumi's Le Fresnoy National Studio for Contemporary Arts in Tourcoing, France; Beyer Blinder Belle restoration architects' renovation of Grand Central Terminal in New York City; and Cesar Pelli's Kuala Lumpur City Centre in Malaysia. Samuel Mockbee—an Alabama architect and cofounder in 1993 of Auburn University's Rural Studio, a program in which students experienced hands-on architectural design by building housing in a poor Alabama county—won a MacArthur Foundation fellowship. Jane Jacobs—urban planner and author of many books, including the classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), which was described by the New York Times as “perhaps the most influential single work in the history of planning”—was the recipient in November of the second Vincent Scully Prize.

Civic Buildings.
      The design elements in new airports made them the most noticeable type of civic structure of the year. Many of the new facilities sought to reflect the excitement of flight in swooping architectural shapes, as well as to provide shopping, hotels, and offices for travelers. Among them were the enormous Kuala Lumpur International Airport in Malaysia, by Japanese architect Kisho Kurokawa; the Shanghai-Pudong International Airport in China, by Aéroports de Paris Architectes et Ingénieurs; and the Sondica Airport in Bilbao, Spain, by internationally known architect-engineer Santiago Calatrava. In New York City the spectacular Rose Center for Earth and Space, a planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History, was in the form of a huge luminous sphere and proved a popular and critical success. The architect was the Polshek Partnership, a New York firm that was again in the news when its design for a presidential library in Little Rock, Ark., for Pres. Bill Clinton was unveiled in December.

      In London the largest single space ever enclosed, the Millennium Dome by Richard Rogers, was filled with commercial exhibits that attracted few visitors. Also in London, Sir Norman Foster's pedestrian Millennium Bridge across the River Thames had to be closed two days after it opened, because it swayed too much.

      The Oklahoma City (Okla.) Memorial, commemorating the 1995 terrorist bombing of a U.S. federal building, opened to acclaim in April. In Sydney, Australia, a vast complex of new buildings for the Olympics was praised for its plan—by American landscape architect George Hargreaves—but received less acclaim for the architecture of the individual buildings.

      See also the table Notable Civil Engineering Projects .

Cultural Buildings.
      The most widely noted new museum of the year was the Tate Modern in London. There Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron transformed a vast brick 1965 riverfront power plant into a new museum for international modern art. The architects left much of the huge interior space open, as a setting for large works of art; several floors of new galleries, shops, and restaurants were inserted elsewhere in the building.

      In Houston, Texas, Spanish architect Rafael Moneo added a major new wing to the Museum of Fine Arts, earlier portions of which were designed by the great modernist Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Moneo's design was a rather Spartan box of limestone on the outside, leading to a mix of traditional and modern motifs on the inside, with much natural light provided by skylights.

      In Los Angeles the long-delayed Walt Disney Concert Hall, by Gehry, was at last under construction, while in New York an astonishing Gehry design for a branch of the Guggenheim Museum received the backing of the city's mayor. Reminiscent of Gehry's famed Guggenheim branch in Bilbao, the New York design was conceived as swirling shapes of titanium, which would appear to float above the water of the East River like a cloud. The original New York Guggenheim—a landmark design by Frank Lloyd Wright—will hold collections of art prior to 1945 if the new building, budgeted at almost $700 million, is built. The Polshek Partnership completed a new entrance to the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Its asymmetrical design contrasts with the classical symmetry of the century-old main structure.

Commercial Buildings.
      Easily the most spectacular new commercial building to be completed during the year was the Burj al Arab (also known as the Arabian Tower) in Dubayy, U.A.E. The 60-story hotel, which was sited on an artificial island, was the tallest in the world at 320 m (1,053 ft) and was intended to attract visitors by the sheer drama of its architecture, which rose from the sea like the curve of a scimitar. At night computerized lighting transformed the building into a huge kinetic light show. The minimum guest rate of $900 per night was seen as an added attraction; visitors would stay at the hotel merely to show that they could afford to. The interior of the structure was no less spectacular; it featured a 183-m (600-ft) atrium, the world's tallest, and luxurious rooms that provided a breathtaking view of Dubayy and the Persian Gulf. The architect for the building was Tom Wright of the British firm WS Atkins, an offshore engineering consultancy that also served as the site architect.

      In Shanghai the Jin Mao Tower outdid the Burj al Arab in one respect. Its 31 uppermost floors formed a hotel that was even loftier than Burj. The hotel floors achieved their height by resting on 52 floors of office space in a 420-m (1,377-ft) tower designed by the American firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill.

      Equally dramatic, but in a more avant-garde style, was the Alpe-Adria Centre for the Hypo Bank in Klagenfurt, Austria, by American Thom Mayne of the firm Morphosis. This banking headquarters was constructed in such a way that wings of the building seemed to crash into one another like boxcars in a train wreck. Like the work of the Blobmeisters, the structure was made possible by the use of computers in design and construction. In New York the LVMH Tower, by French architect Christian de Portzamparc, featured a glass facade that looked like transparent pleated drapery.

Exhibitions.
      London's Victoria and Albert Museum presented “Art Nouveau 1890–1914,” which traced the Art Nouveau style in art and architecture through Paris; Brussels; Glasgow, Scot.; Munich, Ger.; Vienna; and elsewhere. The Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York opened “Design Culture Now,” the first of the planned triennial National Design exhibitions. On display were everything from motorcycles and typefaces to houses and computers, many of which were flexible or adaptable to different shapes and functions. Some referred to them as “blobjects.”

      In Hannover, Ger., Expo 2000, the latest world's fair, drew disappointing crowds but included national pavilions by major architects: Peter Zumthor (Switzerland), Ricardo Legorreta (Mexico), Álvaro Siza (Portugal), and Shigeru Ban (Japan)—the latter was built mostly of paper in keeping with the Expo's theme of environmentalism.

Preservation.
      Two early landmarks of American Modernism, both originally built as office towers, took on new life as hotels. The PSFS Building (1932; also known as the Philadelphia Savings Fund Society Building and the Philadelphia Saving Fund Building) was purchased, refurbished, and transformed by the Loews Corp. into a hotel, and the Reliance Building in Chicago (1895) became the Hotel Burnham, named after the original architect, Daniel Burnham. The remarkable but much altered Art and Architecture Building (1963) at Yale University by Paul Rudolph underwent the first stages of a restoration intended to return it to its original form. In New York a controversy arose over whether to save the Huntington Hartford Gallery (1964) on Columbus Circle, an early effort in white marble by Edward Durell Stone that was meant to recapture a kind of lacy prettiness that had been expunged from architecture by the Modern movement. In Kosovo, a Serbian province in Yugoslavia, an international effort was under way, on a small scale, to plan for the reconstruction of some of the many landmark buildings destroyed by the civil conflicts of the 1990s.

On the Drawing Boards.
      The new projects under way were more often than not developed on computer screens rather than on drawing boards. Daniel Libeskind, designer of the Jewish Museum in Berlin, was named architect of an addition to the Denver (Colo.) Art Museum. A proposed new pavilion for the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia was designed by Bohlin Cywinski Jackson. Kallmann McKinnell & Wood of Boston was chosen to design the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas, after conservative trustees rejected an earlier design by Herzog & de Meuron. A design competition for a Martin Luther King Memorial, on a site near the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial in Washington, D.C., was won by ROMA Design Group of San Francisco. Renzo Piano of Italy won a four-firm competition to design a New York Times tower in New York after Gehry, the favourite, unexpectedly withdrew. The World War II Memorial in Washington, D.C., a competition-winning design by Friederich St. Florian, received final approvals from government agencies but still faced lawsuits from citizens' groups concerned about its site on the Mall between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument.

Deaths.
      Among the losses to the architectural community were Italian writer and professor Bruno Zevi, an advocate of “organic” architecture that would be free from overly rational geometries; Edward Logue, American city planner and public-housing developer; Christian Norberg-Shultz, a Norwegian philosopher of architecture who sought in many books to define the essential meanings of architecture; Hideo Sasaki (see Obituaries (Sasaki, Hideo )), a pioneering American landscape architect; James Marston Fitch, the virtual founder of the contemporary American architectural preservation movement and a powerful advocate of environmentally responsive architecture; and John Hejduk, author of influential theoretical designs and dean for 25 years of the Cooper Union school of architecture in New York City.

Robert Campbell

▪ 1995

Introduction
      Probably the most widely noted building of 1994 was the new home of the American Center, which opened in June on the Seine River in the Bercy neighbourhood of Paris. Designed by Los Angeles architect Frank O. Gehry (see BIOGRAPHIES (Gehry, Frank )), the centre contained stage and motion-picture theatres and a variety of other performance and exhibit spaces, as well as 26 apartments for resident scholars and artists.

      Gehry employed the free-form tilting, curving, and colliding shapes that made him famous, but they seemed tamer than usual because of the traditional warm-toned limestone in which the entire building was clad. Many critics noted the appropriateness of the choice of Gehry, among the most innovative of contemporary U.S. architects, as designer of the American Center, which was founded in 1931 to promote French understanding of U.S. culture.

      A more typically wacky Gehry design, the Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum, opened late in 1993 at the University of Minnesota. Known to students as "the Fred," it was a childlike jumble of shapes on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi River, with several facades clad in brushed stainless steel that reflected the sky and the sunset.

Awards.
      The Pritzker Architecture Prize, which bills itself as the equivalent of a Nobel Prize, retained its rank as the most prestigious architectural award despite a glut of rival $100,000-plus prizes. The 1994 Pritzker was awarded to Christian de Portzamparc, a French architect whose best-known work was the Cité de la Musique, a school for music and dance in Paris. The award ceremony was held in Columbus, Ind., as a way of honouring the town and its remarkable collection of works by modern architects. The Pritzker jury called Portzamparc "a powerful poet of forms and creator of eloquent spaces" and spoke of his "exuberant collage of contemporary architectural idioms, at once bold, colorful, and original."

      Among other awards, the American Institute of Architects (AIA) gave its 1995 Gold Medal, its highest award for lifetime achievement, to Cesar Pelli. Pelli was born in Argentina, served as dean of the School of Architecture at Yale University from 1977 to 1984, and established a practice in New Haven, Conn. He was known for his buildings with a lightweight, almost tentlike, appearance, often surfaced in glass or thin stone veneer. Among his best-known works were the Pacific Design Center in Los Angeles, the World Financial Center in New York City, Herring Hall at Rice University, Houston, Texas, and Carnegie Hall Tower in New York City. The AIA named the Ford Foundation Headquarters in New York City as recipient of its 1995 Twenty-Five-Year Award, given to a building whose design has stood the test of time. The architect was Kevin Roche of Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo and Associates, with Dan Kiley as landscape architect. The AIA also named 17 buildings by U.S. architects as recipients of its annual Honor Awards for good design. Among the most prominent were Carnegie Hall Tower by Pelli, Oriole Park at Camden Yards baseball stadium in Baltimore, Md., by Hellmuth Obata & Kassabaum, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., by James Ingo Freed, a New York City architect. The Gold Medal of the Royal Institute of British Architects went to Michael and Patty Hopkins, known for their marriage of high technology with tradition in such works as the new Glyndebourne opera house in England.

Civic Buildings.
      Of all types of buildings, it was those designed for transportation that dominated the world of architecture in 1994. The most spectacular was in Japan—the $14 billion Kansai International Airport, which opened in September. It was built on an island created from landfill in 18 m (59 ft) of water in Osaka Bay, connected to the mainland by a 3-km (1.85-mi)-long double-deck bridge. The building itself was 1.6 km (1 mi) long and four stories high under a single curving metal roof. The terminal's architect was Renzo Piano of Italy.

      In France the Lyon airport railway station opened as a railroad station linked to an older airport, thus bringing users of cars, trains, and airplanes together beneath a structure of concrete ribs that resembled the skeleton of a vast whale. The architect was Santiago Calatrava of Spain.

      In England a new Waterloo terminal, at the British end of the new Channel Tunnel, imitated the great glass-roofed railroad stations of the 19th century. Its architect was Nicholas Grimshaw. In the United States, Denver (Colo.) International Airport, the largest in the country, covered 137 sq km (53 sq mi) and included parking for 12,000 cars. Its main terminal, roofed in Teflon-coated tensile fabric, was the world's largest tent and looked, as one critic noted, like a Sioux encampment on the plain. The team of architects included August Perez and the firm of C.W. Fentress J.H. Bradburn & Associates. Designed and built with great speed in just over four years, the airport caused frustration when it failed to open on time because nobody could figure out how to get its $200 million automated baggage-handling system to work. Scheduled to open in late 1993, Denver was still not operational at the end of 1994, a delay that caused severe cost overruns.

      In Washington, D.C., a new embassy for Finland by Mikko Heikkinen and Markku Komonen was an elegant collage of glass, copper, bronze, stainless steel, polished granite, and natural wood, held together by taut nautical detailing. It faced the street with a wall of leaves and flowers—a three-story bronze trellis planted with rose and clematis vines.

Cultural Buildings.
      A remarkable concentration of architectural energy occurred at Yerba Buena Gardens in San Francisco, just south of the city's downtown, where several internationally known architects created a cultural complex. Its core was a Center for the Arts designed by Fumihiko Maki of Japan and James Stewart Polshek of New York City. Maki's building contained a film and video theatre and a variety of exhibition and performance spaces and was surfaced on the outside with the architect's signature silver-toned finish. Polshek's building was a 755-seat theatre. Both structures stood atop the underground portion of a 185,000-sq m (2 million-sq ft) expansion of San Francisco's main convention facility, the Moscone Center; the expansion was designed by Freed.

      Also part of the complex was an oval park, the Esplanade, by MGA Partners with Romaldo Giurgola. Scheduled to open in January 1995 across the street from Yerba Buena was a new San Francisco Museum of Modern Art by Swiss architect Mario Botta. It was a formal, symmetrical, blocky structure in red brick, topped by a huge elliptical skylight.

      In Paris much attention surrounded the opening of the new Cartier building, which housed the company's headquarters as well as the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art. Designed by Jean Nouvel, the building contained exhibition spaces and was constructed of several transparent glass walls, one behind the other, creating elaborate depths and reflections.

      In Santiago, Spain, a Galician Centre of Contemporary Art was under construction. Designed by Álvaro Siza, a Portuguese architect and winner of the Pritzker Prize, it was scheduled to open formally in 1995. The building, sited on a hillside and clad in gray granite, was to house a collection of regional art. Crisply modern, yet relaxed and angular, it was already being hailed as a masterpiece. At the University of Wyoming, the Centennial Complex by Antoine Predock celebrated the Amerindian culture in a building shaped like a conical teepee.

      In Managua, Nicaragua, a cathedral by Mexican architect Ricardo Legoretta replaced an earlier one destroyed by a 1972 earthquake. Built of raw concrete enlivened by bright colours, the cathedral was roofed by white bubblelike domes and featured a 34-m (111.5-ft) bell tower.

Exhibitions.
      The blockbuster architectural show of 1994 was "Frank Lloyd Wright: Architect," displayed at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York City from February through May. It was the largest exhibit ever of the work of Wright, who lived from 1867 to 1959 and was usually regarded as the greatest U.S. architect. On view were over 450 drawings and photographs of famous Wright designs, from his early Prairie houses around Chicago to such later masterpieces as the vacation house "Fallingwater" in Pennsylvania and the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. The show included informative scale models of several of the buildings, including some that had been demolished or that were never built. For a time Manhattan—a place the car-loving, country-loving Wright always claimed he despised—seemed to have been turned over to the architect, as the Metropolitan Museum showed Wright's designs for furniture, ceramics, and textiles, while a number of art galleries displayed various other aspects of "Wrightiana."

      MOMA was also host to "Bernard Tschumi: Architecture and Event." This exhibit featured the work of the controversial French-born architect Tschumi, the designer of the Parc de la Villette in Paris, who in 1994 was dean of the school of architecture at Columbia University, New York City.

      In Montreal "Cities of Artificial Excavation: The Work of Peter Eisenman, 1978-1988" was on view from March through June at the Canadian Centre for Architecture. Eisenman, an avant-garde U.S. architect and teacher, designed the entire installation as a maze of twisting corridors and tiny rooms, thus allowing the visitor to experience space as well as look at pictures and models of the architectural projects being displayed. Both the installation and the projects gave a sense of having been carved or quarried out of the earth, layer by layer, rather than constructed. Eisenman cited, as a source of his architecture, his personal experience of psychoanalysis, in which he dug into his own history and unconscious.

      In Paris the Pompidou Centre held an exhibit of the lifetime work of the multifaceted Italian Ettore Sottsass. In the 1960s Sottsass designed modern-classic Olivetti typewriters. He later helped found an influential movement in Postmodern design that he called Memphis, and in 1994 he was an architect of houses.

Preservation.
      A major controversy erupted over a proposal by the Walt Disney Co. to build a new theme park on a 1,200-ha (3,000-ac) site in Virginia near Washington, D.C. "Disney's America" was to feature re-creations of events from U.S. history and was to be sited only 6.4 km (4 mi) from the Manassas National Battlefield Park in Virginia, a major Civil War memorial. The plan was opposed by both environmentalists and history buffs, and the Disney company abandoned the proposal.

      A new concern in the field of architectural preservation was the fate of the disappearing monuments of the Industrial Revolution, especially in the U.S. Vast steel mills along the rivers of western Pennsylvania, as well as structures elsewhere such as grain elevators and bridges, attracted the interest of preservationists as those structures began to decay from abandonment. Once regarded as blighting scars on the landscape, the industrial relics were now viewed by some as powerful and haunting objects and important symbols of America's industrial past. Several "industrial heritage corridors" were proposed in different parts of the country.

      In Paris the renovation of the Louvre Museum continued with the opening of the museum's Richelieu wing late in 1993. Part of a master plan for the museum by the U.S. architect I.M. Pei, the new wing, which once housed government offices, provided more than 12 ha (30 ac) of new space, most of it galleries for paintings and sculpture. (See also Museums .)

      In Pittsburgh, Pa., the new Heinz Architectural Center at the Carnegie Museum of Art opened in November 1993 with plans for a series of thematic exhibitions. Already on permanent display was a complete suite of three rooms designed by Wright in 1951 as his San Francisco branch office.

Technology and Practice.
      A January earthquake in Los Angeles damaged some famous works of architecture and cultural history, including houses from the 1920s by Wright and the last surviving original "Golden Arch" McDonald's Restaurant, from 1953. The earthquake demonstrated the success of California's stringent building codes, which were upgraded in the 1970s and 1980s with earthquakes in mind. Little damage was suffered by buildings built or renovated in compliance with the codes, but it was noted that the 1994 quake had a modest magnitude of 6.7 and thus was no predictor of the performance of buildings in a future "big one"—the 8- or 9-point quake experts regarded as inevitable in Los Angeles.

      In Chicago the prominent architect Stanley Tigerman and interior designer Eva Maddox opened a new school of architecture, which was to be called Archeworks. The school planned to combine design and research in an effort to develop socially conscious designs such as shelters for the homeless.

      An unprecedented development boom in China was attracting the attention of architects around the globe. The world's most populous nation boasted the world's fastest-growing economy, a combination that created a need for buildings on a scale never before seen. The Ministry of Construction estimated that 1.4 billion sq m (15.1 billion sq ft) of new housing alone would be needed in just seven years—roughly the equivalent of building two new cities the size of the New York City metropolitan area. In Hong Kong, due to become part of China in 1997, more than 40,000 new apartments were built in 1994. U.S. and European architects were increasingly becoming associated with Chinese partners in the design of prominent commercial buildings. One of them, a proposed office and hotel tower in Chongqing (Chungking), by the U.S. firm Haines Lundberg Waehler, would be the tallest building in the world.

