FAMOUS ARCHITECTS

Frank Lloyd Wright - recognized by the architectural community as one of the greatest architects of all time, he
has reserved his place in history. While hundreds of his designs never saw life, more than four hundred Wright
designed buildings, bridges, and monuments did reach completion. Seventeen of these designs have been recognized
by the American Institute of Architects (AIA) to be primary examples of his architectural contribution to
American culture. Of those seventeen one, Fallingwater, is frequently viewed as the greatest piece of architecture
in American history.

In a time when technology was limiting others, Wright seemed to thrive. His projects cover the breadth of North
American continent. Of interest to local Indiana natives, West Lafayette is home to one of his designs.

Today, almost forty years after his death, his design's are still being built. Though 1 out of 5 of his design's
completed while he was alive now have been demolished, there are hundred's still standing; many of which are open
to the public. Wright did not like the label genius, but his work dictates the honor.

Wright's architectural philosophy extends it's 'natural simplicity' to furniture design, fixtures, and included such
small details as lettering and font styles. His own ego however, led to such unsimple arrogance as he wrote in 1930..

"Not only do I intend to be the greatest architect who has yet

lived but, fully intend to be the greatest architect of all time."

His first designs were of Victorian descent; which to Wright seemed to relate too much to the box form. He would
soon abandon this characteristic form in favor of an open-house floor plan. This type of design was at first thought
to be to radical, because it was not like the traditions of the past. However, it was not long before his colleagues
began labeling his work revolutionary.

When Wright designed he had several goals the first of which was to "destroy the box". He wanted to get away
from the box like grid that he had used as a young designer. In accomplishing this Wright incorporated several
other geometric shapes into his design, he used circles, triangles,and hexagons. The grids he adapted were diagonal
or hexagonal in context and allowed him to create 60 and 120 degree angles. These angles are seen frequently in
his designs.

One major innovation of Wright's that he used in several of his designs was the vaulted ceiling. He used this
configuration because he believed that an attic was useless space. To make these great rooms seem larger than life
he would design the corridor leading to them to be narrow and dimly lit, creating the effect of surprise as the
viewer entered the great room. In smaller rooms Wright would raise the ceiling plane to make the room seem
larger than it actually was.

The most evident of Wright's design characteristics was his use of the natural site. He believed that the home
should fit into nature and not vice-versa. The home would fit the land it would live on and be truly natural to its
site. He designed homes which grew from the land rather than sat upon it, this technique brought the home and
the site together as one. He used horizontal lines in his designs which set the home into a sense of perpetual
motion, and replicated the horizon to connect the home to the earth. He would use natural materials in their
natural state; thus if limestone were native to an area he would build with it, if red brick were native he used it. He
used colors and textures of the surrounding environment in his designs, as the union of nature and the building was
very important to Wright.

Also evident in his designs was his belief in the open-house floor plan. He believed that the home should be open
with one space flowing into the next, not boxed or closed. To accomplish this, his designs increased the size of the
living room and added large windows to reduce the degree of enclosure. He would use corner windows to take
advantage of the sun at various time of the day. He believed the outside should come in and the inside should go
out. He designed these windows to open the home up, but more importantly, they allowed the occupants to see the
beautiful landscape. Wright took advantage of the lie of the land and the use of the natural lighting to bring about
another of his distinct aspects, the view that was created.

Wright continuously evolved, though more than four hundred designs were built, there were few that were similar.
His designs were as different as night and day because he believed the status quo to be too easy. Wright always
strived for something different, something better. The low degree of enclosure, the land, light and the view are
the most evident features in all of his modern architecture. With these he could create a setting where the home
should truly become a home; for his highest priority was to please his clients. Although he was a dedicated
American, his influence was first recognized in Europe. But when he began designing in the United States his goal
was to create an American culture with no European influences.

From the time Wright started designing until the day he died, his creations set a precedent. We can only imagine
how homes would appear today if he had not chosen the path his mother led him towards. Wright's role in the
American culture can not be limited to buildings he designed. He was an architect of more than buildings, he was an
architect of an age. With his influential work he did as much as any other person to create the future and, in doing
so, Wright broke the traditions of the past to set a standard for that future. Never satisfied with today Wright
always knew tomorrow would be better. His ego caused him to lose a little respect, but it allowed him to constantly
strive to be the absolute best.