      Deaths during 1994 included Pietro Belluschi in February. Italian-born, Belluschi gained a reputation for a gentle version of modernism, using wood and other natural materials, in the Portland, Ore., area in the 1940s. (See OBITUARIES (Belluschi, Pietro ).) Brazilian landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx, who combined abstract art with lush plantings in more than 3,000 gardens, died in June. (See OBITUARIES (Burle Marx, Roberto ).) Friends of U.S. architect Charles Moore, who died in 1993, announced plans to acquire and preserve the house that was his last house and studio, in Austin, Texas. (ROBERT CAMPBELL)

      See also Building and Construction; (Business and Industry Review ) Engineering Projects .

      This updates the article architecture, history of Western (Western architecture).

▪ 1994

Introduction
      The architectural world in 1993 was dominated to a considerable extent by the personality of the British architect Sir Norman Foster. In December it was announced that Foster, 58, was winner of the annual Gold Medal of the American Institute of Architects (AIA), the highest honour in U.S. architecture. It was the first time since 1966 that the Gold Medal, given for lifetime achievement, had gone to an architect from outside North America.

      Foster, an avid aviator, was known for glittering, crisply detailed "high-tech" metal and glass buildings, of which the best known was his Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation tower in Hong Kong. His mirror-glass Willis Faber office building in Ipswich was the only British building built since World War II to be officially listed as a historic landmark.

      Foster's Carré d'Art, an art museum and library, opened in early summer in Nîmes, France, on a site opposite the Maison Carrée, a Roman temple from the 1st century AD. Critics acclaimed the new structure as a light-filled, glass-walled modern equivalent of the classical temple. During 1993 Foster was also named architect for the redevelopment of the Reichstag in Berlin, the ornate former national capitol built in 1871 and burned by the Nazis in 1933. It would house the Parliament of the newly united Germany. Foster was also picked to design the American Air Museum in Duxford, England. His uncharacteristically sober Joslyn Art Museum addition in Omaha, Neb., started construction in June.

Awards.
      Japanese architect Fumihiko Maki was chosen in April as winner of the $100,000 Pritzker Prize, the nearest thing in architecture to a Nobel Prize. The award was made in Prague in order to call attention to the architectural merit of that historic Central European city, one of Maki's favourites. Maki, 65, spent the years 1952-65 as a student and teacher in the U.S., then opened a practice in Japan in which he created modern buildings in bold, sculptural shapes, often finished in a surface of brushed aluminum or stainless steel that seemed bathed in light. Among the best known were the Wacoal showroom, known as the Spiral Building, in Tokyo, the Fujisawa Municipal Gymnasium, the Chiba Convention Center, the National Museum of Modern Art in Kyoto, and the Hillside Terrace Apartments in Tokyo. For the latter complex, he received the 1993 Prince of Wales Prize in Urban Design, awarded to Maki jointly with the Swiss architect Luigi Snozzi.

      Other prestigious awards included the $138,000 Praemium Imperiale for architecture to Japanese architect Kenzo Tange, 79, best known for the Olympic stadia of 1964 in Tokyo and the Yamanashi Press Institute in Kofu. The AIA gave its 1993 Twenty-Five Year Award, an annual prize for an American building that had proved its worth over at least a quarter century, to the Deere & Co. Administration Building in Moline, Ill., by Eero Saarinen. It was the sixth such award, a record, to a building by Saarinen. (During the year it was announced that an earlier Saarinen winner, Dulles International Airport outside Washington, D.C., would be enlarged in the manner the architect had envisioned, by extension of the original structure by 98 m [320 ft] at each end). The Twenty-Five Year Award for 1994 was to be presented to Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Deer Isle, Maine, by Edward Larrabee Barnes. The AIA also picked 18 American buildings for its annual Honor Awards for good architecture. Among the better known were NationsBank Plaza in Tampa, Fla., by Harry Wolf; Canal+ Headquarters in Paris by Richard Meier; Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, by Peter Eisenman; Hynes Convention Center in Boston by Kallmann, McKinnell & Wood; Buckhead Branch Library in Atlanta, Ga., by Scogin Elam & Bray; and two restorations, the Rookery Building, an 1886 Chicago classic by Burnham & Root with modifications by Frank Lloyd Wright, restored by the McClier firm, and the Furness Building of 1891, originally a college library, now named for its architect, Frank Furness, in Philadelphia, restored by Venturi, Scott-Brown & Associates.

      Architect Glenn Murcatt of Australia won the Alvar Aalto Medal, awarded by Finnish architects for work that, according to the citation, "fuses ingredients of modernity with elements of an indigenous rural tradition to create structures that appear . . . locally rooted and universal." The long-anticipated Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles by Frank O. Gehry, not yet built, won an award for its design from the magazine Progressive Architecture.

Civic Buildings.
      Perhaps the most widely discussed new building of the year, and one of the most admired in many years, was the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which opened in April on a site near the Mall in Washington, D.C. (See Museums .) The architect was James Ingo Freed of the New York firm Pei Cobb Freed & Partners, and the exhibits were designed by Ralph Appelbaum. The museum attempted, through its architecture, to evoke the Nazi death camps and to suggest how modern technology and efficiency could be put to perverted and even insane purposes. The exhibits, using photographs and such objects as an actual railroad car of the type used to transport victims to the camps, traced the history of the Nazi policy of extermination of the Jewish people.

      Also widely publicized was a fire station in the Vitra furniture factory complex in Weil am Rhein, Germany, the first building actually built by Zaha Hadid, an architect long known as a leader of the so-called deconstructionist movement, in which buildings often appear to be exploding into sharply angled fragments. "The results are not Classical proportions and Euclidian geometries, but attenuated and tapered forms that deliver the thrill of high-speed travel without the rocket," wrote one critic. The Vitra company's "campus" included other buildings, some built and some in progress, by such international "star" architects as Gehry, Tadao Ando, Alvaro Siza, and Nicholas Grimshaw.

      An addition to Milan's Lignate Airport was designed by the Italian Aldo Rossi to suggest a gateway. A Federal Judiciary Building in Washington was designed by Barnes as a simplified imitation of the historic Union Station by Daniel Burnham, which stands adjacent. The Greater Columbus Convention Center, by Eisenman, was designed in such a way that its walls looked as if they had been thrown off balance by an earthquake. On an island in Japan, Ando created a Buddhist Lotus Temple around an elliptical pool of water.

Commercial and Cultural Buildings.
      An American acropolis began to assume final form in San Francisco at the 35-ha (87-ac) Yerba Buena Gardens urban-renewal project. A Center for the Arts, designed by Maki and containing mostly performance spaces, opened in October. Not yet complete were the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, by the Swiss architect Mario Botta, and the Center for the Arts Theater, by James Stewart Polshek. The adjacent Moscone Center convention facility was being extended by Freed, part of it beneath the Center for the Arts.

      In Frankfurt, Germany, a new skyscraper complex for the DG Bank, by American architect William Pedersen of Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates, PC, mixed a variety of heights, shapes, and window patterns in a harmonious group. In Charlotte, N.C., the 60-story NationsBank Corporate Center and Blumenthal Performing Arts Center, by Cesar Pelli, recalled the classic towers of the Empire State Building era with its elegantly illuminated setback top. In New York, architect Kevin Roche enlarged the Jewish Museum by adding a new wing in exact imitation of the neo-Gothic style of the original. Optical laser scanners helped stone-carvers replicate details, and the new limestone was roughened by being chiseled to match the older weathered stone.

      In Salem, Mass., the Salem Witch Trials Tercentenary Memorial opened with a design by architect James Cutler and artist Maggie Smith, chosen in an international competition from among 242 entries. Names and statements of victims of the witchcraft persecution were carved into stone walls, slabs, and benches to create a memorial park. A Women's Rights National Historical Park opened in Seneca Falls, N.Y., where the movement for women's rights began in 1848. In Wellesley, Mass., the new Davis Museum at Wellesley College, the first U.S. building by the noted Spanish architect Rafael Moneo, was praised as one of the best art museum interiors of recent years. Moneo was also at work on a major extension of the Houston (Texas) Art Museum.

Exhibitions, Competitions, and New Commissions.
      A major exhibit of the work of Italian architect Renzo Piano—one of the designers of the Pompidou Centre, which he called "a spaceship landing in the middle of Paris"—was on display at the Architectural League in New York City and later at the Menil Collection in Houston, a building originally done by Piano for which the architect was now designing an addition to display works of the painter Cy Twombly.

      The Pompidou Centre itself mounted an exhibit of the avant-garde deconstructionist Vienna firm of Coop-Himmelblau. Wrote one critic: "Formal aspects of the 'open architecture' advanced by the firm's founders—fragmenting, breaking, dematerializing, contorting, impaling, reversing, exploding—are abundantly evident in the show's 47 alarming models." The Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York City put on an exhibit of bridges, buildings, and sculptures by Spanish engineer and architect Santiago Calatrava. MOMA also showed the 10 finalist entries in a competition to design the Nara Convention Center in Japan, including the winner by Arata Isozaki. (Isozaki also won a competition in the U.S., for a sculpture garden at the Bass Museum in Miami Beach, Fla.)

      In an effort to bring notice to the architecture of the Pacific region, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art mounted a huge exhibit of the work of a young Japanese architect, Shin Takamatsu. The catalog compared Takamatsu's wildly expressive work to "the strange monuments of a religious cult" and to "overscaled mechanical models and, at times, gigantic jewelry." Architect Stanley Tigerman designed the exhibit "Chicago Architecture and Design, 1923-1993," shown at the Art Institute of Chicago.

      New York City architect Peter Pran led a team that won a competition to design a new $230 million New York Police Academy in the South Bronx. Pelli proposed a pair of 85-story towers for the Kuala Lumpur City Centre in Malaysia. Rossi designed a set of office buildings in the stoplight colours of red, green, and yellow for the Disney Development Co. in the Disney town of Celebration, Fla.

Controversies.
      A long battle by admirers of the headquarters of the Salk Institute for Biological Sciences in La Jolla, Calif., ended in defeat in May when bulldozers razed a grove of eucalyptus trees at the entrance, making way for construction of a new wing. Designed by Louis I. Kahn and built in 1966 for polio vaccine pioneer Jonas Salk, the research complex was regarded as one of the great American buildings. Critics of the addition argued that it would harm the orchestrated sequence of movement through the grove, across a threshold, and onto a courtyard with a stunning framed view of the Pacific horizon. Salk supported the addition, but it was opposed by prominent architects and historians, including Gehry, Meier, Philip Johnson, Vincent Scully, and Robert Venturi. New York Times critic Herbert Muschamp called the Salk "the most sublime landscape ever created by an American architect." The addition, designed by former Kahn associates David Rhinehart and Jack MacAllister, would contain laboratories, offices, and an auditorium.

      In New York City it was announced that the 1918 main post office, by McKim Mead and White, would be renovated as an Amtrak railroad passenger terminal. The post office stood directly across the street from the site of the old Pennsylvania Station, designed by the same architects, now demolished.

      In Italy, after decades of trying to figure out what to do about the Leaning Tower of Pisa, engineers decided that the landmark was in imminent danger of collapse. A massive weight of lead and concrete was inserted at the high side of the tower's foundation, intended to act as a counterweight that would gradually reverse the tower's tilt. In the first three months, the tower righted itself by 0.3°.

Urban Design and Planning.
      Agreement appeared to have been reached on New York City's huge Riverside South project on 23 ha (56 ac) of former rail yards overlooking the Hudson River from 59th to 72nd Street in Manhattan. Developer Donald Trump in 1985 proposed a "Television City" development with 1.4 million sq m (15 million sq ft) of floor space, including the world's tallest (150 stories) building. A coalition of neighbourhood and civic groups opposed the project and formed themselves into a Riverside South Development Corp. They produced an alternate scheme of about half the bulk, including 10 ha (25 ac) of new public park. The new design, although endorsed by the city and by Trump himself, was still opposed by some neighbourhood groups.

      Also in Manhattan came the fourth proposal of recent years for improvements to a sleazy honky-tonk strip. Proponents of "42nd Street Now!"—including architect Robert A.M. Stern—wished to transform a block of old theatres between 7th and 8th Avenue into a Hollywood version of the Times Square of the past, with even more glitz and rooftop signs and bright lights than the original. Some of the renovations would be temporary, until the economy revived sufficiently to permit construction of the huge office towers long intended for this block.

      Miami-based architects Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, designers of the influential model village of Seaside, Fla., established a group called the Congress for the New Urbanism. CNU sponsored, in October, the first of a series of symposia in support of traditional ideas about city planning. CNU promoted communities made up of closely packed neighbourhoods, as opposed to typical recent developments of superhighways and scattered suburbs, which were seen as wasteful of resources and alienating for their inhabitants.

Business and Practice.
      The global ecological crisis was a recurrent theme in architecture in 1993. "Designing for a Sustainable Future" was the theme of the annual convention of the AIA, held in Chicago in June. The National Audubon Society opened a new headquarters in New York City, remodeling an 1891 department store as an example of environmentally responsible design. Designed by Croxton Collaborative, the renovated structure used 62% less energy than required by New York's strict energy code. Audubon also argued that it was saving energy by preserving an old building rather than erecting a new one and by locating in a downtown that was well served by public transportation.

      The largest U.S. retailer, Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., opened the first of a series of "Eco-marts" in Lawrence, Kan., using renewable construction materials and efficient lighting and featuring a recycling centre. Critics of Wal-Mart pointed out that goods and customers still arrived at the suburban stores by energy-consumptive vehicles, however. In the New England region, opponents in several towns succeeded in killing proposals for new Wal-Mart stores, arguing they would challenge and perhaps destroy community retail life on "Main Street."

      With economic recession continuing in most countries, less was being built than in the recent past. Around the world, airports were among the few major types of buildings being built in large numbers. In the U.S. a series of new federal courthouses, some by outstanding architects, promised to become, for the 1990s, what the art museum was during the '70s and '80s: the major embodiment of civic architectural pride.

      In some places the idea of architecture as a profession was being questioned. In Great Britain the government considered abolishing the requirement for testing and licensing of architects. In Spain and Germany efforts were under way to abolish fee scales set by architects, an action taken several years earlier in the U.S.

      Deaths during 1993 included Reima Pietila, the most distinguished living Finnish architect, in August at age 70. Alison Smithson (see OBITUARIES (Smithson, Alison Margaret )) of Great Britain, prominent in the 1950s and '60s with her husband, Peter, as an advocate of socially responsible architecture, also died in August, at age 65. Influential Postmodernist architect Charles Moore, designer of such projects as Sea Ranch Condominium north of San Francisco, the Piazza d'Italia in New Orleans, La., and the St. Matthew's Episcopal Church in Pacific Palisades, Calif., died on December 16 at age 68. (See OBITUARIES (Moore, Charles ).) (ROBERT CAMPBELL)

      See also Engineering Projects ; Building and Construction (Industrial Review ).

      This updates the article architecture, history of Western (Western architecture).

* * *

Introduction

      the art and technique of designing and building, as distinguished from the skills associated with construction. The practice of architecture is employed to fulfill both practical and expressive requirements of civilized people and thus embraces both utilitarian and aesthetic ends. Although these two ends may be distinguished, they cannot be separated, and the relative weight given to each can vary widely. Almost every settled society that possesses the techniques for building produces architecture. It is necessary in all but the simplest cultures; without it, man is confined to a primitive struggle with the elements; with it, he has not only a defense against the natural environment but also the benefits of a human environment, a prerequisite for and a symbol of the development of civilized institutions.

      The characteristics that distinguish a work of architecture from other man-made structures are (1) the suitability of the work to use by human beings in general and the adaptability of it to particular human activities, (2) the stability and permanence of the work's construction, and (3) the communication of experience and ideas through its form. All these conditions must be met in architecture. The second is a constant, while the first and third vary in relative importance according to the social function of buildings. If the function is chiefly utilitarian, as in a factory, communication is of less importance. If the function is chiefly expressive, as in a monumental tomb, utility is a minor concern. In some buildings, such as churches and city halls, utility and communication may be of equal importance.

      The present article treats primarily the forms, elements, methods, and theory of architecture. For the history of architecture in antiquity, see the sections on ancient Greece and Rome in architecture, Western (Western architecture); as well as art and architecture, Anatolian; art and architecture, Arabian; art and architecture, Egyptian; art and architecture, Iranian; art and architecture, Mesopotamian; and art and architecture, Syro-Palestinian. For later historical and regional treatments of architecture, see architecture, African (African architecture); art and architecture, Oceanic; architecture, Western (Western architecture); arts, Central Asian (Central Asian arts); arts, East Asian; arts, Islamic (Islamic arts); arts, Native American (Native American art); arts, South Asian (South Asian arts); and arts, Southeast Asian (Southeast Asian arts). For a discussion of the place of architecture and architectural theory in the realm of the arts, see aesthetics. For related forms of artistic expression, see city, interior design, and urban planning.

Use
      The types of architecture are established not by architects but by society, according to the needs of its different institutions. Society sets the goals and assigns to the architect the job of finding the means of achieving them. This section of the article is concerned with architectural typology, with the role of society in determining the kinds of architecture, and with planning—the role of the architect in adapting designs to particular uses and to the general physical needs of human beings.

Architectural types
      Architecture is created only to fulfill the specifications of an individual or group. Economic law prevents architects from emulating their fellow artists in producing works for which the demand is nonexistent or only potential. So the types of architecture depend upon social formations and may be classified according to the role of the patron in the community. The types that will be discussed here—domestic, religious, governmental, recreational, welfare and educational, and commercial and industrial—represent the simplest classification; a scientific typology of architecture would require a more detailed analysis.

Domestic architecture
      Domestic architecture is produced for the social unit: the individual, family, or clan and their dependents, human and animal. It provides shelter and security for the basic physical functions of life and at times also for commercial, industrial, or agricultural activities that involve the family unit rather than the community. The basic requirements of domestic architecture are simple: a place to sleep, prepare food, eat, and perhaps work; a place that has some light and is protected from the weather. A single room with sturdy walls and roof, a door, a window, and a hearth are the necessities; all else is luxury.

“Vernacular” architecture
      In much of the world today, even where institutions have been in a continuous process of change, dwelling types of ancient or prehistoric origin are in use. In the industrialized United States, for instance, barns are being built according to a design employed in Europe in the 1st millennium BC. The forces that produce a dynamic evolution of architectural style in communal building are usually inactive in the home and farm. The life of the average person may be unaltered by the most fundamental changes in his institutions. He can be successively a slave, the subject of a monarchy, and a voting citizen, without having the means or the desire to change his customs, techniques, or surroundings. Economic pressure is the major factor that causes the average individual to restrict his demands to a level far below that which the technology of his time is capable of maintaining. Frequently he builds new structures with old techniques because experiment and innovation are more costly than repetition. But in wealthy cultures economy permits and customs encourage architecture to provide conveniences such as sanitation, lighting, and heating, as well as separate areas for distinct functions, and these may come to be regarded as necessities. The same causes tend to replace the conservatism of the home with the aspirations of institutional architecture and to emphasize the expressive as well as the utilitarian function.

“Power” architecture
 As wealth and expressive functions increase, a special type of domestic building can be distinguished that may be called power architecture. In almost every civilization the pattern of society gives to a few of its members the power to utilize the resources of the community in the construction of their homes, palaces, villas, gardens, and places of recreation. These few, whose advantages usually arise from economic, religious, or class distinctions, are able to enjoy an infinite variety of domestic activities connected with the mores of their position. These can include even communal functions: the palace of the Flavian emperors in ancient Rome incorporated the activities of the state and the judicial system; the palace of Versailles (Versailles, Palace of), a whole city in itself, provided the necessities and luxuries of life for several thousand persons of all classes and was the centre of government for the empire of Louis XIV. Power architecture may have a complex expressive function, too, since the symbolizing of power by elegance or display is a responsibility or a necessity (and often a fault) of the powerful. Since this function usually is sought not so much to delight the patron as to demonstrate his social position to others, power architecture becomes communal as well as domestic. In democracies such as ancient Greece and in the 20th-century Western world, this show of power may have been more reserved, but it is still distinguishable.