My research into the life of Frank Lloyd Wright has allowed me to become knowledgeable of a true architectural
genius. I discovered what Wright believed architecture was supposed to be and what it was supposed to say. The
research has allowed me to visually see the terms of architecture in their structural form and not just in print. I
would like to believe that I can now take what have learned about Wright's designs and one day incorporate a few
of his ideas into my own. I have found that I share a few of Wright's beliefs, one which is his opinion on
conformity. So in closing I leave you with a quote to simmer on. As Wright wrote in his book ... A Testament ...

"Unfortunately conformity reaches far and wide into American life: to distort our democracy? This drift toward
quantity instead of quality is largely distortion. Conformity is always convenient? Quality means individuality, is
therefore difficult. But unless we go deeper now, quality at the expense of quality will be our national tragedy - the
rise of mediocrity into high places."

Wright's work over the span of his life set a precedent for what architecture was to become. His philosophy in
creating a functional facility was nothing short of brilliant, and the utility of his designs have stood the test of
time. Wright's brilliance has been universally acclaimed, and seventeen of his over four hundred designs have been
acknowledged by the American Institute of Architecture (AIA) to be recognized as Wright's personal contribution
to American culture.

SELECTED PROJECTS

1889 Wright Residence, Oak Park

1893 Winslow Residence, River Forest
1901 Willits Residence, Highland Park
1902 Dana House Springfield, IL
1904 Unity Church, Oak Park, IL
1906 Robie Residence , Chicago, IL
1911 Taliesin Spring Green, WI
1917 Hollyhock House , Los Angeles
1923 Ennis House Los Angeles, CA
1923 Millard House Pasadena, CA
1936 Fallingwater Ohiopyle, PA
1936 Admin. Building , Racine, WI
1937 Taliesin West, Scottsdale, AZ
1937 Wingspread Wind Point, WI
1944 Unitarian Church, Shorewood, WI
1954 Beth Sholom Synagogue
1956 Guggenheim Museum, New York
1956 Annunciation Church Wauwatosa
1957 Civic Center San Raphael, CA
1959 Grady Memorial Auditorium
1997 (1938) Monona Terrace Madison

Charles Edouard Jeaneret was his given name at birth in the Swiss town of la Chaux-des-Fonds on the 6th of
October 1887. An artist first, he took his eventual name in 1920 when he knew his life would be that of
architecture rather than strictly art. Though he was never schooled officially, he was influenced by many, this
first of which was Auguste Perret, whom taught him about the use of reinforced concrete. Corbu was also
influenced by Peter Behrens whom he worked with in 1910. His biggest influence though came from the traveling he
often did. He was also greatly persuaded by cubism painters and painted several works himself. It was the
Acropolis in Athens which gave him the most inspiration though. He would visit the Parthenon daily and draw
sketches of it from all angles. His mind was full of these classical over tones.

Le Corbusier, was an architect with a great imagination, which included a vision of an ideal city, a philosophy of
nature, and a strong belief for tradition. An internationally influential architect and city planner, whose designs
combined functionalism of a modern movement with a bold, sculptural expressionism. He would become one of the
rare individuals who succeeded in investing his conceptions with a universal tone.

He designed with the use of the grid, cube, quite often used simple geometric forms, the primary forms of the
square, circle, and the triangle in simple arrangements. As an artist he learned the importance to control volumes,
surface, and profile; the abstract sculptured masses he created exhibited all. With a visual scale produced through
the massive forms used his designs dominated the sites. The forms appeared often to be solid chunks of concrete
that had been carved and cut like an artist molds clay. Through articulation, sculpture of space and volumes, and
contrasting light that offered generous shadows, he succeeded.

He emphasized the function to tradition in providing examples for contemporary purposes. He once stated that the
past was his only true master. He saw and designed the building in not 2 or 3 but 4 dimensions. The later being
nature which brought about time and change. Nature was health, fresh air, and sunlight; he saw cleanliness in all.
He felt the need for a new architecture in tune with the developments of the machine age. After all he saw the
building as a "machine for living" , that is the functions of the house were examined then stripped to the bare
essentials. His goal was to reinstall in our machine society the conditions of nature which had been disrupted; sun,
space, and greenery.