Group housing
      A third type of domestic architecture accommodates the group rather than the unit and is therefore public as well as private. It is familiar through the widespread development of mass housing in the modern world, in which individuals or families find living space either in multiple dwellings or in single units produced in quantity. Group housing is produced by many kinds of cultures: by communal states to equalize living standards, by tyrants to assure a docile labour force, and by feudal or caste systems to bring together members of a class. The apartment house was developed independently by the imperial Romans of antiquity to suit urban conditions and by the American Indians to suit agricultural conditions. Group architecture may be power architecture as well, particularly when land values are too high to permit even the wealthy to build privately, as in the 17th-century Place des Vosges in Paris, where aristocratic mansions were designed uniformly around a square, or in the 18th-century flats in English towns and spas. Although most domestic architecture of the 20th century employed the style and techniques of the past, the exceptions are more numerous and more important for the development of architecture than ever before. This is because the distribution of wealth and power is widespread in parts of the world where architecture is vital and because the modern state has assumed responsibility for much high-quality housing.

Religious architecture
      The history of architecture is concerned more with religious buildings than with any other type, because in most past cultures the universal and exalted appeal of religion made the church or temple the most expressive, the most permanent, and the most influential building in any community.

      The typology of religious architecture is complex, because no basic requirements such as those that characterize domestic architecture are common to all religions and because the functions of any one religion involve many different kinds of activity, all of which change with the evolution of cultural patterns.

The temple or church
 Temples or churches serve as places of worship and as shelters for the images, relics, and holy areas of the cult. In the older religions, the temple was not always designed for communal use. In ancient Egypt and India it was considered the residence of the deity, and entrance into the sanctum was prohibited or reserved for priests; in ancient Greece it contained an accessible cult image, but services were held outside the main facade; and in the ancient Near East and in the Mayan (Maya) and Aztec architecture of ancient Mexico, where the temple was erected at the summit of pyramidal mounds, only privileged members of the community were allowed to approach. Few existing religions are so exclusive. Beliefs as dissimilar as Christianity, Buddhism, Judaism, and Islām are based on communal participation in rites held inside the temple or church. The buildings have even evolved into similar plans, because of a common requirement that the maximum number of worshippers be able to face the focal point of the service (the mosque's (mosque) “point” is the wall facing the direction of Mecca, the city of Muḥammad's birth and therefore the most sacred of all Islāmic religious sites). Consequently, the Muslims were able to adopt the Byzantine church tradition, modern synagogues are often scarcely distinguishable from churches, and early Protestantism absorbed Catholic architecture with only minor revision (elimination of subsidiary chapels and altars, repositories of relics, and some symbolic decoration).

      Shelter is not always required for worship. Primitive rites are often practiced outdoors with some monument as a focus, while the altar of Pergamum and the Ara Pacis Augustae (Augustan Altar of Peace) in Rome are evidences of the open-air religious observances of the classical world. The atrium of early Christian architecture and the cloister were isolated areas for prayer.

      The complex programs of later religions made the place of worship the focus for varied activities demanding architectural solutions; for example, the baptistery, bell towers, and chapter houses of Christian architecture, the minarets of the Muslims, and the holy gates of Buddhism. Most modern sects demand space for religious education adjoining the community church or temple. Catholicism and the religions of Asia have produced monasteries, convents, and abbeys—connected to places of worship—that accommodate the organized practice of religion, adding domestic and often industrial, agricultural, and scholarly functions to the religious.

Shrines and memoria
      Shrines consecrate a holy place for its miraculous character or for its association with the life of the founder, gods, or saints of a cult. Since the importance of such structures is usually proportionate to the antiquity of their tradition and associations with cult origins, they have had little importance in later architectural history. The major commemorative buildings of Christianity are those connected with the life of Jesus Christ (Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem) and the apostles or early Church Fathers (St. Peter's in Rome) or with the medieval cult of relics (Santiago de Compostela in Spain). No single formal design characterizes this type, but the theme of the domed or central-plan structure (round, square, polygon, Greek cross, etc.) connects the memoria of Asia (the Indian stupa, Chinese pagoda), pagan antiquity (the Pantheon in Rome), and Christianity (the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem). The significance of the form is discussed below under Content.

Funerary art
      Expressing man's relationship to the afterlife, funerary art is not always architectural, since it may be purely symbolic and therefore suitable to sculptural treatment, as in the classic Greek, medieval, and modern tomb. Funerary architecture is produced by societies whose belief in the afterlife is materialistic and by individuals who want to perpetuate and symbolize their temporal importance. Monumental tombs (tomb) have been produced in ancient Egypt (pyramids), Hellenistic Greece (tomb of Mausolus at Halicarnassus, which is the source of the word mausoleum), ancient Rome (tomb of Hadrian), Renaissance Europe (Michelangelo's Medici Chapel, Florence), and Asia (Tāj Mahal (Taj Mahal), Āgra, Uttar Pradesh, India). Modern tomb design has lost vitality, though it remains as elaborate (Monument to Victor Emmanuel II, Rome) or as meaningful in terms of power (Lenin Mausoleum, Moscow) as before. The exceptional examples are partly sculptural in character (e.g., Louis Sullivan's Wainwright Tomb, St. Louis, Missouri; Walter Gropius' war memorial, Weimar, Germany).

      Since the 18th century much of religious architecture has lost individuality and importance through the weakening of liturgical traditions. But today, as in the past, outstanding architects have met new demands of use and expression with superior solutions.

Governmental architecture
      The basic functions of government, to an even greater extent than those of religion, are similar in all societies: administration, legislation, and the dispensing of justice. But the architectural needs differ according to the nature of the relationship between the governing and the governed. Where governmental functions are centralized in the hands of a single individual, they are simple and may be exercised in the ruler's residence; where the functions are shared by many and established as specialized activities, they become complex and demand distinct structures. There are, however, no basic formal solutions for governmental architecture, since the practical needs of government may be met in any sheltered area that has convenient space for deliberation and administration. A distinct type is created rather by expressive functions arising from the ideology of the different systems of political organization (monarchy, theocracy, democracy, etc.) and from the traditions of the various offices of government (law courts, assembly houses, city halls, etc.). Governments that exercise power by force rather than by consent tend to employ the expressive functions of architecture to emphasize their power; they tend to produce buildings of a monumentality disproportionate to their service to the community. Those in which the ruler is given divine attributes bring religious symbolism into architecture. Democratic governments have the responsibility of expressing in their architecture the aims of the community itself, a difficult task in the modern world, when the community may be neither small enough to express itself easily nor homogeneous enough to agree on how to do so.

      The simple democratic processes of the Greek city-states and the medieval free towns produced governmental architecture on a domestic scale, while the Roman Empire (ancient Rome) and later monarchies seldom made important distinctions between the palace and the seat of state functions. The widespread growth of representative government and the increase in the size and functions of the state in the 19th century created a great variety of buildings, some for entirely new uses. Some examples are: first, capitols, courthouses, parliament buildings, printing offices, and mints and, later, post offices, embassies, archives, secretariats, and even laboratories, when the work, the increased personnel, and the complexity of mechanical aids demanded specialized architectural solutions. Bureaucracy, for better or for worse, has made governmental architecture more important than at any time in history.

      In the first rapid expansion from about 1780 to 1840, Neoclassical architects found impressive solutions to the new problems, but afterward governmental architecture lapsed into a century of conservatism, following at a safe distance behind private building. After World War II, governmental architecture showed new vitality. Outstanding are Le Corbusier's work at Chandīgarh, Punjab, India, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization headquarters in Paris, and the program of the U.S. Department of State for building American embassies.

      Military architecture is closer to the governmental type than to others, but its expressive function is so much subordinated to the practical that it is usually regarded as a class of engineering (see fortification (military technology)).

Recreational architecture
      Few recreations require architecture until they become institutionalized and must provide for both active and passive participation (athletic events, dramatic, musical performances, etc.) or for communal participation in essentially private luxuries (baths, museums, libraries). Throughout history, recreational architecture has been the most consistent in form of any type. Diversions may change, but, as in domestic architecture, the physical makeup of the human being provides consistency. If his participation is passive he must be able to hear and to see in comfort. If his participation is active, he must be given spaces suited to the chosen activity. In most cultures, recreational institutions have their origins in religious rites, but they easily gain independence, and religious expression is reduced or eliminated in their architecture.

Theatres (theatre)
      Theatres originated in ancient Greece with the rites of the god Dionysus, first as temporary installations and later as outdoor architecture using the natural slope and curves of hillsides to bring the spectator close to the stage and to avoid the need for substructures. The Greek theatre was monumentalized and modified by the Romans, whose arches and vaults allowed construction of sloping seats from level foundations. In the Middle Ages churches and temporary structures were used for dramatic purposes, and in the Renaissance the form of the Roman theatre was occasionally revived (Andrea Palladio's Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza, Italy). The 17th-century development of opera, drama, and ballet in Europe brought about a revival of theatre building but in a new form conceived to satisfy class and economic distinctions (e.g., the Teatro Farnese in Parma, Italy; Residenztheater, in Munich). A flat or inclined pit accommodated standing patrons, tiers of boxes rose vertically above in a horseshoe plan, and permanent covering (for both acoustics and comfort) made artificial lighting an important feature in theatrical performances. While the modern theatre has been greatly improved in efficiency by new acoustical methods and materials, it also has kept much of the Baroque form. However, it provides seating throughout and usually substitutes sloping galleries (into which the unprivileged have been moved) for boxes. The motion picture has had little effect on theatre design (see theatrical production: History of theatres and staging (theatre)).

Auditoriums (auditorium)
      The auditorium is distinguished by the absence of stage machinery and by its greater size. The development of large symphony orchestras and choirs and of the institution of lectures and mass meetings combined with growing urban populations to produce this modification of the theatre.

Athletic facilities
      Sport (sports) arenas, racetracks, and public swimming pools of the present day owe their origin to the ancient Romans (though certain precedents can be found in Crete and Greece). Although the classical tradition of sports was broken from the early Middle Ages to the 19th century, even the design of arenas and tracks has been scarcely altered from the Colosseum and Circus Maximus, though the construction of large grandstands has inspired magnificent designs in reinforced concrete (stadiums at Florence, Helsinki, and the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México). Sports that have no precedents in antiquity, such as baseball, have required modifications in design but have not been important for architecture.

Museums (museum) and libraries
      Museum and library architecture was also an innovation of classical antiquity (library architecture appears independently in ancient China and Japan). Early examples are found on the acropolis of Hellenistic Pergamum and in Roman Ephesus. Museums were not cultivated in the Middle Ages, and libraries were incorporated into monasteries. In the Renaissance and Baroque periods, library construction like Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach's Hofbibliothek in the Hofburg, Vienna, was rare, but important civic buildings were designed within religious institutions (Michelangelo's Biblioteca Laurenziana in Florence) and universities (Sir Christopher Wren's Trinity College Library, Cambridge; James Gibbs' Radcliffe Camera, Oxford). This type of architecture became truly communal for the first time in the 19th century, when the size of library collections and the number of visitors inspired some of the finest architecture of the modern period (Michael Gottlieb Bindesbøll's Thorvaldsen Museum, Copenhagen; Sir Robert Smirke's British Museum in London; Henri Labrouste's Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève in Paris; Alvar Aalto's library in Viipuri, Finland; Frank Lloyd Wright's Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City).

Architecture of welfare and education
      The principal institutions of public welfare are those that provide facilities for education, health, public security, and utilities. Some of these functions are performed by the church and the state, but, since their character is not essentially religious or political, they may require independent architectural solutions, particularly in urban environments. A consistent typology of this architecture, however, cannot be established throughout history, because the acceptance of responsibility for the welfare of the community differs in degree in every social system.

      Buildings for the specific purposes of public welfare were seldom considered necessary in antiquity, in most of Eastern architecture, or in the early Middle Ages. But in ancient Greece health facilities were included in precincts of Asclepius, the god of healing, and in the East within Buddhist precincts. The Romans produced a highly developed system of water supply and sewerage, of which their monumental aqueducts are an impressive survival.

      In the later Middle Ages consistent forms began to emerge. With the separation of the university from a purely religious context, a concept of planning developed (particularly at Oxford, Cambridge, and Paris) that still influences educational architecture. Hospitals (hospital) designed as large halls were established as adjuncts to churches, convents, and monasteries (Hôtel-Dieu, Beaune, France) and gained architectural independence in the Renaissance (Ospedale degli Innocenti, Florence). Ancient and medieval prisons (prison) and guardhouses were occasionally isolated from military architecture (e.g., Tower of London; Bargello in Florence), but the prison did not become an important architectural type until the late 18th and 19th centuries (e.g., George Dance's Newgate Prison, London; Henry Hobson Richardson's Allegheny County Jail, Pittsburgh).

      The expansion of education and health facilities beginning in the 19th century created a widespread and consistently growing need for specialized architectural solutions. Schools, from the nursery to the university, now demand not only particular solutions at all levels but structures for a variety of purposes within each level; advanced education demands buildings for scientific research, training for trades and professions, recreation, health, housing, religious institutions, and other purposes. Most of the countries of the Western world have produced educational architecture of the highest quality; this architectural type is more important than in any past age.

Commercial and industrial architecture
      Buildings for exchange, transportation, communication, manufacturing, and power production meet the principal needs of commerce and industry. In the past these needs were mostly unspecialized. They were met either within domestic architecture or in buildings distinguished from domestic types chiefly by their size. Stores, banks, hostelries, guildhalls, and factories required only space for more persons and things than houses could accommodate. Bridges, warehouses, and other structures not used for sheltering people were, of course, specialized from the beginning and survived the Industrial Revolution without basic changes. The Industrial Revolution profoundly affected the typology as well as the techniques of architecture. Through the introduction of the machine and mass production, economic life moved out of the domestic environment into an area dominated by devices and processes rather than by individuals, creating the need for buildings more specialized and more numerous than the total accumulation of types throughout history. All the types cannot be discussed here, but a categorical listing into which they can be fitted will illustrate their importance for architecture: exchange (office buildings, stores, markets, banks, exchanges, warehouses, exhibition halls); transportation (roads, bridges, tunnels; stations for rail, sea, and air transport and the dispensing of fuel; garages, hangars, and other storage facilities; hotels); communication (structures for the transmission and reception of telephone, telegraph, radio, television, and radar communication; for the printing and distribution of newspapers, magazines, books, and other reading matter; for motion-picture production; and for advertising functions); production (mines, factories, laboratories, food-processing plants); power (dams, generating plants; fuel storage, processing, and distribution installations).

      Each of these functions demands its own architectural solution, but in general they may be divided into two classes according to whether the plan must give greater attention to the size and movement of machinery or of persons. Wherever human activity is the chief concern, there has been less departure from traditional expression; banks in the form of Roman temples are an obvious example. The demands of machines have no tradition and have encouraged a search for greater, simpler, and more flexible spaces; but frequently the practical function has entirely eliminated the expressive, so that with some distinguished exceptions (e.g., Frank Lloyd Wright's S.C. Johnson & Sons, Inc., building, Racine, Wisconsin; Eero Saarinen's General Motors Technical Center, Warren, Michigan), most modern factories are not architecture. Where both men and machines had to be given equal attention, as in railroad stations, architecture of the 19th and 20th centuries vacillated between creating new forms and grasping for irrelevant traditions.

Architectural planning
      The architect usually begins to work when the site and the type and cost of a building have been determined.

      The site involves the varying behaviour of the natural environment that must be adjusted to the unvarying physical needs of human beings; the type is the generalized form established by society that must be adjusted to the special use for which the building is required; the cost implies the economics of land, labour, and materials that must be adjusted to suit a particular sum.

      Thus, planning is the process of particularizing and, ultimately, of harmonizing the demands of environment, use, and economy. This process has a cultural as well as a utilitarian value, for in creating a plan for any social activity the architect inevitably influences the way in which that activity is performed.

Planning the environment
      The natural environment is at once a hindrance and a help, and the architect seeks both to invite its aid and to repel its attacks. To make buildings habitable and comfortable, he must control the effects of heat, cold, light, air, moisture, and dryness and foresee destructive potentialities such as fire, earthquake, flood, and disease.

      The methods of controlling the environment considered here are only the practical aspects of planning. They are treated by the architect within the context of the expressive aspects. The placement and form of buildings in relation to their sites, the distribution of spaces within buildings, and other planning devices discussed below are fundamental elements in the aesthetics of architecture.

      The arrangement of the axes of buildings and their parts is a device for controlling the effects of sun, wind, and rainfall. The sun is regular in its course; it favours the southern and neglects the northern exposures of buildings in the Northern Hemisphere, so that it may be captured for heat or evaded for coolness by turning the axis of a plan toward or away from it. Within buildings, the axis and placement of each space determines the amount of sun it receives. Orientation may control air for circulation and reduce the disadvantages of wind, rain, and snow, since in most climates the prevailing currents can be foreseen. The characteristics of the immediate environment also influence orientation: trees, land formations, and other buildings create shade and reduce or intensify wind, while bodies of water produce moisture and reflect the sun.

Architectural forms
      Planning may control the environment by the design of architectural forms that may modify the effects of natural forces. For example, overhanging eaves, moldings, projections, courts, and porches give shade and protection from rain. Roofs are designed to shed snow and to drain or preserve water. Walls control the amount of heat lost to the exterior or retained in the interior by their thickness and by the structural and insulating materials used in making them. Walls, when properly sealed and protected, are the chief defense against wind and moisture. Windows (window) are the principal means of controlling natural light; its amount, distribution, intensity, direction, and quality are conditioned by their number, size, shape, and placement and by the characteristics of translucent materials (e.g., thickness, transparency, texture, colour). But the planning of fenestration is influenced by other factors, such as ventilation and heating. Since most translucent materials conduct heat more readily than the average wall, windows are used sparingly in extreme climates. Finally, since transparent windows are the medium of visual contact between the interior and exterior, their design is conditioned by aesthetic and practical demands.

      Colour has a practical planning function as well as an expressive quality because of the range of its reflection and its absorption of solar rays. Since light colours reflect heat and dark colours absorb it, the choice of materials and pigments is an effective tool of environmental control.

Materials and techniques
      The choice of materials is conditioned by their own ability to withstand the environment as well as by properties that make them useful to human beings. One of the architect's jobs is to find a successful solution to both conditions; to balance the physical and economic advantages of wood against the possibility of fire, termites, and mold, the weather resistance of glass and light metals against their high thermal conductivity, and many similar conflicts. The more violent natural manifestations, such as heavy snow loads, earthquakes, high winds, and tornadoes, are controlled by special technical devices in regions where they are prevalent.

      Any number of these controls may be out of reach of the planner for various reasons. The urban environment, for example, restricts freedom of orientation and design of architectural forms and creates new control problems of its own: smoke, dirt, noise, and odours.

Interior control (interior design)
      The control of the environment through the design of the plan and the outer shell of a building cannot be complete, since extremes of heat and cold, light, and sounds penetrate into the interior, where they can be further modified by the planning of spaces and by special conditioning devices.

      Temperature, light and sound are all subject to control by the size and shape of interior spaces, the way in which the spaces are connected, and the materials employed for floors, walls, ceilings, and furnishings. Hot air may be retained or released by the adjustment of ceiling heights and sources of ventilation. Light reflects in relation to the colour and texture of surfaces and may be reduced by dark, rough walls and increased by light, smooth ones. Sounds are transmitted by some materials and absorbed by others and may be controlled by the form of interiors and by the use of structural or applied materials that by their density, thickness, and texture amplify or restrict sound waves.

      Conditioning devices played only a small part in architecture before the introduction of mechanical and electrical systems in the 19th century. The fireplace was almost the only method of temperature control (though the ancient Romans anticipated the modern water system for radiant heating); fuel lamps and candles had to be movable and were rather in the sphere of furnishings than of architecture; the same is true of the tapestries and hangings used for acoustical purposes and to block drafts.