In 1911 he wrote,

"I gabble elementary geometry; I am possessed with the color white, the cube, the sphere, the cylinder and the
pyramid. Prisms rise and balance each other, setting up rhythms in midday sun the cubes open out into surface, at
nightfall a rainbow seems to rise from forms in the morning they are real, casting light and shadow and sharply
outlined as a drawing. We should no longer be artist, but rather penetrate the age, fuse it until we are
indistinguishable. We too are distinguished, great and worthy of past ages. We shall even do better still, that is my
belief"

Le Corbusier’s ideas were wrote out in 1926 when he described his five points of a new architecture; which some
say he likened to the five classical orders. The points were the pilotis, roof garden, free plan, free facade, and
ribbon windows. The ideas of architecture would stick with him for the rest of his life. It was an architecture of
the time, and it was likened the machine. Le Corbusier is one of the most influential architects of our time. He was
a social reformer who was most inspired when thinking in terms of a whole city, great buildings, wide spaces, trees
and sculpture, He died of a heart attack while swimming in the sea off the Cap Martin on the 27th of August, 1965.

SELECTED PROJECTS

1912 Villa Jeanneret-Perret Switzerland

1917 Villa Schwob Switzerland
1925 Pavillion de l'Espirit Bologna
1929 Villa Savoye Poissy
1932 Pavillion Suisse Paris
1933 Refuge de l Armee du Salut Paris
1952 Unite d'habitation Marseille
1953 Aero club de Doncourt Conflans
1954 Millowners Building Abmedabad
1955 Notre Dame du Haut Ronchamp
1956 High Court Chandigarh
1958 Secretariat Chandigarh
1958 Unite d'habitation Berlin
1959 Maison Du Bresil Paris
1959 Dela Culturel
1962 Palais de l'Assemblee Chandigarh
1965 Art School Chandigarh
1967 Maison d'homme Zurich
1967 Unite d'habitation Firminy-vert
1986 Open Hand Monument Chandigarh

Maria Ludwig Michael Mies was born in 1886, in Aachen he would change his name to Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
when he established himself as an architect, van der Rohe was his mothers surname. His name is one of the few
that can be mentioned in the same breath as Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier. The three unearthed abstract
vales of the medium of architecture itself, not so much as style, but as a quality of style in general. Like Corbusier,
Mies worked with Peter Behrens from 1908-1911. He took over the Bauhaus movement, which was a German design
school, after Walter Gropius left to concentrate on his own practice and Hannes Meyer, whos role in the Bauhaus
has been minimalized, was dismissed for political reasons. The German born architect would first come to America
in 1937; where he would eventually become the dean at the Illinois Institute of Technology.

Mies’s early works were in the classical form; he saw classicism in lofty terms as a heavenly geometrical exhibition
of the spiritual world. He saw the past as a basis of principles and inspirations that could be obtained through a
modern language. His early work showcased the use of glass and the horizontal massing of forms, which became a
trademark. His approach to architecture was through the structural systems; it was this structural approach that
would bring him to the forefront of architecture. His ideas of using glass, stone, water, and steel are frequently
used in his designs. His rectilinear style was very much contingent on structure and technology. He adapted
symmetry, frontality, and axiality for his civic buildings and monuments. He adapted asymmetry, fluidity, and
interlocking volumes for his residences.

He paid great attention to the detailing of the structure. "God is in the details" , which he attributed to his
fathers teachings about craftsmanship. His work was with simple forms, the distillation from history and the order
of industrial techniques. His designs of bold, pure, simple forms offered both architectural integrity and structural
honesty. He was not so much concerned with the choice of materials that would adorn the facade, but with the
interior skeleton that the supported the mask. Like Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier he felt the need to bring
nature, man, and architecture together in a "higher unity" as he put it. He dealt with suburban villa’s, pavilions,
industrial structures, museums and monuments. While redefining the wall, openings, columns, piers, pilasters,
soffits, and the pergola.

Mies formulated a genuinely contemporary and universally applicable architecture standard. His concepts on
structure are echoed throughout the world today. Known as the father of the steel and glass structure, he
designed with the idea that "less is more". A pioneer in the skyscraper Mies’s influence is widespread. In his own
words, "I don’t want to be interesting, I want to be good", to most in the field he was both. His work in Chicago, at
the Illinois Institute of Technology, and on Lake Shore drive exemplify he genius in the architecture in an age of
science and technology. He would continue to design and live alone in a Chicago apartment until his death in 1969.