      Today, heating, insulation, air conditioning, lighting, and acoustical methods have become basic parts of the architectural program. These defenses and comforts of industrialization control the environment so efficiently that the contemporary architect is free to use or to discard many of the traditional approaches to site and interior planning.

Planning for use
      While environmental planning produces comfort for the senses (sight, feeling, hearing) and reflexes (respiration), planning for use or function is concerned with convenience of movement and rest. All activities that demand architectural attention require unique planning solutions to facilitate them. These solutions are found by differentiating spaces for distinct functions, by providing circulation among these spaces, and by designing them to facilitate the actions of the human body.

      The number of functions requiring distinct kinds of space within a building depends not only upon the type of building but also upon the requirements of the culture and the habits and activities of the individual patrons. A primitive house has a single room with a hearth area, and a modern one has separate areas for cooking, eating, sleeping, washing, storage, and recreation. A meetinghouse with a single hall is sufficient for Quaker religious services, while a Roman Catholic cathedral may require a nave, aisles, choir, apse, chapels, crypt, sacristy, and ambulatory.

      The planning of differentiated spaces involves as a guide to their design (placement, size, shape, environmental conditions, sequence, etc.) the analysis of use (number of uses and character, duration, time of day, frequency, variability, etc., of each), users (number, behaviour, age, sex, physical condition, etc.), and furniture or equipment required.

      Communication among differentiated spaces and between the exterior and the interior may be achieved by openings alone in the simplest plans, but most buildings require distinct spaces allotted to horizontal and vertical circulation (corridors, lobbies, stairs, ramps, elevators, etc.). These are designed by the procedure of analysis employed for differentiating uses. Since their function is usually limited to simplifying the movement of persons and things toward a particular goal, their efficiency depends on making the goal evident and the movement direct and easy to execute.

      The convenience of movement, like the comfort of environment, can be increased both by planning and by devices. Planning methods are based on analysis of the body measurements, movements, and muscular power of human beings of different ages and sexes, which results in the establishment of standards for the measurements of ceilings, doorways, windows, storage shelves, working surfaces, steps, and the like and for the weight of architectural elements that must be moved, such as doors, gates, and windows. These standards also include allowances for the movement of whatever furnishings, equipment, or machinery are required for the use of any building. Devices for facilitating movement within buildings replace or simplify the labours of daily life: the traditional pumps, plumbing, and sewerage systems and the innumerable modern machines for circulation, food preparation and preservation, industrial processing, and other purposes.

Economic (economics) planning
      Major expenses in building are for land, materials, and labour. In each case they are high when the commodity is scarce and low when it is abundant, and they influence planning more directly when they become restrictive.

      The effect of high land values is to limit the amount of space occupied by any building as well as the amount of expenditure that can be reserved for construction. When land coverage is limited, it is usually necessary to design in height the space that otherwise would be planned in breadth and depth, as in the ancient Roman insula (apartment houses) or the modern skyscraper. When the choice of materials is influenced by cost, all phases of architectural design are affected, since the planning procedure, the technique, and the form of buildings are dependent on materials. High labour costs influence the choice of techniques and, consequently, of materials. They encourage simplification in construction and the replacement of craftsmanship by standardization. The development in the 19th and 20th centuries of light wood-frame construction and methods of prefabrication was largely the result of the rising cost of labour.

      Planning involves not only the control of cost in each area but also the proportioning of expenditures among land, materials, and labour in order to produce the most effective solution to an architectural problem.

Techniques
      The techniques of architecture in the sense that they will be considered here are simply the methods by which structures are formed from particular materials. These methods are influenced not only by the availability and character of materials but also by the total technological development of society, for architecture depends on an organized labour force and upon the existence of the tools and skills necessary to secure, manufacture, transport, and work durable materials.

      The evolution of techniques is conditioned by two forces. One is economic—the search for a maximum of stability and durability in building with a minimum of materials and labour. The other is expressive—the desire to produce meaningful form. Techniques evolve rapidly when economic requirements suggest new expressive forms or when the conception of new forms demands new procedures. But they remain static when architects avoid the risk of pioneering with untried and possibly unsuccessful methods and depend instead on proved procedures or when the need for the observance of tradition, for the communication of ideas, or for elegance and display is best fulfilled by familiar forms.

      The ultimate purpose of building techniques is to create a stable structure. In mechanical terms, structures are stable when all their parts are in a state of equilibrium, or rest. Walls and roofs can buckle, crack, or collapse if they are not properly designed. These movements are caused by forces that tend to push or pull bodies in a given direction. Forces acting on any member (part) of a building are, first, its own weight and, second, the loads it carries, principally from other members but also from persons, furnishings, wind, etc. Their action encounters a reaction in opposing forces that hold the member in place by resisting at its joints. These forces may be active in all directions, and they must be balanced for stability. They tend to crush, pull apart, and bend the member—in other words, to change its size and shape.

      Within the member itself there are forces, too, that tend to resist any deformation. They are called stresses, and they vary according to the strength of materials and the form of the member. The kinds of stress under consideration are compression, which resists crushing; tension, which resists pulling apart; and bending, which occurs when one part of a member is in compression and the other is in tension. A column is put into compression by the loads it carries; in a trussed roof the piece that forms the base of the triangle is put into tension by the outward-pushing forces in the sides; and a lintel or beam (the member that spans a space) is put into bending by loads and forces that push down on its top and encounter a reacting force at its ends. Some materials are strong only in compression (e.g., stone, brick, cast iron, concrete) and others in tension as well (e.g., wood, steel, reinforced concrete), so the latter are more efficient in resisting bending forces.

      Finally, the stability of the total structure whose single members are all in equilibrium is achieved by diverting the loads from all of them downward so that they may be resisted by the upward-supporting forces of the ground.

      Techniques will be discussed in terms of the characteristics of building materials and the methods by which they are used in architecture (see building construction). (building construction)

Materials
      In most areas where stone is available, it has been favoured over other materials for the construction of monumental architecture. Its advantages are durability, adaptability to sculptural treatment, and the fact that it can be used in modest structures in its natural state. But it is difficult to quarry, transport, and cut, and its weakness in tension limits its use for beams, lintels, and floor supports.

      The simplest and cheapest stonework is rubble; i.e., roughly broken stones of any shape bounded in mortar. The strongest and most suitable stonework for monumental architecture is ashlar masonry, which consists of regularly cut blocks (usually rectangular). Because of its weight and the precision with which it can be shaped, stone masonry (in contrast with brick) does not depend on strong bonding for stability where it supports only direct downward loads. The entablatures (entablature) (the upper sections of a classical order that rest on the capital of a column) of an ancient Greek temple, for example, were bonded by small bronze dowels. But the weight creates problems of stability when loads push at an angle; stone vaults and arches require more support and buttressing than equivalent forms in other materials.

      The best stone (and brick) bonding is that in which blocks are placed so that the vertical joints in one course are not above the joints in the courses above and below, since the stone resists deformation better than any bonding material. Many stones are strong enough to provide monolithic supports (columns and piers) and beams (lintels); and in some styles stone slabs are employed even for roofing (ancient Egyptian temples, early Christian basilicas in Syria). But this roofing requires so many columns that unvaulted masonry buildings are almost always combined with floors and covering in wood. Stone has been consistently used for building since the Stone Age, as exemplified by Stonehenge, in England. Although it has generally been replaced as a structural material by cheaper and more efficient manufactured products, it is still widely used as a surface veneer for its practical and expressive qualities.

      Brick compares favourably with stone as a structural material for its fire- and weather-resisting qualities and for the ease of production, transportation, and laying. The size of bricks is limited by the need for efficient drying, firing, and handling, but shapes, along with the techniques of bricklaying, have varied widely throughout history. Special shapes can be produced by molding to meet particular structural or expressive requirements (for example, wedge-shaped bricks are sometimes employed in arch construction and bricks with rounded faces in columns). Bricks may be used in construction only in conjunction with mortar, since the unit is too small, too light, and too irregular to be stabilized by weight. Each course must be laid on an ample mortar bed with mortar filling the vertical joints. The commonest ancient Roman bricks were cut into triangles and laid with the base out and the apex set into a concrete filling that provided additional strength. Rectangular bricks are bonded either as headers (short side out) or stretchers (long side out). Standard modern types provide a ratio of width to length of slightly less than 1:2 to permit a wide variety of bonding patterns within a consistent module, or standard of measurement. Brick, which has been used since the 4th millennium BC, was the chief building material in the ancient Near East. The versatility of the medium was expanded in ancient Rome by improvements in the manufacture of both bricks and mortar and by new techniques of laying and bonding. Employed throughout the Middle Ages, brick gained greater popularity from the 16th century on, particularly in northern Europe. It is widely used in the 20th century, often for nonbearing walls in steel frame construction.

      Wood is easier to acquire, transport, and work than other natural materials. All parts of a building can be efficiently constructed of wood except foundations; its disadvantage is susceptibility to fire, mold, and termites. The strength of wood in both tension and compression arises from its organic nature, which gives it an internal structure of longitudinal and radial fibres that is not impaired by cutting or long exposure. But like all organisms it contains moisture and is not uniformly strong, so it must be carefully selected and seasoned to prevent warping, splitting, and failure under loads. Wood is used in building both solid and skeletal structures. The principal solid system, called log construction, is employed when only primitive cutting tools are available. Four walls must be built up together in horizontal layers of single hewn or uncut logs and jointed at the corners. The stability of the log building depends entirely on the mutual support of the walls, and the method is suitable only for simple structures of limited size. The skeletal system requires precise cutting and shaping of lumber. It provides a rigid framework of jointed or nailed members independent of the walls, which are attached to the exterior and interior surfaces after completion.

      Almost all masonry buildings of the past had wood floors and coverings, since wood is the lightest, the most practical, and the most inexpensive material for spanning spaces.

      The monumental architecture of the West has typically employed materials rarer than wood for expressive purposes, but the history of wood construction can be traced consistently in China, Korea, and Japan and in the domestic architecture of northern Europe and North America. Wood continues to be used in a growing number of techniques and products: heavy framing systems with compound beams and girders, interior and exterior facing with plywood and other composite panels, and arch and truss systems with laminated members that can be designed to meet particular structural demands (see wood).

iron and steel
      The development of construction methods in iron and steel was the most important innovation in architecture since ancient times. These methods provide far stronger and taller structures with less expenditure of material than stone, brick, or wood and can produce greater unsupported spans over openings and interior or exterior spaces. The evolution of steel frame construction in the 20th century entirely changed the concept of the wall and the support.

      In architecture before 1800, metals played an auxiliary role. They were used for bonding masonry (dowels and clamps), for tension members (chains strengthening domes, tie rods across arches to reinforce the vaults), and for roofing, doors, windows, and decoration. cast iron, the first metal that could be substituted for traditional structural materials, was used in bridge building as early as 1779. Its ability to bear loads and to be produced in an endless variety of forms, in addition to its resistance to fire and corrosion, quickly encouraged architectural adaptations, first as columns and arches and afterward in skeletal structures. Because cast iron has much more compressive than tensile strength (for example, it works better as a small column than as a beam), it was largely replaced in the late 19th century by steel, which is more uniformly strong, elastic, and workable, and its high resistance in all stresses can be closely calculated.

      Steel structural members are rolled in a variety of shapes, the commonest of which are plates, angles, I beams, and U-shaped channels. These members may be joined by steel bolts or rivets, and the development of welding in the 20th century made it possible to produce fused joints with less labour and materials. The result is a rigid, continuous structure in which the joint is as firm as the member and which distributes stresses between beams and columns. This is a fundamental change in architectural technique, the effect of which cannot yet be estimated.

      Normally, steel must be protected against corrosion by surface coverings, but alloys such as stainless steel have been developed for exposed surfaces. Aluminum and other light metal alloys have come to be favoured for exterior construction because of their weather resistance.

      Concrete is a manufactured mixture of cement and water, with aggregates of sand and stones, which hardens rapidly by chemical combination to a stonelike, water- and fire-resisting solid of great compressive (but low tensile) strength. Because it can be poured into forms while liquid to produce a great variety of structural elements, it provides an economical substitute for traditional materials, and it has the advantages of continuity (absence of joints) and of fusing with other materials.

      Concrete was employed in ancient Egypt and was highly developed by the ancient Romans, whose concrete made with volcanic-ash cement ( pozzolana) permitted a great expansion of architectural methods, particularly the development of domes and vaults (often reinforced by brick ribbing) to cover large areas, of foundations, and of structures such as bridges and sewerage systems where waterproofing was essential. The technique of manufacture declined in the Middle Ages and was regained in the 18th century, but concrete had only a limited importance for architecture until the invention of reinforced concrete in the 1860s.

      Reinforced concrete was developed to add the tensile strength of steel to the compressive strength of mass concrete. The metal is embedded by being set as a mesh into the forms before pouring, and in the hardened material the two act uniformly. The combination is much more versatile than either product; it serves not only for constructing rigid frames but also for foundations, columns, walls, floors, and a limitless variety of coverings, and it does not require the addition of other structural materials. Although the making of forms is a slow and costly process, the technique competes economically with steel frame construction because the mesh, composed of thin, bendable metal rods or metal fabric, employs far less steel, and concrete is itself inexpensive.

      The steel reinforcement is employed to take full advantage of the plastic, or sculptural, character of concrete. It can be jointed or bent to unify supporting members with the floors and the coverings they carry. Furthermore, stresses produced in floors, domes, and vaults may be distributed within the slabs themselves to reduce load, and the diminished load may be concentrated at desired points so that the number and size of supports is greatly reduced.

      Three 20th-century developments in production are destined to have a radical effect on architecture. The first, concrete-shell construction, permits the erection of vast vaults and domes with a concrete and steel content so reduced that the thickness is comparatively less than that of an eggshell. The second development, precast-concrete construction, employs bricks, slabs, and supports made under optimal factory conditions to increase waterproofing and solidity, to decrease time and cost in erection, and to reduce expansion and contraction. Finally, prestressed concrete provides bearing members into which reinforcement is set under tension to produce a live force to resist a particular load. Since the member acts like a spring, it can carry a greater load than an unstressed member of the same size.

Methods
      The two types of wall are load bearing, which supports the weight of floors and roofs, and nonbearing, which at most supports its own weight.

Load-bearing wall
      The load-bearing wall of masonry is thickened in proportion to the forces it has to resist: its own load, the load of floors, roofs, persons, etc., and the lateral forces of arches, vaults, wind, etc., that may cause it to crack or buckle. Its thickness often can be reduced at the top, because loads accumulate toward the base; in high buildings this is done by interior or exterior setbacks at the floor level of upper stories. Walls that must resist lateral forces are thickened either along the whole length or at particular points where the force is concentrated. The latter method is called buttressing. Doors and windows weaken the resistance of the wall and divert the forces above them to the parts on either side, which must be thickened in proportion to the width of the opening. In multistory buildings, windows—unless they are very small—must be placed one above the other so as to leave uninterrupted vertical masses of wall between them to transfer loads directly to the ground. The number of openings that can be used depends on the strength of the masonry and the stresses in the wall. Walls in light, wood-framed structures and in reinforced-concrete construction may have a bearing function also. But the nature of the material admits other means of resisting forces than the increase of mass.

      The placement of walls is determined by the type of support for floors and roofs. The commonest support is the beam, which must be jointed to walls at both ends; consequently, its maximum permissible length establishes the distance between bearing walls. All floors and coverings are most easily supported on straight, parallel walls except the dome (see below Dome (architecture)).

Nonbearing wall
      Excluding the independent garden variety, the nonbearing wall appears only where loads are carried by other members, as in heavy timber and other skeletal structures. Modern steel and reinforced-concrete frames require exterior walls only for shelter and sometimes dispense with them on the ground floor to permit easier access. Since the wall rests or hangs upon members of the frame, it becomes a curtain or screen and admits treatment in any durable, weather-resisting material. Traditional materials are often used, but light walls of glass, plastic, metal alloys, wood products, etc., can be equally efficient. This freedom of choice extends also to the form of walls and offers greatly expanded opportunities for creative expression.

Post-and-lintel
      The simplest illustration of load and support in construction is the post-and-lintel system, in which two upright members (posts, columns, piers) hold up a third member (lintel, beam, girder, rafter) laid horizontally across their top surfaces. This is the basis for the evolution of all openings. But, in its pure form, the post-and-lintel is seen only in colonnades and in framed structures, since the posts of doors, windows, ceilings, and roofs are part of the wall.

      The job of the lintel is to bear the loads that rest on it (and its own load) without deforming or breaking. Failure occurs only when the material is too weak or the lintel is too long. Lintels composed of materials that are weak in bending, such as stone, must be short, while lintels in materials that are strong in bending, such as steel, may span far greater openings. Masonry lintels are inefficient because they must depend on the cohesiveness of mortar, which is weaker than the blocks it bonds; so, in masonry construction, lintels of monolithic (single-slab) stone, wood, and stronger materials are employed.

      The job of the post is to support the lintel and its loads without crushing or buckling. Failure occurs, as in lintels, from excessive weakness or length, but the difference is that the material must be especially strong in compression. Stone, which has this property, is more versatile as a post than as a lintel; under heavy loads it is superior to wood but not to iron, steel, or reinforced concrete. Masonry posts, including those of brick, may be highly efficient, since the loads compress the joints and add to their cohesiveness. Although monolithic stone columns are used, they are extravagant to produce for large structures, and columns are usually built up of a series of cylindrical blocks called drums.

      From prehistoric times to the Roman Empire, the post-and-lintel system was the root of architectural design. The interiors of Egyptian temples and the exteriors of Greek temples are delineated by columns covered by stone lintels. The Greeks opened their interior spaces by substituting wooden beams for stone, since the wood required fewer supports. The development of the arch and vault challenged the system but could not diminish its importance either in masonry construction or in wood framing, by its nature dependent on posts and beams.

 Ancient uses of the post-and-lintel were refined but not fundamentally altered until the production of cast-iron columns, which, offering greater strength and smaller circumference, greatly reduced the mass and weight of buildings. Much construction in modern materials is based on the post-and-lintel system of the past. Steel and concrete skeletons restore to modern architecture the formal simplicity of the oldest structures known. But, because they are rigid frames, they abandon the fundamental concept of the duality of post-and-lintel by fusing them into a unit throughout which stresses are distributed. The “mushroom” column is a further departure, since the unit can be extended into a covering slab and becomes a ceiling as well as a support.

      The arch can be called a curved lintel. Early masonry builders could span only narrow openings because of the necessary shortness and weight of monolithic stone lintels. With the invention of the arch, two problems were solved: (1) wide openings could be spanned with small, light blocks, in brick as well as stone, which were easy to transport and to handle; and (2) the arch was bent upward to resist and to conduct into its supports the loads that tended to bend the lintel downward. Because the arch is curved, the upper edge has a greater circumference than the lower, so that each of its blocks must be cut in wedge shapes that press firmly against the whole surface of neighbouring blocks and conduct loads uniformly. This form creates problems of equilibrium that do not exist in lintels. The stresses in the arch tend to squeeze the blocks outward radially, and loads divert these outward forces downward to exert a resultant diagonal force, called thrust, which will cause the arch to collapse if it is not properly buttressed. So an arch cannot replace a lintel on two free-standing posts unless the posts are massive enough to buttress the thrust and to conduct it into the foundations (as in ancient Roman triumphal arches). Arches may rest on light supports, however, where they occur in a row, because the thrust of one arch counteracts the thrust of its neighbours, and the system will remain stable as long as the arches at either end of the row are buttressed by walls, piers, or earth.

      The size of arches is limited only by economy; large arches exert large thrusts, and they are hard to buttress and to build. The form may be varied to meet specific problems; the most efficient forms in masonry are semicircular, segmental (segment of a circle), and pointed (two intersecting arcs of a circle), but noncircular curves can be used successfully.

 Arches were known in Egypt and Greece but were considered unsuitable for monumental architecture. In Roman times the arch was fully exploited in bridges, aqueducts, and large-scale architecture. New forms and uses were found in medieval and particularly Gothic architecture (flying buttress, pointed arch), and Baroque architects developed a vocabulary of noncircular forms for expressive reasons. Steel, concrete, and laminated-wood arches of the 20th century have changed the concept and the mechanics of arches. Their components are completely different from wedge-shaped blocks; they may be made entirely rigid so as to require only vertical support; they may be of hinged intersections that work independently, or they may be thin slabs or members (in reinforced concrete) in which stresses are so distributed that they add the advantages of lintels to those of arches, requiring only light supports. These innovations provide a great freedom of design and a means of covering great spans without a massive substructure.

      The evolution of the vault begins with the discovery of the arch, because the basic “barrel” form, which appeared first in ancient Egypt and the Near East, is simply a deep, or three-dimensional, arch. Since the barrel vault exerts thrust as the arch does, it must be buttressed along its entire length by heavy walls in which openings must be limited in size and number. This is a disadvantage, since it inhibits light and circulation.

      But Roman builders discovered that openings could be made by building two barrel vaults that intersected at right angles to form the groin vault, which is square in plan and may be repeated in series to span rectangular areas of unlimited length. This vault has the additional advantage that its thrusts are concentrated at the four corners, so that the supporting walls need not be uniformly massive but may be buttressed where they support the vault.

      Two disadvantages of the groin vault encouraged Gothic builders to develop a modification known as the rib vault. First, to build a groin vault, a form must be made to pour or lay the entire vault, and this requires complex scaffolding from the ground up; second, the groin vault must be more or less square, and a single vault cannot span extended rectangular areas. The rib vault provided a skeleton of arches or ribs along the sides of the area and crossing it diagonally; on these the masonry of the vault could be laid; a simple centring sufficed for the ribs. To cover the rectangular areas, the medieval mason used pointed arches, which, unlike round arches, can be raised as high over a short span as over a long one. Thus, the vault could be composed of the intersection of two vaults of different widths but the same height.

      To reduce further the thickness of the wall (to the point of substituting large areas of glass for masonry), Gothic builders developed the flying buttress, which counteracts vault thrust not by continuous wall mass and weight but by counterthrust created by exterior half-arches placed at the height of the vaults at the points of greatest stress. These buttresses conduct stresses to heavier wall buttresses below the window level.

      The next important development in vaults, as in arches, came with 19th-century materials. Great iron skeleton vaults were constructed as a framework for light materials such as glass (Crystal Palace, London). The elimination of weight and excessive thrust, the freedom in the use of materials, and the absence of centring problems favoured the simple barrel vault and made more complex types obsolete. But in many of the modern frame systems the vault itself loses its structural function and becomes a thin skin laid over a series of arches.

      While the arch is supplanting the vault in one area of technique, the vault has abandoned the arch principle in another. The reinforced-concrete shell vault, based on the principle of the bent or molded slab, is one of the most important innovations in the history of architecture. It has all the advantages of load distribution of the concrete floor slab, plus the resistance to bending provided by its curved form. The shell is reinforced in such a way that it exerts no lateral thrust and may be supported as if it were a beam or truss; hence, the form no longer necessitates the conducting of loads into the wall, and the vault may be designed with great freedom.

      Domes appeared first on round huts and tombs in the ancient Near East, India, and the Mediterranean region but only as solid mounds or in techniques adaptable only to the smallest buildings. They became technically significant with the introduction of the large-scale masonry hemispheres by the Romans. Domes, like vaults, evolved from the arch, for in their simplest form they may be thought of as a continuous series of arches, with the same centre. Therefore, the dome exerts thrusts all around its perimeter, and the earliest monumental examples required heavy walls. Since the walls permitted few openings and had to be round or polygonal to give continuous support, early domes were difficult to incorporate into complex structures, especially when adjacent spaces were vaulted.

      Byzantine (Istanbul) architects perfected a way of raising domes on piers instead of walls (like groin vaults), which permitted lighting and communication from four directions. The transition from a cubic plan to the hemisphere was achieved by four inverted spherical triangles called pendentives—masses of masonry curved both horizontally and vertically. Their apexes rested on the four piers, to which they conducted the forces of the dome; their sides joined to form arches over openings in four faces of the cube; and their bases met in a complete circle to form the dome foundation. The pendentive dome could rest directly on this foundation orupon a cylindrical wall, called a drum, inserted between the two to increase height.

      The dome was unsuited to the lightness and verticality of late-medieval styles but was widely used in the Renaissance and Baroque periods. Renaissance builders adapted the Gothic rib system to dome construction and found new means to reduce loads and thrust (concentric chains, etc.) that permitted high drums and variations in the curvature of the dome. The awkward, tunnellike effect produced on the interior by high domes was often hidden by an internal shell built on the same foundations (as at Florence Cathedral and St. Paul's Cathedral, London).

      The effort and ingenuity devoted to doming rectangular buildings can be explained principally by the symbolic character of the form, since vaulting is a simpler alternative. So it was chiefly the desire to observe tradition that preserved the dome in the early era of iron and steel construction, and, with rare exceptions (Halle aux Blés, Paris; the Coal Exchange, London), 19th-century examples retained masonry forms without exploiting the advantages of metal.

      Newer techniques, however, have added practically to the expressive advantages of domes. The reinforced-concrete slab used in vaulting can be curved in length as well as width (like an inflated handkerchief or a parachute). And in this development the distinction between vaults and domes loses significance, being based on nothing but the type of curvature in the slab. Geodesic domes (geodesic dome), developed in the 20th century by R. Buckminster Fuller (Fuller, R Buckminster), are spherical forms in which triangular or polygonal facets composed of light skeletal struts or flat planes replace the arch principle and distribute stresses within the structure itself, as in a truss. Geodesic domes can be supported by light walls and are the only large domes that can be set directly on the ground as complete structures.

      By far the commonest covering throughout history is the trussed roof, constructed upon a frame composed of triangular sections spaced crosswise at intervals and made rigid in length by beams. Trusses formerly were principally of wood and were used to cover masonry as well as framed structures, even when these were vaulted. The variety of trusses is so great that only the general principle of the form can be given here.

      The truss is based on the geometric law that a triangle is the only figure that cannot be changed in shape without a change in the length of its sides; thus, a triangular frame of strong pieces firmly fastened at the angles cannot be deformed by its own load or by external forces such as wind pressure. These forces, which in a vault thrust outward against the walls, are contained within the truss itself, because the piece (chord) at the base of the triangle resists by tension the tendency of the two sides to behave like a vault. With its forces in equilibrium, the truss exerts only a direct downward pressure on the walls, so that they need not be thickened or buttressed. This explains why most roofs are triangular in cross section.

      In trusses that are too large to be constructed of three members of moderate size, a complex system of small triangles within the frame replaces the simple triangle.

      Not all peaked roofs are trusses, for in primitive building, in ancient Greece, and in much Chinese and Japanese wood architecture the chord is omitted and the sides exert thrust. Nor are all trusses triangular, since the principle may be modified (as in modern steel and heavy timber construction) to apply to arches and vaults if chords of sufficient strength can be found.

Framed structures (framed building)
      A framed structure in any material is one that is made stable by a skeleton that is able to stand by itself as a rigid structure without depending on floors or walls to resist deformation. Materials such as wood, steel, and reinforced concrete, which are strong in both tension and compression, make the best members for framing. Masonry skeletons, which cannot be made rigid without walls, are not frames. The heavy timber frame, in which large posts, spaced relatively far apart, support thick floor and roof beams, was the commonest type of construction in eastern Asia and northern Europe from prehistoric times to the mid-19th century. It was supplanted by the American light wood frame (balloon frame), composed of many small and closely spaced members that could be handled easily and assembled quickly by nailing instead of by the slow joinery and dowelling of the past. Construction is similar in the two systems, since they are both based on the post-and-lintel principle. Posts must rest on a level, waterproof foundation, usually composed of masonry or concrete, on which the sill (base member) is attached. Each upper story is laid on crossbeams that are supported on the exterior wall by horizontal members. Interior walls give additional beam support.

      In the heavy-timber system, the beams are strong enough to allow the upper story and roof to project beyond the plane of the ground-floor posts, increasing the space and weather protection. The members are usually exposed on the exterior. In China, Korea, and Japan, spaces between are enclosed by light screen walls and in northern Europe partly by thinner bracing members and partly by boards, panels, or (in half-timbered construction) bricks or earth.

      The light frame, however, is sheathed with vertical or horizontal boarding or shingling, which is jointed or overlapped for weather protection. Sheathing helps to brace as well as to protect the frame, so the frame is not structurally independent as in steel frame construction. The light-frame system has not been significantly improved since its introduction, and it lags behind other modern techniques. Prefabricated panels designed to reduce the growing cost of construction have not been widely adopted. Modern heavy-timber and laminated-wood techniques, however, provide means of building up compound members for trusses and arches that challenge steel construction for certain large-scale projects in areas where wood is plentiful.

      Steel framing (framed building) is based on the same principles but is much simplified by the far greater strength of the material, which provides more rigidity with fewer members. The load-bearing capacity of steel is adequate for buildings many times higher than those made of other materials. Because the column and beam are fused by riveting or welding, stresses are distributed between them, and both can be longer and lighter than in structures in which they work independently as post-and-lintel. Thus, large cubic spaces can be spanned by four columns and four beams, and buildings of almost any size can be produced by joining cubes in height and width. Since structural steel must be protected from corrosion, the skeleton is either covered by curtain walls or surfaced in concrete or, more rarely, painted. The steel frame is used also in single-story buildings where large spans are required. The simple cube then can be abandoned for covering systems employing arches, trusses, and other elements in a limitless variety of forms in order to suit the functions of the building.

      Differences between reinforced-concrete and steel framing are discussed in the section on materials. The greater rigidity and continuity of concrete frames give them more versatility, but steel is favoured for very tall structures for reasons of economy in construction and space. An example is the system called box frame construction, in which each unit is composed of two walls bearing a slab (the other two walls enclosing the unit are nonbearing curtain walls); this type of construction extends the post-and-lintel principle into three dimensions. Here, again, concrete crosses the barriers that separated traditional methods of construction.

Expression
      Expression in architecture is the communication of quality and meaning. The functions and the techniques of building are interpreted and transformed by expression into art, as sounds are made into music and words into literature.

      The nature of expression varies with the character of culture in different places and in different times, forming distinct modes or languages of expression that are called styles. Style communicates the outlook of a culture and the concepts of its architects. The boundaries of a style may be national and geographical (e.g., Japanese, Mayan) or religious (e.g., Islāmic) and intellectual (e.g., Renaissance), embracing distinct linguistic, racial, and national units, and different expressions within each of these boundaries are produced by the particular style of regions, towns, groups, architects, or craftsmen. The lifespan of styles may be long (ancient Egyptian, over 3,000 years) or short (Baroque, less than 200 years) according to the changeability of cultural patterns. The principal forces in the creation of a style are tradition, the experience of earlier architecture; influence, the contribution of contemporary expressions outside the immediate cultural environment; and innovation, the creative contribution of the culture and the architect. These forces operate to produce an evolution within every style and ultimately to generate new styles that tend to supplant their predecessors.

      The components of expression, which communicate the particular values of style, are content and form. Since content can be communicated only through form, the two are organically united, but here they will be discussed separately in order to distinguish the specific and concrete meaning (content) from the abstract expression of qualities (form).

Content
      Content is the subject matter of architecture, the element in architectural expression that communicates specific meanings that interpret to society the functions and techniques of buildings.

Symbols of function
      Society requires that architecture not only communicate the aspirations of its institutions but also fulfill their practical needs. Differences in expression, apart from differences in planning, distinguish the forms of architectural types (the house from the church, etc.), the kinds of use (the Catholic from the Protestant church), and the traditions and customs of users (the English from the Swiss Protestant church). When architectural forms become the vehicles of content—in plan, elevation, and decoration—they are symbolic. Their symbolism can be understood consciously or unconsciously, by association (e.g., spire = church) to a building one has seen before and by the fact that it suggests certain universal experiences (e.g., vertical forms “rise”; low roofs “envelop”). One comprehends the meaning of symbols that are new, as well as those that are known, by association, because the laws of statics restrain builders from putting them into forms so completely unfamiliar that they do not suggest some tradition, just as the structure of language permits endless new meanings but retains a fairly constant vocabulary. The meaning of architectural symbols—or of words—may even change, but the process must be both logical and gradual, for, if the change is irrational, the purpose—communication—is lost.

      The architectural plan, when used symbolically, communicates through its shape. From prehistoric times and in many cultures, the circle, with its suggestion of the planets and other manifestations of nature, gained a symbolic, mystical significance and was used in the plans of houses, tombs, and religious structures. By slow processes it came to be employed for memoria and shrines and for hero cults in both the East and the West. When building techniques permitted, its symbolism often merged with that of the dome. In Hindu temples, the square (and the cross plans developed from it) expressed celestial harmony. The central-plan Christian church (circle, polygon, Greek cross, ellipse) fascinated the architects of the Renaissance with its symbolic and traditional values, and it is found in their drawings and treatises to the virtual exclusion of the more practical longitudinal basilicas that architects were often commissioned to build.

      Plan symbolism remained almost exclusively in the sphere of religion after antiquity, and its traditions gradually disappeared in the course of the 19th century. The modern plan is determined by problems of form (space-mass relationships, etc.) and by the practical demands of use rather than by symbolic communication.

      In elevation the most consistent symbolic forms have been the dome, the tower, the stairway, the portal, and the colonnade. Domes imply the meanings of the circle and more, since a dome is a covering. Long before masonry domes could be built, the hemisphere was associated with the heavens as a “cosmic canopy,” and throughout history domes have been decorated with stars and astrological symbols. In ancient Rome and among Christians and Indian Buddhists, the dome came to mean universal power. During the Renaissance it spread from religious structures to palaces and government buildings, retaining some of its implications of power. In the United States the national capitol (Capitol, United States) is domed, and there are few state capitols without domes; the symbol has survived the loss of its original meanings. The tower, with origins in primitive nature rites, has consistently symbolized power. The Chinese pagoda extends central-plan symbolism into towers; many towers and spires rose from the northern European Gothic cathedral, and the medieval Italian city was a forest of towers erected by nobles in constant competition to express their supremacy. This meaning survives in modern skyscrapers; their height is more frequently boasted of than their efficiency or beauty.

      Architectural elements conceived to facilitate the use of buildings may also take on symbolic significance. The stairway (staircase), employed in the past to give “monumentality” to important buildings, frequently became more expressive than convenient, especially in Baroque palaces. Portals, from the time of ancient Egyptian temple pylons and Babylonian city gates, became monuments in themselves, used to communicate a heightened significance to what lay behind them. In the Gothic cathedral they became the richest element of the facade—a translation of biblical doctrine into stone. Since the development of the classical Greek temple, the colonnade on the exterior of buildings has borne similar implications.

      Such symbols have become archaic in modern culture and appear as a sign of resistance to new forms. This resistance is especially evident in the popular symbolism of domestic architecture, where the atmosphere of the home is often expressed by cottage-like roofs, shutters, trellises, mullioned windows, grilles, and other associations with a more peaceful past.

      Decoration, the most easily recognized medium of content, communicates meaning either through architectural elements or through the figural arts (sculpture, painting, mosaic, stained glass, etc.). The architectural elements used decoratively, such as the classical orders, usually originate in technique and in time lose their structural significance to become symbols. In ancient Rome and from the Renaissance to the 20th century, the formal Grecian orders were applied to buildings of many different techniques as expressions of the continuing influence of Greek institutions. Similarly, the new vocabulary of Gothic architecture, developed with new building techniques (the pointed arch, the flying buttress, etc.), became in later periods a source for religious and romantic symbolism. The Art Nouveau of the turn of the 20th century, a system of ornament based on floral and other organic forms, survived for only two decades, perhaps because its symbols were neither drawn from a tradition nor derived from a structural system. (Architectural ornament will be further treated below.)

      The function of the figural arts in conveying content is a subject outside the scope of this article, but its importance for architecture must be mentioned. The figural arts not only offer the means of expressing more specific ideas than any architectural symbols, but in many architectural styles they define the character of mass and space. The sculptures of the Hindu temple, the mosaics of the Byzantine church, and the stuccoes of Moorish palaces are not ornamental applications; they determine the form of the building itself.

      The virtual absence of traditional symbols in modern architecture is evidence of the failure of these symbols to express the cultural patterns of the 20th century. In these times, architecture, like painting, sculpture, and other arts, has tended to be abstract, to emphasize qualities of form rather than the communication of familiar ideas through symbols.

Expression of technique
      The second aspect of content is the communication of the structural significance of materials and methods. Its purpose is to interpret the way in which architecture is put together. The characteristics of materials that are important in expressing design techniques are the properties of their composition (e.g., structure, weight, durability) and the way they are used in structure. Their properties may be expressed and interpreted by the treatment of the surface, and their use may be expressed by emphasis on the dimensions and joining of the building units into which they are formed.

      The hardness, weight, and crystalline composition of stone masonry traditionally have been emphasized by devices not necessarily connected with structural methods: rustication (finishing in rough, uneven surfaces), drafting (more refined, linear cutting), and polishing. Niches and other indentations, projecting courses, or frames around openings suggest massiveness. In nonbearing walls, a smooth, unbroken surface implies thinness. The use of stone or brick (brick and tile) masonry in construction is emphasized by clarifying the limits of each block and by the amount of mortar used and by distinguishing lintels, arches, and other specific members from the construction of the wall. The properties of wood are suggested by revealing and emphasizing its texture in load-bearing members and by treating the sheathing of light wood frames in patterns (of shingling or boarding) that communicate thinness. The plasticity of concrete is shown by freedom in modelling and its use in construction by emphasizing the impressions of the wooden forms in which it is cast. The sections of light metal curtain walls are frequently stamped into geometric patterns to illustrate their nonbearing character. Materials that must be covered for protection, such as unfired brick and the steel used in framing, are not adaptable to this type of communication.

      At times building methods are demonstrated simply by exposing the structure, as in the heavy timber frame, but in many styles the functions of structural systems have been interpreted by designing their members in forms that often are more explanatory than efficient. The Greek column, which is narrower at its summit than at its base, is diminished by a curve beginning slightly below the midpoint, giving it an effect of an almost muscular power to resist loads. The expression is more explicit in the caryatid, a human figure that replaces the column, and in the burdened animals and dwarfs that support the columns of Romanesque portals. Many elements in the Gothic cathedral serve as diagrams of structure: the supporting piers are clusters of shafts, each of which extends upward without interruption to become the rib of the vault, and the ribs themselves are an elucidation of technique; the flying buttress and the window tracery are elegant interpretations of their functions. In the modern steel-frame building (framed building), the hidden forms of the skeleton are often repeated on the facade to enable one to “see through” to the technique, but the system also permits the alternative of expressing the lightness and independence of the curtain wall by sheer surfaces of glass and other materials. The work of the concrete slab is made explicit by projecting indications of the placement of reinforcement or of the distribution of stresses.

      The expression of technique is characteristic not of all architectural styles but only of those such as the Gothic and modern, in which new techniques excite a search for the interpretive design of their materials and methods. More often than not, both materials and methods have been disguised by decorative forms or surfacing such as veneers, stucco, or paint, because of emphasis on the expression of content or of form. Most early stone architecture in Egypt, Greece, and India retained as decoration the forms developed in wooden forerunners. The precious marble of Greek temples was disguised under painted stucco; Roman brickwork was hidden by slabs of coloured marble; and 19th-century cast-iron columns were molded into classic or Gothic forms. The history of domes is filled with examples of the successful disguising of method, of giving the ponderous mass the effect of rising from the exterior and of floating from within.

      Technical content has been one of the foundation stones of 20th-century architectural theory, particularly in its early phases, and has represented a reaction against 19th-century symbolic content. It is essential for the understanding of modern architecture that the expression of technique be seen as an art—a creative interpretation that heightens awareness of the nature of architecture.

Form
      In the sphere of function and technique, the architect is responsible to the patterns of his culture on one hand and to the patterns of technology on the other; but, in the expression of form, he is free to communicate his own personality and concepts. Not every architect has the gift to exercise this prerogative to the fullest. As in other arts and sciences, a few individuals generate new styles, and others follow, interpreting these styles in original and personal ways. But the majority accepts styles as given and perpetuates them without leaving its mark. The architect's principal responsibility in the formation of style is to create meaningful form. When form is spoken of in the arts, not only the physical shape, size, and mass of a work are meant but also all the elements that contribute to the work's aesthetic structure and composition. Many of these may be without a fixed form of their own—a rest in music, a line in painting, a space in architecture—and gain significance only as they are organized into the finished product. The basic formal elements of architecture in this sense are space and mass. The process of organizing these elements into an ordered form is called composition, and the principal means by which they are given expressive quality are scale, light, texture, and colour.

space and mass
      Space, that immaterial essence that the painter suggests and the sculptor fills, the architect envelops, creating a wholly human and finite environment within the infinite environment of nature. The concept that space can have a quality other than emptiness is difficult to grasp. When a building is entered, floor, supports, walls, and a ceiling are seen, all of which can be studied and perhaps enjoyed, while the space, in the sense that one is accustomed to think of it, is void: the absence of mass, filled by air.

      But spatial experiences that express something are common to everyone, though they are not always consciously grasped. One feels insecure in a low cave or a narrow defile, exhilarated and powerful on a hilltop; these are psychological and motor reactions that result from measuring one's potential for movement against the surrounding spaces, and the same reactions take root even in language (“confining” circumstances and “elevating” experiences are spoken of). An infinite variety of such reactions may be summoned by the architect, because he controls the limits above, below, and on all sides of the observer. As a person enters the architect's space he measures it in terms of the degree and the quality of his potential for movement. The concept of potentiality is important, first, because the observer can anticipate where he may move merely looking about him and, second, because he can conceive movements that he cannot execute. Thus, in the nave of a Gothic cathedral the high walls closely confining the observer on two sides restrict his possible movements, suggesting advance along the free space of the nave toward the altar; or their compression forces him to look upward to the vaults and the light far overhead, there to feel a sense of physical release, though he is earthbound. The experience of Gothic space is called uplifting because it urges one to rise.

      Renaissance space, on the other hand, attempts to balance its suggestion of movement, to draw the observer to a focal point at which he can sense an equilibrium of movement in all directions, a resolution of the conflict of compression and release. At this point one feels physically at rest, at the opposite extreme from the elevating sensation of the cathedral.

      Of course, one does not use his eyes alone to feel spatial quality, because only the simplest spaces—a cubic room, for example—can be wholly experienced from one standpoint. In a complex of spaces, such as that of the cathedral, the observer walks about, gaining new sensations, seeing new potentials for movement at every step. Most modern architecture, in its free organization of space sequences, demands mobility; its techniques have made it possible to remove the heavy walls and supports of the past, reducing the sense of compression. Walls become membranes to be arranged at will for spatial experience, and some are transparent and so extend one's potential for movement into the limitless out-of-doors.

      Spatial experience is not restricted to the interiors of buildings. The sensations one has in nature's open spaces may be re-created by art. City squares and streets, even gardens, achieve a variety of expression comparable with that of interiors. The Baroque piazza of St. Peter's (Saint Peter's Basilica) in Rome, which directs the observer along its great embracing arcs toward the entrance, is at least as moving as the church interior.

      The exterior of a single building, particularly one that is isolated from other architecture, does not create a space. It occupies the space of nature. Thus, it may be experienced as sculpture, in terms of the play of masses in a void. The aesthetics of masses, like that of spaces, is rooted in one's psychology. When a tall tree or a mountain is called majestic and a rocky cliff menacing, human attributes are being projected. Man inevitably humanizes inert matter and so gives the architect the opportunity to arouse predictable patterns of experience.

      The appreciation of mass, like that of space, depends on movement, but this movement must be physical. It cannot be experienced in anticipation, because, no matter where one stands to observe even the simplest building, part of it is out of sight. The mass of a complex building is differently composed from every point of view. The 20th-century art critic Sigfried Giedion, emphasizing the need for movement in experiencing modern architecture, suggested that architecture may be four-dimensional, since time (for movement) is as meaningful as the spatial dimensions.

      Some architecture depends much more on mass expression than on space expression. The Egyptian pyramid, the Indian stupa, and the dagoba of Sri Lanka have no meaningful interior spaces; they are architectural in function and technique, sculptural in expression. The interior of a Greek temple is of little interest compared with the wonderful play of forms on its colonnaded exterior, while early Christian and Byzantine architecture reverse the emphasis, making the simple exterior a shell for a splendid and mystical space. Gothic architecture balances the two, partly in order to express a dual content: earthly power over the world outside, spiritual power inside. Modern techniques permit a reduction of the contrast between space and mass expressions by reducing the mass of walls and the size and number of supports and by allowing the interpenetration of interior and exterior space.

      Space and mass are the raw materials of architectural form; from them the architect creates an ordered expression through the process of composition. Composition is the organization of the whole out of its parts—the conception of single elements, the interrelating of these elements, and the relating of them to the total form.

      The simplest architectural element is a plane, the flat, two-dimensional surface that limits masses and spaces. The simplest plane is a rectangular one without openings or decoration—the wall of a room, for example. This wall is given quality solely by the proportion of its width to its height. Now a door is put into the wall; the door itself has a certain proportion, and a third element is injected, the relation of two proportions. A window is added, and the composition becomes more complex; then a row of windows, and sequence becomes a factor in addition to the elements of proportion and relation. Sequence again involves the concept of motion; the row of windows is said “to run along” the facade or is “rhythmically” designed.

      Finally, this wall may gain rich subtleties of composition within its proportions and rhythms. It can be modelled—into a complex of planes or irregular or curved surfaces—to provide the dimension of depth to its proportions; or symbols of use or of technique can become part of its expressive form.

      No architectural planes stand alone, of course; they always intersect other planes. The room wall meets two other walls, the floor, and the ceiling, and a facade wall meets the ground, the roof, and two other walls. So the total composition of a wall must be harmonized with the composition of other planes in a three-dimensional whole.

      The means of achieving this harmony differ in every style. Greek architects developed a system of proportions based on the lower diameter of the temple column, from which spatial intervals and the measurement of masses were derived by multiplication and division. Medieval architects first used arithmetical modules based on the measurements of areas in the cathedral plan and, in the Gothic period, changed to a geometric system that employed chiefly the equilateral triangle and the square, figures that had symbolic and mystical values. In Renaissance theory, proportions and harmonies were developed from systems of musical composition, since architects believed that relationships in all the arts depended on an all-pervading celestial harmony. Several modular and proportional systems have been evolved by modern architects (e.g., Le Corbusier's “Modulor”), but none has been widely adopted.

      Behind these changing theoretical methods, however, there seems to be a constant human reaction to spatial relationships that distinguishes harmony from cacophony, that makes one bored with a perfectly cubic room or prefer certain rectangular forms to others. This psychological response to form probably is connected to one's mechanisms of balance, movements, and stature—in short, to one's own composition—but the scientific analysis of the process is still at an early stage of development.

      Some buildings have only a single, simple interior space (the Pantheon in Rome) or exterior mass (the pyramids of Egypt) and are not less expressive on this account. But composition carries on into a richer dimension as soon as two or more spaces or masses are organized into the whole. Such a complex composition must give a coordinated form to connecting spaces and masses, each of them in itself a unique harmony. The observer must be made to feel, in moving through the spaces and around the masses, not only that each is related to the one that precedes and follows it but that each one is contributing to a concept of the whole: a form that is greater than the sum of its parts. In the Gothic cathedral, the nave, the aisles alongside it, the transept that crosses it toward one end, the choir, and apse beyond may each be experienced separately for its own quality. But the experience gains its full meaning only when the form of the total expression is realized: the low aisles giving grandeur to the high nave, the three together leading to the confluence of the two transept arms at the crossing in a vast climax that prepares for the resolution or finale at the altar. In the same way, the significance of a total mass composition unfolds as one moves about its separate parts. At St. Peter's in Rome, the three projecting apses are gathered into a unity by the undulating walls; they prepare for the cylindrical drum, the drum for the dome, the form of which leads to the culminating lantern, which is harmonized with the drum. Toward the facade, two little domes frame and prophesy the great one, as the cathedral aisles do the nave. While these particular examples from the past illustrate symmetrical compositions with a climax, other buildings that are of equal quality might be chosen to show irregular unity that is no less expressive (e.g., the Erechtheum in Athens; the abbey of Mont Saint-Michel in France).

      In modern architecture, as in modern painting, Renaissance laws of composition, which emphasized the symmetry and balance of semi-independent units, have been supplanted by principles that imply the continuity of the whole and remove distinctions between parts. The biological term organic is sometimes used to describe a process of composition that seeks to develop interdependent spaces and masses that function expressively as members of an organism.

      If composition were merely a matter of organizing a certain number of relationships, the process would be mechanical, not creative, and all architecture would be equally good or, more likely, bad. The purpose of composition is to express particular concepts and experiences, and it is successful only when these are fully communicated to the observer.

      When the proportions of architectural composition are applied to a particular building, the two-termed relationship of the parts to the whole must be harmonized with a third term—the observer. He not only sees the proportions of a door and their relationship to those of a wall (as he would in a drawing of the building), but he measures them against his own dimensions. This threetermed relationship is called scale.

      A well-scaled building such as a Greek temple will serve for illustration. If it were to be magnified to the size of St. Peter's (Saint Peter's Basilica) in Rome, with its proportions remaining unchanged in their own relationships, the temple would be out of scale, and the result would appear monstrous. If the columns were to be doubled in width while the temple remained the same size, they would be out of scale and out of proportion with the whole. The proportions of the temple are satisfactory as they are because they are based on certain aesthetic principles established by the Greeks, principles that are partly rooted in human psychological makeup and partly accepted by custom (e.g., as are musical consonances). It is difficult to understand, however, why the scale of these temples is so successful within a certain range of size, for neither the ancient Greeks nor anyone else established laws to relate scale to size. They found their solution by experiment and subjective judgment.

      It may be that the success of scale depends upon man's ability to comprehend proportions in relation to some unit or module that is roughly human sized and close enough to a person in a building to permit him to measure it against himself. The Greeks, in employing the base of the column as a module for all the proportions of a temple, found a unit of a size that can be grasped easily and one that is close to eye level as a person approaches the temple. This module is a key to relationships among elements too far away to measure. This can be done in much larger buildings, too, where the elements close to the observer are too massive to be measured easily. Roman and Renaissance architecture retained the ancient Greek orders as decoration partly for this reason, using them to break up huge masses into more comprehensible parts. In entirely different styles of architecture, such as the Gothic, where the expressive function requires immeasurable proportions, there is still a measurable module given in the base of the pier. But piers and columns are not always a source of the module. In masonry construction, the single block can serve the same purpose. In frame construction, the bay (distance between floors or columns) or doors and windows may make a better key. The most successful modern skyscrapers retain a comprehensible scale, in spite of their size, by the repetition of some such module, and this is one reason why the skeleton is so often expressed on the exterior even when it is hidden behind walls.

      Light is a necessity for sight and, in architecture, a utility. But light is also a powerful, though ephemeral, vehicle of expression. Because it moves, changes character, and comes and goes with its source, light has the power to give to the inert mass of architecture the living quality of nature. The architect, though he does not quite control it, can predict its behaviour well enough to catch its movements meaningfully. He channels it through openings into his spaces and molds it on the surfaces of his masses by changes of plane, making it enliven his forms by contrast with shadow.

      The sunlight that falls on the exteriors of buildings cannot be directed or changed in quality, but it can be reflected or absorbed in a wide range of modulation by the relief and texture of surfaces. The planes and decoration of a facade, therefore, are not just the lines the architect makes on his working drawings but receptacles of light and shadow that change in character, even in form, as the Earth moves about the Sun.

      Because of this link between nature and art, an important part in the formation of local architectural styles is played by the variation in the quality and intensity of light in different climatic regions.

      The architect controls interior light better than exterior light, since he can select the position, size, and shape of its source. With glass and other transparent materials he transforms even its colour and intensity and so gives light a meaning independent of that which it imparts to the structure. One realizes this most powerfully in the Gothic cathedral, where the stained-glass windows transform the rays of the sun into a mystical diffusion that descends from above like a supernatural vision.

      Furthermore, light may be illusory, dissolving rather than clarifying form. When it comes out of darkness in great intensity it seems to spread outward from its architectural channel. This illusion may be employed to express meanings, as at Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, where the light from the base of the dome hides the supports, giving the impression that the canopy floats on air.

      Texture plays a dual role in architecture: it expresses something of the quality of materials, and it gives a particular quality to light. Although one absorbs both qualities simultaneously by eye, the first has tactile, the second visual associations.

      Specific tactile textures are peculiar to every material by virtue of its manufacture or natural composition, but they may be altered to produce a variety of expressive qualities. Any stone may be used in its natural, irregular state, or it may be chiselled in a rough or smooth texture or highly polished to convey a range of meanings from vigour to refinement.

      Visual textures are produced by the patterns given to the lighting of the surface both through the way the materials are worked (e.g., vertical or horizontal chiselling of stone) and through the way they are employed in building (e.g., vertical or horizontal boarding, projection and recession of courses of brick). Like all patterns, visual textures create associations of movement, giving rhythm to the surface.

      A single texture is rarely employed in building. The variety of materials and treatments typically produces a complex of textures that must be composed and harmonized like the forms and spaces of architecture into a consistent expressive whole.

      Since colour is a characteristic of all building materials, it is a constant feature of architecture. But building materials are selected primarily for their structural value, and their colours are not always suited to expressive requirements; thus, other materials chosen for their colour are frequently added to the surface. These include pigments, which usually preserve the texture of the original surface, and veneers of stone, wood, and a variety of manufactured products that entirely alter the surface character.

      But colour, regardless of how it is produced, is the most impermanent element in architecture. It changes with the weathering and staining of materials (the white Gothic cathedrals are now deep gray), or, if it is superficial, it can easily be altered or removed (as the coloured stucco veneers of ancient Greek temples or the bright marble facing on Roman brickwork).

      The values that are associated with colour (yellow and red, for instance, are called “gay,” black and deep blue “sombre”) are independent of materials and forms, and they give the architect a range of expression not provided by other means at his disposal. A different expressive device is provided by the great range of light reflection in the colour scale. Colours that reflect light brilliantly appear to advance toward the viewer, and those that absorb light appear to recede; the degree of projection and recession of architectural forms may be altered, emphasized, or subdued by the colours of their surfaces.

      Architecture, unlike most of the other arts, is not often conceived independently of particular surroundings. The problems of design extend beyond the organizing of space and mass complexes to include the relating of the total form to its natural and architectural environment.

      In site planning, a primary function of architectural design, the architect aims to create harmonies with preexisting elements in the landscape and “townscape.”

      But the province of the architect is not limited to the conception of single structures in harmony with a given setting. Throughout history, architects have been employed in giving a new form to the environment itself: planning the natural surroundings by the design of parks, roadways, waterways, etc.; designing complexes of related buildings; and organizing the urban environment into areas of residence, recreation, assembly, commerce, etc., both to increase their utility and to give them unique expressive qualities through the interrelationship of groups of buildings to the open areas about them.

James S. Ackerman

      Although it would be difficult to cover in any single definition all conceptions, past and present, of what constitutes ornament in architecture, three basic and fairly distinct categories may be recognized: mimetic, or imitative, ornament, the forms of which have certain definite meanings or symbolic significance; applied ornament, intended to add beauty to a structure but extrinsic to it; and organic ornament, inherent in the building's function or materials.

Mimetic ornament
      Although it is still found in the 20th century, mimetic ornament is by far the commonest type of architectural ornament in primitive cultures, in Asian civilizations, and generally throughout antiquity. It grows out of what seems to be a universal human reaction to technological change: the tendency to reproduce in new materials and techniques shapes and qualities familiar from past usage, regardless of appropriateness. This tendency may be called the principle of mimesis. Most common building types in antiquity, both East and West (e.g., tombs, pyramids, temples, towers), began as imitations of primeval house and shrine forms. An obvious example is the dome, which developed as a permanent wooden or stone reproduction of a revered form originally built of pliable materials. In the mature stages of early civilizations, building types tended to evolve beyond primitive prototypes; their ornament, however, usually remained based on such models. Decorative motifs derived from earlier structural and symbolic forms are innumerable and universal. In developed Indian and Chinese architecture, domical and other originally structural forms occur often and lavishly as ornament. In ancient Egypt, architectural details continued to preserve faithfully the appearance of bundled papyrus shafts and similar early building forms. In ancient Mesopotamia, brick walls long imitated the effect of primitive mud-and-reed construction. In the carved-stone details of the Greco-Roman orders (e.g., capitals, entablatures, moldings), the precedent of archaic construction in wood was always clearly discernible.

      The prevalence of mimetic ornament in architecture may be explained in two ways. Some (perhaps most in primitive cultures) is religious in origin. Certain forms and shapes, through long association with religious rites, became sacred and were preserved and reproduced for their symbolic value. These forms continued to be understood even though they were often stylized into abstract or geometric patterns, unrecognizably removed from their naturalistic models. Much mimetic ornament, however, even in early times, can be ascribed simply to inertia or conservatism. People have generally tended to resist change; they find it reassuring to be surrounded by known and familiar forms. Reproducing them as ornament on newly introduced forms is a common reaction to the vague feeling of uneasiness that rapid social and technological change induces; it provides a satisfying sense of continuity between the past and the present. This resistance was a factor in the 19th- and early-20th-century practice of disguising new techniques of construction in metal and glass by an overload of ornament imitating earlier styles.

Applied ornament
      Architectural ornament in the 19th century exemplified the common tendency for mimetic ornament, in all times and places, to turn into mere applied decoration, lacking either symbolic meaning or reference to the structure on which it is placed. By the 5th century BC in Greece, the details of the orders had largely lost whatever conscious symbolic or structural significance they may have had; they became simply decorative elements extrinsic to the structure. The Doric frieze is a good case: its origin (i.e., an imitation of the effect of alternating beam ends and shuttered openings in archaic wood construction) remained evident, but it came to be treated as a decorative sheath without reference to the actual structural forms behind. In losing their mimetic character, the details of the Greek orders acquired a new function; they served to articulate or unify the building visually, organizing it into a series of coordinated visual units that could be comprehended as an integrated whole, rather than as a collection of isolated units. This concept of applied decoration was passed on through the Greco-Roman period. The triumphal arch of Rome, with its system of decorative columns and entablature articulating what is essentially one massive shape, is a particularly good illustration; the Colosseum is another. Most of the great architecture of the Renaissance and Baroque periods depends on it; to a large extent, the difference between these styles is the difference in decoration. The characteristic serenity and balance of Filippo Brunelleschi's (Brunelleschi, Filippo) architecture in the 15th century, for example, is very largely effected by his treatment of pilasters (rectangular ornamental columns with bases and capitals) and entablatures applied to them, whereas, in 16th-century wall-surface designs such as Michelangelo's Medici chapel or the dome of St. Peter's, the same elements are used in different combinations to create a quite opposite effect of tension and release.

      Judicious and intelligent use of applied ornament remained characteristic of most Western architecture until the 19th century, when the rationale of applied ornament frequently broke down, and an often indiscriminate and inappropriate use of decoration became characteristic. The reasons for this development are complex. In part it was a reaction to an overly rapid pace of social change during the period; partly, also, it was a logical outgrowth of the increasingly lavish decoration of late Baroque and Rococo architecture in the 18th century. Also, there was an overemphasis on the purely literary and associative values attached to the ornament characteristic of historical architectural styles. But compounding all these factors was the development of machinery, such as multiple lathes and jigs, which provided builders with cheap prefabricated ornament to give their often shoddy and ill-proportioned structures an illusion of elegance. Architectural ornament and architectural forms proper tended to part company and to be designed quite independently of each other.

Organic ornament
      By the early 20th century a preoccupation with the proper function of architectural ornament was characteristic of all advanced architectural thinkers; by the mid-20th century a concept of architectural ornament had been formulated that has been called organic ornament. This concept, however, is by no means peculiar to the 20th century. Its essential principle is that ornament in architecture should derive directly from and be a function of the nature of the building and the materials used. This principle is characteristic of both Christian and Islāmic religious architecture of the medieval period. In the architectural ornament of Muslim India or Persia, as in early Christian and Byzantine work, there is a strong mimetic element. The proscription of representational forms in the Qurʾān and the tendency of both Muslim and early Christian artists to borrow and adapt their formal vocabulary from preceding cultures led inevitably to their transforming what had been meaningful forms into systems of abstract ornament. But basically this ornament was neither mimetic nor applied. Throughout the Middle Ages, church buildings were conceived primarily as tangible symbols of heaven. Their architectural ornament, no matter how various or lavish, was consistently designed to promote this symbolism; whether by gilt, intricacy, or multiplicity, it all contributed to an overall effect of glory and so was integral to the architectural form.

      Twentieth-century concepts of the function of architectural ornament, generally speaking, began with an understanding of this medieval usage that grew out of the 19th-century writings of the English art critic John Ruskin (Ruskin, John) and the French Gothic Revival architect Viollet-le-Duc (Viollet-le-Duc, Eugène-Emmanuel), as well as through the interpretations and applications of the British designer William Morris (Morris, William). The immediate influence of these men proved rather unfortunate. The first result of Viollet-le-Duc's disciplined and scholarly investigations into the principles of medieval architecture was a school of slick archaeological architects, capable of decorating all manner of collegiate, civic, and domestic buildings with frigidly correct reproductions of the details of medieval cathedrals and châteaus. Out of Ruskin's demonstration of the origins of medieval decoration in natural forms there grew the so-called Art Nouveau movement toward exaggerated floral and curvilinear ornament; and out of Morris' insistence on handicrafts, inspired by infatuation with the medieval guild system, developed the Arts and Crafts movement.

      As early as the 1870s the U.S. architect H.H. Richardson (Richardson, Henry Hobson) adopted the Romanesque style, less for its historical associations than for the opportunities it afforded him to express the nature and texture of stone. In mature examples of his architecture from the mid-1880s, ornament in the older, applied sense had virtually disappeared, and his buildings depend for their aesthetic effect mainly on the inherent qualities of their materials. The generation following Richardson saw a further international development of this principle.

      In Great Britain Sir Edwin Lutyens and Charles Rennie Mackintosh, in The Netherlands Hendrick Petrus Berlage, and in the United States Louis Sullivan were among many architects who contributed to the new ornamental expression. It was largely based on intrinsic texture and pattern but with interspersed bands and patches of naturalistic ornament, applied with studied discipline. With the general reaction against 19th-century eclectic principles of ornamentation after World War I, however, leading designers rejected even this kind of applied ornament and relied for ornamental effect on building materials alone. The so-called International Style, in which the German architect Walter Gropius (Gropius, Walter) and the Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier (Corbusier, Le) were the chief figures, dominated advanced design during the late 1920s and 1930s. The barrenness that resulted from their reliance on such materials as concrete and glass, however, along with other factors, resulted in a reaction in the 1940s in favour of the neglected precedent set by the U.S. architect Frank Lloyd Wright in his early-20th-century work, which emphasized more visually interesting materials, intricate textural patterns, and natural settings as the proper basis of architectural ornament. This trend continued in later decades; the style known as the New Brutalism was related to it.

Alan Gowans

Theory of architecture
      The term theory of architecture was originally simply the accepted translation of the Latin term ratiocinatio as used by Vitruvius, a Roman architect-engineer of the 1st century AD, to differentiate intellectual from practical knowledge in architectural education; but it has come to signify the total basis for judging the merits of buildings or building projects. Such reasoned judgments are an essential part of the architectural creative process. A building can be designed only by a continuous creative, intellectual dialectic between imagination and reason in the mind of each creator.

      A variety of interpretations has been given to the term architectural theory by those who have written or spoken on the topic in the past. Before 1750 every comprehensive treatise or published lecture course on architecture could appropriately be described as a textbook on architectural theory. But, after the changes associated with the Industrial Revolution, the amount of architectural knowledge that could be acquired only by academic study increased to the point where a complete synthesis became virtually impossible in a single volume.

      The historical evolution of architectural theory is assessable mainly from manuscripts and published treatises, from critical essays and commentaries, and from the surviving buildings of every epoch. It is thus in no way a type of historical study that can reflect accurately the spirit of each age and in this respect is similar to the history of philosophy itself. Some architectural treatises were intended to publicize novel concepts rather than to state widely accepted ideals. The most idiosyncratic theories could (and often did) exert a wide and sometimes beneficial influence; but the value of these influences is not necessarily related to the extent of this acceptance.

      The analysis of surviving buildings provides guidance that requires great caution, since, apart from the impossibility of determining whether or not any particular group of buildings (intact or in ruins) constitutes a reliable sample of the era, any such analyses will usually depend on preliminary evaluations of merit and will be useless unless the extent to which the function, the structure, and the detailing envisaged by the original builders can be correctly re-established. Many erudite studies of antique theories are misleading because they rest on the assumption that the original character and appearance of fragmentary ancient Greek and Hellenistic architectural environments can be adequately deduced from verbal or graphic “reconstructions.” Even when buildings constructed before 1500 remain intact, the many textbooks dealing with antique and medieval theories of architecture seldom make qualitative distinctions and generally imply that all surviving antique and medieval buildings were good, if not absolutely perfect.

      Nevertheless, the study of the history of architectural philosophy, like that of the history of general philosophy, not only teaches what past generations thought but can help the individual decide how he himself should act and judge. For those desirous of establishing a viable theory of architecture for their own era, it is generally agreed that great stimulus can be found in studying historical evidence and in speculating on the ideals and achievements of those who created this evidence.

Distinction between the history and theory of architecture
      The distinction between the history and theory of architecture did not emerge until the mid-18th century; indeed, the establishment of two separate academic disciplines was not even nominal until 1818, when separate professorships with these titles were established at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Even then, however, the distinction was seldom scrupulously maintained by either specialist. It is impossible to discuss meaningfully the buildings of the immediate past without discussing the ideals of those who built them, just as it is impossible to discuss the ideals of bygone architects without reference to the structures they designed. Nevertheless, since any two disciplines that are inseparably complementary can at the same time be logically distinguishable, it may be asserted that this particular distinction first became manifest in Les Ruines des plus beaux monuments de la Grèce (“The Ruins of the Most Beautiful Monuments of Greece”), written in 1758 by a French architecture student, Julien-David LeRoy. Faced with the problem of discussing Athenian buildings constructed in the time of Vitruvius, he decided to discuss them twice, by treating them separately under two different headings. Before this date, “history” was of architectural importance only as a means of justifying, by reference to classical mythology, the use of certain otherwise irrational elements, such as caryatids. Even Jacques-François Blondel (Blondel, Jacques-François), who in 1750 was probably the first architectural teacher to devote a separate section of his lecture courses to “history,” envisaged the subject mainly as an account of the literary references to architecture found in antique manuscripts—an attitude already developed by the 15th-century Renaissance architect Leon Battista Alberti.

      The modern concept of architectural history was in fact simply part of a larger trend stimulated by the leading writers of the French Enlightenment, an 18th-century intellectual movement that developed from interrelated conceptions of reason, nature, and man. As a result of discussing constitutional law in terms of its evolution, every branch of knowledge (especially the natural and social sciences) was eventually seen as a historical sequence. In the philosophy of architecture, as in all other kinds of philosophy, the introduction of the historical method not only facilitated the teaching of these subjects but also militated against the elaboration of theoretical speculation. Just as those charged with the responsibility of lecturing on ethics found it very much easier to lecture on the history of ethics, rather than to discuss how a person should or should not act in specific contemporary circumstances, so those who lectured on architectural theory found it easier to recite detailed accounts of what had been done in the past, rather than to recommend practical methods of dealing with current problems.

      Moreover, the system of the Paris École des Beaux-Arts (Beaux-Arts, École des) (which provided virtually the only organized system of architectural education at the beginning of the 19th century) was radically different from that of the prerevolutionary Académie Royale d'Architecture. Quatremère de Quincy, an Italophile archaeologist who had been trained as a sculptor, united the school of architecture with that of painting and sculpture to form a single organization, so that, although architectural students were ultimately given their own professor of theory, the whole theoretical background of their studies was assimilated to the other two fine arts by lecture courses and textbooks such as Hippolyte Taine's Philosophie de l'art, Charles Blanc's Grammaire des arts du dessin, and Eugène Guillaume's Essais sur la théorie du dessin.

      Similarly, whereas before 1750 the uniformity of doctrine (the basic premises of which were ostensibly unchanged since the Renaissance) allowed the professor of architecture to discuss antique and 16th-century buildings as examples of architectural theory and to ignore medieval buildings completely, the mid-19th-century controversy between “medievalists” and “classicists” (the “Battle of the Styles”) and the ensuing faith in Eclecticism turned the studies of architectural history into courses on archaeology.

      Thus, the attitudes of those scholars who, during the 19th and early 20th centuries, wished to expound a theory of architecture that was neither a philosophy of art nor a history of architecture tended to become highly personal, if not idiosyncratic. By 1950 most theoretical writings concentrated almost exclusively on visual aspects of architecture, thereby identifying the theory of architecture with what, before 1750, would have been regarded as simply that aspect that Vitruvius called venustas (i.e., “beauty”). This approach did not necessarily invalidate the conclusions reached; but many valuable ideas then put forward as theories of architecture were only partial theories, in which it was taken for granted that theoretical concepts concerning construction and planning were dealt with in other texts.

Distinction between the theory of architecture and the theory of art
      Before embarking on any discussion as to the nature of the philosophy of architecture, it is essential to distinguish between two mutually exclusive theories that affect the whole course of any such speculation. The first theory regards the philosophy of architecture as the application of a general philosophy of art to a particular type of art. The second, on the contrary, regards the philosophy of architecture as a separate study that, though it may well have many characteristics common to the theories of other arts, is generically distinct.

      The first notion (i.e., that there exists a generic theory of art of which the theory of architecture is a specific extension) has been widely held since the mid-16th century, when the artist and writer Giorgio Vasari published in his Le vite de' più eccellenti pittori, scultori ed architettori italiani . . . (The Lives of the Most Eminent Italian Painters, Sculptors and Architects . . .) his assertion that painting, sculpture, and architecture are all of common ancestry in that all depend on the ability to draw. This idea became particularly prevalent among English-speaking theorists, since the word design is used to translate both disegno (“a drawing”) and concetto (“a mental plan”). But its main influence on Western thought was due to Italophile Frenchmen, after Louis XIV had been induced to establish in Rome a French Academy modelled on Italian art academies.

      As a result of the widespread influence of French culture in the 17th and 18th centuries, the concept of the beaux arts (Second Empire style) (literally “beautiful arts” but usually translated into English as “fine arts”) was accepted by Anglo-Saxon theorists as denoting a philosophical entity, to the point where it was generally forgotten that in France itself the architectural profession remained totally aloof from the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture until they were forced to amalgamate after the French Revolution.

      This theory of fine art might not have been so widely adopted but for the development of aesthetics, elaborated after 1750. Thus, when academies of fine art were being established successively in Denmark, Russia, and England on the model of the French Academy in Rome, German philosophers were gradually asserting (1) that it was possible to elaborate a theory of beauty without reference to function (Zweck); (2) that any theory of beauty should be applicable to all sensory perceptions, whether visual or auditory; and (3) that the notion of beauty was only one aspect of a much larger concept of life-enhancing sensory stimuli.

      The alternative theory (i.e., that a philosophy of architecture is unique and can therefore be evolved only by specific reference to the art of building) will be dealt with below with reference to the traditional triad usually cited in the formula coined, by the English theorist Sir Henry Wotton, in his book The Elements of Architecture, namely “commodity, firmness, and delight.”

      Generally speaking, writers on aesthetics have been noticeably reluctant to use architectural examples in support of speculations as to the nature of their general theories; but references to buildings have been used in most “philosophies of art” ever since the German philosophers Immanuel Kant (Kant, Immanuel) and G.W.F. Hegel first popularized the philosophical discipline. Kant, in his Kritik der Urteilskraft (1790; Eng. trans., Critique of Judgment, 1951), distinguished between what he termed free beauty (pulchritudo vaga) and dependent beauty (pulchritudo adhaerens). He classified architecture as dependent beauty, saying that in a thing that is possible only by means of design (Absicht)—a building or even an animal—the regularity consisting in symmetry must express the unity of the intuition that accompanies the concept of purpose (Zweck), and this regularity belongs to cognition. Nevertheless, he claimed that a flower should be classified as free beauty (where the judgment of taste is “pure”) “because hardly anyone but a botanist knows what sort of thing a flower ought to be; and even he, though recognizing in the flower the reproductive organ of the plant, pays no regard to this natural purpose if he is passing judgment on the flower by taste.” What Kant's reaction would have been to a modern plastic imitation flower is impossible to guess; but it will readily be perceived (1) why those who, in the 19th century, accepted the notion that beauty in architecture is pulchritudo adhaerens felt such antipathy toward “shams,” (2) how the distinction between “pure art” and “functional art” (Zweckkunst) became confused, and (3) why there arose a tendency to pursue definitions of “pure beauty” or “pure art” without specifically referring to the function and structure of any particular class of beautiful or artistic objects, such as buildings.

      This latter tendency was reinforced when the French philosopher Victor Cousin (Cousin, Victor), writing in 1835, classified the history of philosophy under three distinct headings: the true, the beautiful, and the good. The ensuing acceptance of the idea that beauty was to be studied independently of truth and goodness produced a tendency not merely to regard beauty as something added to a building (rather than conceptually inseparable from the truth and goodness of its structure and function) but to regard beauty as limited to visual and emotional qualities.

      In the first half of the 20th century, philosophers grew less dogmatic about aesthetics. But its influence on theories of architecture became stronger because of the popular view that sculpture was essentially nonrepresentational. Thus, although the assertion that “aesthetically, architecture is the creation of sculpture big enough to walk about inside” is meaningful in the 20th century, it would have seemed nonsensical to any architectural theorist living before 1900, when sculpture was invariably thought of either as representational or as a carved refinement of load-bearing wood or stone.

      The notion of functional art, most actively promoted by German writers and termed by them Zweckkunst, is most appropriately related to architectural theory under three headings, namely (1) the idea that no building is beautiful unless it properly fulfills its function, (2) the idea that if a building fulfills its function it is ipso facto beautiful, and (3) the idea that, since form relates to function, all artifacts, including buildings, are a species of industrial, or applied, art (known in German as Kunstgewerbe).

      The first proposition will be dealt with later under the heading utilitas. The second proposition, though widely popularized through the publication of the French architect Jean-Nicholas-Louis Durand's lectures delivered during the economic depression of the beginning of the 19th century, has had little influence except during similar periods of economic depression. The third proposition has, however, had a wide influence, since, unlike the second proposition, it is closely akin to (rather than antagonistic toward) the theory of aesthetics, in that it regards all the visual arts as generically related.

      This last theory seems to have been popularized, if not originated, by Gottfried Semper (Semper, Gottfried), an architect from Dresden who, after finding political asylum in England (where he then helped to organize the Great Exhibition of 1851), published a book in German on arts and crafts that seems to have been influential not only in Germany but also in areas of the United States heavily populated by German-speaking immigrants, such as Chicago. Later, in 20th-century Germany, the Bauhaus (officially Hochschule für Gestaltung; Academy for Form Giving) was ostensibly intended to train students in separate creative disciplines, but its didactic method was based on the assumption—implied by the general introductory courses—that, if one could design anything, one could design everything. In the explanatory words of its founder, the architect Walter Gropius, “The approach to any kind of design—a chair, a building, a whole town or a regional plan—should be essentially identical.”

The art of building
      The notion that architecture is the art of building was implied by Alberti (Alberti, Leon Battista) in the first published treatise on the theory of architecture, De re aedificatoria (1485; Eng. trans., Ten Books on Architecture, 1955); for, although he was a layman writing for other lay scholars, he rejected, by his title, the idea that architecture was simply applied mathematics, as had been claimed by Vitruvius. The specific denotation of architecture as “the art of building,” however, seems to be a French tradition, deriving perhaps from the medieval status of master masons, as understood by the 16th-century architect Philibert Delorme. This definition occurs in most French treatises published before 1750; and, although the humanistic and antiquarian aspects of fine building were rarely questioned after the Renaissance, the distinction between “architecture” and “building” never had any appreciable significance before Renaissance ideas succumbed to the combined assault of “aesthetics” and the Gothic Revival movement.

      Before the 18th century it was generally accepted that the theory of architecture was concerned mainly with important private or civic buildings such as palaces, mansions, churches, and monasteries. Buildings such as these required the superior skill that only book learning could provide, and so relatively little attention was given, in theoretical writings, to simple and straightforward buildings that could be competently built in accordance with local traditions by unlettered craftsmen. But, with the expansion of the architectural profession, with the perversion of the idea that social prestige was symbolized by ornamentation, with the wider distribution of wealth, and with the growing urge toward individualism in an increasingly egalitarian society, the real distinction between these two kinds of buildings was obscured, and in its place was substituted an antithesis. Henceforth, “building” was associated with the notion of cheapness, whereas “architecture” was associated with what John Ruskin would have called “sacrifice” (but which his antagonists would have called conspicuous waste). A distinction was made between the respective attitudes of “art architects” and practical-minded civil engineers. This distinction persisted because of the different methods of training candidates for the two professions. Whereas a fledgling engineering student is seldom asked to design a whole structure (such as a bridge), architectural students begin by designing whole structures and proceed with structures of increasing size and complexity, either graphically or by means of small-scale models.

      It was doubtless the difference in educational methods that prompted Le Corbusier (Corbusier, Le) to state:

The engineer, inspired by the law of economy and led by mathematical calculation, puts us in accord with the laws of the universe. He achieves harmony. The architect, by his arrangement of forms, achieves an order which is a pure creation of his spirit . . . it is then that we experience beauty.

      Yet some 80 years previously the English critic James Fergusson had felt obliged to qualify, with a comparable distinction, his enthusiasm for the new architecture of the Crystal Palace, by observing that “it has not a sufficient amount of decoration about its parts to take it entirely out of the category of first-class engineering and to make it entirely an object of fine art.” The distinction between architecture and “mere building” was stated by Nikolaus Pevsner in the opening paragraph of his Outline of European Architecture (1942): “a bicycle shed is a building; Lincoln Cathedral is a piece of architecture . . . the term architecture applies only to buildings designed with a view to aesthetic appeal.” Whatever the justification for such assertions, it must nevertheless be recognized that neither of these authors suggests that aesthetic appeal or art are synonyms for superfluity. Although adjustment in proportions or refinement of profiles may increase the thickness of short-span structural members beyond the structural analytical minima, this does not necessarily imply any radical decrease in real economy but simply indicates a concept of economy that takes into account the assembly and amenity of spatial enclosures and admits that there is value in environmental harmony. It is thus as misleading to imply (as Fergusson implied) that architecture is civil engineering plus ornament as it is to imply (as Le Corbusier did) that the status of the two professions is to be distinguished by the relative superiority of beauty over harmony.

      It is important to insist that the theory of architecture is concerned primarily with the attainment of certain environmental ideals rather than with their cost; for these two problems are philosophically distinct, as is clear if one considers such a concept as, for example, that of standardization. The financial saving made by standardizing rolled-steel sections or by casting concrete in reusable formwork is so obvious that it requires no elaboration with respect to Vitruvius' demand for oeconomia. But such standardization also fulfills Vitruvius' concurrent demand for order, arrangement, eurythmy, symmetry, and propriety.

      The Place Vendôme in Paris is adorned with over 100 identical pilasters and half columns, all carved with the same Corinthian capitals under the supervision of a member of the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture. Whether or not the resultant uniformity was or still is both pleasing and desirable is certainly open to discussion; but it will be perceived that any argument about architectural standardization must primarily be a question of value, rather than of cost, and it is with values that architectural theory has always been predominantly concerned.

“Commodity, firmness, and delight”: the ultimate synthesis
      It has been generally assumed that a complete theory of architecture is always concerned essentially in some way or another with these three interrelated terms, which, in Vitruvius' (Vitruvius) Latin text, are given as firmitas, utilitas, and venustas (i.e., structural stability, appropriate spatial accommodation, and attractive appearance). Nevertheless, a number of influential theorists after 1750 sought to make modifications to this traditional triad (1) by giving its components a radically different equilibrium (such as the primacy given by the 18th-century French architect Étienne-Louis Boullée to the effects of geometric forms in light or the claim made by J.N.L. Durand that the fulfillment of function was the sole essence of architectural beauty), (2) by adding ethical values (such as Ruskin's “sacrifice” and “obedience”), or (3) by introducing new scientific concepts (such as Giedion's “space-time”).

      Furthermore, it has been argued that the traditional concept of firmitas, utilitas, and venustas ceased to have any real value after 1800, when engineers began creating structures that seemed so ostentatiously to defy the stonemasons' laws of gravity, when scientific studies were creating more and more doubts as to the economical, sociological, psychological, acoustical, thermal, or optical determinants of appropriate spatial accommodation and when beauty was “altogether in the eye of the beholder.”

      Clearly, one must be wary of attributing too much importance to the sequence, since a slight variation occurs in the writings of even the most traditional theorists. Vitruvius gives these terms in the sequence firmitas, utilitas, venustas, whereas both Alberti and, following him, the 16th-century Venetian architect and theorist Andrea Palladio reverse the order of the first two. Thus, Sir Henry Wotton's (Wotton, Sir Henry) sequence (which is normally used in English-language texts) does not, as so often stated, derive directly from the Latin text of Vitruvius but from the Italian text of Palladio's I quattro libri dell' architettura (i.e., comodità, perpetuità, bellezza). But it does seem worth noting that venustas generally comes last, implying that firmitas and utilitas are to be regarded as essential logical prerequisites of architectural beauty.

      On the other hand, the practical advantages, in academic treatises, of giving priority to venustas are evident. Jacques-François Blondel (Blondel, Jacques-François), in his nine-volume Cours d'architecture (1771–77) used this sequence because he observed that considerations of “decoration” are almost entirely within the domain of the theory of architecture, whereas neither distribution (utilitas) nor construction (firmitas) can be explained properly without practical experience. The growing emphasis on aesthetics, combined with developments in psychology and the influence of art-historical methods, added weight to this argument, while the corresponding independence of scientific techniques of structural and spatial analysis led many teachers of architecture to consider utilitas and firmitas as totally separate academic disciplines. Important exceptions can be found to this generalization. At the end of the 19th century, Julien Guadet, in reaction against the creation of a chair of aesthetics at the Paris École des Beaux-Arts, considered it his duty, as professor of architectural theory, to devote his lectures to the study of architectural planning, and this method, which achieved prestige as a result of his keen mind and wide historical knowledge, was pursued by many later scholars. But Guadet's approach became unfashionable, and since the 1960s the predominant methods of teaching architectural theory have ranged from a return to the synthesis of structural, spatial, and formal values espoused by Robert Venturi to the exploration of the architectural implications of general theories of linguistics advanced by Christian Norberg-Schulz.

Venustas
      This Latin term for “beauty” (literally, the salient qualities possessed by the goddess Venus) clearly implied a visual quality in architecture that would arouse the emotion of love; but it is of interest to note that one of the crucial aspects of this problem was already anticipated by Alberti in the 15th century, as is made clear by his substitution of the word amoenitas (“pleasure”) for Vitruvius' more anthropomorphic term venustas. Alberti not only avoids the erotic implications of the term venustas but, by subdividing amoenitas into pulchritudo and ornamentum, gives far more precise indications as to the type of visual satisfaction that architecture should provide. Pulchritudo, he asserts, is derived from harmonious proportions that are comparable to those that exist in music and are the essence of the pleasure created by architecture. Ornamentum, he claims, is only an “auxiliary brightness,” the quality and extent of which will depend essentially on what is appropriate and seemly. Both pulchritudo and ornamentum were thus related to function and environment in that, ideally, they were governed by a sense of decorum; and, since the etymological roots of both “decoration” and “decorum” are the same, it will be understood why, before 1750, the term decoration had in both English and French a far less superficial architectural implication than it often does today.

      After the German philosopher and educator Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb) had introduced the neologism aesthetics in about 1750, the visual merits of all artifacts tended to be assessed more subjectively than objectively; and, in the criticism of all those sensory stimuli that, for want of a better term, critics somewhat indiscriminately lumped together as the fine arts, the visual criteria were extended to include not only beauty but also sublimity, picturesqueness, and even ugliness. Now it is clear that, once ugliness is equated with beauty, both terms (being contradictory) become virtually meaningless. But ugliness, after the mid-19th century, was not only one of the most important themes of many popular dramas and novels; ugliness was also often considered the most appropriate architectural expression for all sorts of virtues—especially those of manliness, sincerity, and so on.

      Before 1750, architects had expressed these qualities more subtly (e.g., by slight modifications of proportions or by unobtrusive ornament). In later years, when the value of proportion and ornament became highly controversial, architectural theorists tended to avoid committing themselves to any criteria that might be subsumed under the heading venustas. In the last resort, however, some concept of beauty must be essential to any theory of architecture; and, whether one considers Le Corbusier's buildings beautiful or not, his most stabilizing contribution toward the theory of modern architecture was undoubtedly his constant reiteration of this term and his insistence on the traditional view that beauty in architecture is essentially based on harmonious proportions, mathematically conceived.

      In the 20th century the main obstacle to an acceptance of Alberti's notions of pulchritudo and ornamentum resulted from the influence of nonrepresentational sculpture after 1918, whereby ornament was no longer conceived as an enrichment of proportioned structure but as an integral, all-pervading part of each building's totality. This ideal of the fusion between good proportions and “auxiliary brightness” was expressed by Walter Gropius (Gropius, Walter) in The New Architecture and the Bauhaus when he wrote in 1935:

Our ultimate goal, therefore, was the composite but inseparable work of art, the great building, in which the old dividing-line between monumental and decorative elements would have disappeared for ever.

      The idea was accepted in most schools of architecture by the mid-20th century; but one may question whether it fully justified the expectations of its protagonists, once it had been exemplified and proliferated in so many urban environments. It is by no means certain that Gropius' concept of the fundamental interdependence of architectural proportion and architectural ornament was irrevocably established by the Bauhaus theorists or that future architectural theorists need only concentrate on such minor modifications to the concept as may be required by sociological and technological developments.

Utilitas
      The notion that a building is defective unless the spaces provided are adequate and appropriate for their intended usage would seem obvious. Yet the statement itself has been a source of controversy since the 1960s. The main reasons for the controversy are: first, whereas there are seldom exact statistical means of computing spatial adequacy or appropriateness, there are many building types or building elements for which one cannot even establish the optimum forms and dimensions with any confidence that they will be generally accepted. Second, edifices are frequently used for purposes other than those for which they were originally planned. Furthermore, there is some doubt as to whether “form follows function” or “function follows form,” since, although, in general, it can reasonably be assumed that an architect's task is to construct specific spaces for the fulfillment of predetermined functions, there is plenty of historical evidence to suggest that many important social institutions have resulted from spaces already built. No better example could be found than the evolution of parliamentary systems. The British system, based on the concept of legislatures in which the sovereign's government and the sovereign's opposition confront each other, originated in the fact that the earliest parliaments met in the medieval palace chapel. The French system, created concurrently with the Greek and Roman revivals, was based on the concept of legislatures addressed by orators, and its environment was that of an antique theatre. In the former system the seating was designed in accordance with the liturgical requirements of a Christian church; in the latter, with the evolution of Greek drama. Neither had anything to do with preconceived notions regarding the most effective environment for parliamentary debate, yet both have had divergent influences on constitutional procedures, thereby deeply affecting the whole theory of government.

      Third, the exact significance of what is meant by “adequate appropriate spaces” becomes far more complex in buildings requiring a large number of interrelated spaces than it is in single-cell buildings. The emotional effect of transitions from spacious to constricted volumes and vice versa transcends in architectural importance the statistical evaluation of floor areas; a fact which explains the attractiveness of theories that have tacitly adopted places of worship as spatial paradigms and bolstered their arguments by historical reference to temples and churches. This bias is perceptible not only in the most influential theories enunciated before 1900 (when the prototypes were either primeval, antique, or medieval) but also in the most influential ideas promulgated by such great architectural leaders of the 20th century as Frank Lloyd Wright and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.

      The idealization of monumental single-cell spaces is sometimes justified, but the difficulty of evolving theories of planning by the use of historical prototypes should be emphasized. It is in this branch of architectural theory that the influences of historicism have been most insidious, precisely because they are less obvious here than in systems of construction, of proportions, and of ornamentation. Such influences persist mainly because of art-historical indifference to the essential distinction between building types, since such distinction conflicts with the chronological sequence of particular architects' stylistic evolution; but it is for this reason that Julien Guadet's greatest contribution to the theory of architecture may well have been his decision to evolve a history of architecture in which all buildings were classified solely in accordance with their function.

Firmitas
      Two plausible reasons can be given for according logical primacy in the Vitruvian triad to firmitas. The first is the notion that architecture is essentially the “art of building.” The second is that, since the uses or functions of a building tend to change, the structures serving such functions may be considered as taking logical precedence over them. This idea was expressed with characteristic lapidary vigour by the 20th-century French architect Auguste Perret (Perret, Auguste) when he asserted that

architecture is the art of organizing space; but it is by construction that it expresses itself. . . . Functions, customs, and building regulations and fashions impose conditions which are only transitory.

      Some later architectural theorists have become so concerned with the rapid obsolescence of modern buildings that they have envisaged edifices that express the temporary nature of these transitory qualities and are therefore built in such a way as to enable the structures themselves to be discarded completely after a few years. On the other hand (since the economic feasibility of this technique is questionable), there are still many architects who believe in the inevitability of permanent buildings and who therefore hold views more compatible with this belief.

      From the time of the Renaissance to the mid-18th century—as also before the decline of the ancient Roman Empire on which the culture of this era was modelled—little concern seems to have been given to the idea that there was any virtue in manifesting the actual structural system of a building. Alberti (Alberti, Leon Battista) recommended a distinctive articulation of the skeleton frame in conformity with the antique concept of trabeation, or the post-and-lintel system (and hence the independence of the “infilling” elements, such as arches or solid walling); but the more commonly accepted notion seems to have been that, provided a trabeated system was expressed externally, the relationship of this visual expression to the actual system of construction was relatively unimportant. Theoretical pronouncements on this matter depended of course on the architectural traditions of each country. In Italy (where the traditional technique of building had, even during the Middle Ages, assumed that structure was independent of appearance and where it was common to complete a building in brick before adding its marble facades) the idea that there could be any theoretical dilemma regarding the unison between these two elements was virtually inconceivable. Palladio (Palladio, Andrea) and his generation seem to have generally accepted the idea that, in regions where masonry was scarce, the use of stuccoed, painted, or veneered brickwork, with plastered timber beams, was architecturally as “genuine” as the use of stone, provided it was all of one colour. But in the Île-de-France region around Paris, on the contrary, the medieval traditions of French masonry construction, combined with the abundance of good freestone, caused theorists from the Renaissance to the time of the French Revolution to favour a less tenuous relationship between the external appearance of a building and the system by which it was constructed. Nevertheless, it is probably fair to say that in all European countries before the end of the 18th century, as well as in their American colonies, the only problem concerned with firmitas (other than technical problems) was the problem of the relationship between “real and apparent stability”; and, when theorists pronounced on this problem, it was usually to assert that a building should not only be structurally stable but should also appear to be so.

      A violent assault upon this point of view was launched by the Gothic (Gothic Revival) Revivalists, who in the mid-19th century contended that the breathtaking counterpoise of a cathedral's flying buttresses was far more dramatically expressive of firmitas than the ponderous massiveness of its sturdy western towers. It was in this era that the term daring (which Ruskin had frequently used with reference to the paintings of the English Romantic artist Joseph Mallord William Turner) became popular as a laudatory epithet, thereby indicating an ideal of structural expression that was to be increasingly exploited when steel and reinforced concrete permitted higher buildings with fewer and more slender supports.

      But the most controversial issue concerning firmitas in the 19th century—which also arose through the influence of the Gothic Revival movement—concerned the extent to which a building should manifest its structural system and the materials used. The attraction of this particular interpretation of the concept of truthful architecture was probably due to the popularity of new attitudes toward experimental science and to the disrepute into which mythology had been cast by the philosophers of the Enlightenment. Presumably, truth was no less prized in the 17th or 18th centuries than in the 19th century (though shams may have been less rife), while hypocrisy was regarded with as much contempt. Moreover, although the 19th century was a period of growing realism in literature, it was also a period of growing expressiveness in painting and music. Whatever the reason for this change of attitude, the 19th century saw a general acceptance of the notion that buildings were “true” only insofar as their structural form and appearance corresponded to the structural systems and materials employed, and this dogma was developed by means of many elaborate biological and mechanical analogies.

      This particular doctrine had a highly beneficial influence on architectural evolution during the 20th century, since it helped to demonstrate why the radical changes in building technology rendered earlier concepts of architectural form (based on load-bearing masonry construction) theoretically untenable. For, while it may readily be admitted that a building can express many other things besides its function and structure, failure to express the latter in some manner, however remote, must always lead to arbitrariness. This would not only be harmful to the evolution of architectural form but would inevitably result in a somewhat cynical concept of building as “pure form”—a concept that only those who regard architecture as nothing more than large-scale packaging or abstract sculpture could accept.

Peter Collins

Additional Reading

General works
John Fleming, Hugh Honour, and Nikolaus Pevsner, The Penguin Dictionary of Architecture, 4th ed. (1991), is a general reference work of architectural terminology and biography. Paul Frankl, Principles of Architectural History (1968, reissued 1973; originally published in German, 1914), contains a classic analysis of architectural form, 1400–1900. Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time, and Architecture, 5th ed. (1967, reissued 1982), offers a stimulating survey and justification of modern architecture and its antecedents. Steen Eiler Rasmussen, Experiencing Architecture, 2nd ed., trans. from Danish (1962), is a beginner's guide to architectural appreciation. Julius Schlosser, Die Kunstliteratur (1924, reprinted 1985), comprises a bibliography of theoretical writing up to 1800. Michael Raeburn (ed.), Architecture of the Western World (1980), is an excellent survey.

Use
Architectural types and planning are addressed in Jeffrey Ellis Aronin, Climate & Architecture (1953, reprinted 1973), on the influence of physical environment on planning; Sigfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command (1948, reprinted 1969), on the impact of machinery on 19th- and 20th-century building; Lewis Mumford, The Culture of Cities (1938, reissued 1981), the growth of modern cities seen from a historical and humanitarian viewpoint; Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961, reissued 1993), a pensive critique of modern patterns of urbanization and of the modernist approach to urban architecture; and Amos Rapoport, House Form and Culture (1969), an analysis of basic domestic forms in the light of cultural anthropology.

Techniques
Building methods and techniques are explained in Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (1934, reissued 1963), a general view of the cultural role of technology; Great Britain, Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, Principles of Modern Building, 3rd ed., 2 vol. (1959–61), a study of building techniques and materials; Charles G. Ramsey and Harold R. Sleeper, Ramsey/Sleeper Architectural Graphic Standards, 9th ed. edited by John Ray Hoke, Jr. (1994), the practicing designer's handbook of standards and equipment; and Mario Salvadori and Robert Heller, Structure in Architecture, 3rd ed. (1986), a clear, well-illustrated explanation of structural principles.

Expression and theory
Early works include John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849, reissued 1989), an aesthetic of architecture of the Romantic era allied to ethics; Eugéne Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, Discourses on Architecture, 2 vol. (1889–90, reissued 1959; originally published in French, 1863–72), a premodern architectural theory based on rational construction; and Vitruvius, The Ten Books on Architecture (1914, reissued 1960), the only architectural treatise to survive from antiquity—a book that exerted great influence on Renaissance and later design. Modern studies include Christopher Alexander, Notes on the Synthesis of Form (1964, reissued 1971), design calculations for the cybernetic age; and the credos of the three most influential modern architects: Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture (1927, reissued 1986; originally published in French, 1923); Walter Gropius, Scope of Total Architecture (1955, reissued 1970); and Frank Lloyd Wright, Modern Architecture (1931, reprinted 1987). The following are surveys: Peter Collins, Changing Ideals in Modern Architecture, 1750–1950 (1965, reissued 1975), a survey of architectural principles; Paul Frankl, The Gothic: Literary Sources and Interpretations Through Eight Centuries (1960), the medieval style and its survivals through the centuries; Geoffrey Scott, The Architecture of Humanism, 2nd ed., rev. (1924, reissued 1980), combining a critique of 19th-century theory with a psychologically based defense of Baroque design; John Summerson, The Classical Language of Architecture (1963, reissued 1985), on the use of the classical repertoire of motives through the ages; Rudolf Wittkower, Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism, 4th ed. (1988), discussing architectural thought in the Renaissance; and Aldo Rossi, The Architecture of the City (1982; originally published in Italian, 1966), addressing architectural and urban theory.A useful general survey of ornamental forms and designs is Joan Evans, Pattern: A Study of Ornament in Western Europe from 1180 to 1900, 2 vol. (1931, reprinted 1976). Accounts of mimetic ornament and design may be found in E. Baldwin Smith, Egyptian Architecture as Cultural Expression (1938, reissued 1968), The Dome: A Study in the History of Ideas (1950, reissued 1978), and Architectural Symbolism of Imperial Rome and the Middle Ages (1956, reprinted 1978). A theory of ornament as social function is found in Alan Gowans, “The Unchanging Arts of Beautification: Commercial Design and Decoration,” in his The Unchanging Arts (1971). Carole Rifkind, A Field Guide to American Architecture (1980), covers styles, building types, ornamentation, and elements of construction.

Theory and criticism
Leon Battista Alberti, De re aedificatoria (1485), was the first printed book on the theory of architecture; numerous English translations are available, including On the Art of Building in Ten Books (1988). Reyner Banham, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, 2nd ed. (1980), is an authoritative study of the theories of architecture developed in the second quarter of the 20th century. Peter Collins, Architectural Judgement (1971), provides a comparative study of decision making in architecture and law. Christian Norberg-Schulz, Intentions in Architecture (1963, reissued 1977), contains an influential study of architectural theory based on linguistics. Howard Robertson, The Principles of Architectural Composition (1924), is a characteristic textbook of the early decades of the 20th century. Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 2nd ed. (1977), proposes a new theory of architecture based on recent art-historical interpretations of Mannerism and Baroque architecture. Edward R. De Zurko, Origins of Functionalist Theory (1957), is a compendious historical analysis of the relationship between form and function, as conceived by philosophers and architectural theorists. David Watkin, Morality and Architecture (1977, reprinted 1984), makes a spirited attack on modernist and functionalist theories. Roger Scruton, The Aesthetics of Architecture (1979), offers a philosophical exploration of the intellectual questions raised by architecture.Roger Scruton

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