SELECTED PROJECTS

1927 Weissenhof Apartment Building

1928 Lange House Krefeld, Germany
1929 Barcelona Pavilion
1930 Tugendhat House, Brno
1933 Mies van der Rohe House Berlin
1946 Farnsworth House Plano, IL
1948 Lake Shore Drive Apartments
1952 Chapel of Saint Savior IIT
1956 Crown Hall IIT
1959 Seagram Building New York, NY
1968 Mellon Hall of Science
1968 National Gallery Berlin, Germany
 ARCHITECTURE DICTIONARY

ABATEMENT: The wastage of wood when lumber is sawed or planed to size.

ABUTMENT: A masonry mass (or the like) which receives the thrust of an arch, vault, or strut.

ADDENDUM: A supplement to bidding documents, issued prior to the submission of bids, for the purpose of
clarifying, correcting, or adding to the specifications previously issued.

ALCOVE: A small recessed space opening directly into a larger room.

AMBULATORY: A passageway around the apse of a church.

APPROVED EQUAL: Material, equipment, or method proposed by the contractor and approved by the architect for
incorporation in or use in the work as equivalent in essential attributes to the material, equipment, or method
specified in the contract document.

APSE: A semicircular or semipolygonal space usually in a church terminating an axis and intended to house an altar.

ARBOR: A light open structure of trees or shrubs closely planted either twined together or self supporting on a
light lattice.

ARCADE: A line of counter thrusting arches raised on columns or piers.

ARCHITECT: A designation reserved, usually by law, for a person or organization professionally qualified and duly
licensed to perform architectural services.

ARCHITRAVE: A horizontal beam or lintel, that rests on columns or piers; or the lowest portion of an entablature;
or a decorative molding around a door, a window, or an arch.

ARCHIVOLT: One of several parallel curved, and often decorated, moldings on the inside of an arched opening; a
curved architrave.

ASHLAR: Stone that has been cut square and dressed.

ATRIUM: In classical architecture, an interior courtyard that is open to the weather. In contemporary
architecture, a significant interior space, often sky lighted, used for circulation.

BALUSTRADE: An entire railing system including top rail and its balusters, and sometimes a bottom rail.

BALUSTER: One of a number of short vertical members often circular in section used to support a stair handrail
or a coping.

BASILICA: A Roman hall of justice, typically with a high central space lit by a clerestory and lower aisles all
around it.

BATTEN: A narrow strip of wood applied to cover a joint along edges of two parallel boards in the same plane.
BID: An offer to perform the work described in a contract at a specified cost.

BREEZEWAY: A covered passageway, open to the outdoors, connecting either two parts of a building or two
buildings.

BUILDING CODES: Regulations, ordinances or statutory requirements of a government unit relating to building
construction and occupancy, generally adopted and administered for the protection of public health, safety, and
welfare.

CAMBER: A slight convex curvature built into a truss or beam to compensate for any anticipated deflection so that
it will have no sag when under load.

CANTILEVER: A structural member which projects beyond its supporting wall or column.

CANTON: A corner of a building decorated with a projecting masonry course, a pilaster or similar feature.

CATHEDRA: The bishops throne, set at the end of the apse in early Christian churches.

CAVETTO: A hollow member or round concave molding containing at least the quadrant of a circle used in cornices.

CELLA: The sanctuary of a classical temple, containing the cult statue of the god.

CERTIFICATION: A declaration in writing that a particular product or service complies with a specification or
stated criterion.

CHANGE ORDER: An amendment to the construction contract signed by the owner, architect, and contractor that
authorizes a change in the work or an adjustment in the contract sum or the contract time or both. Construction
Budget: The sum established by the owner as available for construction of the project, including contingencies for
bidding to contractors and for changes during construction.

CLERESTORY: An upper zone of wall pierced with windows that admit light to the center of a lofty room.

CLOISTER: A covered walk surrounding a court, usually linking a church to other buildings of a monastery.

CONSTRUCTION DOCUMENTS: Drawings and specifications created by an architect that set forth in detail
requirements for the construction of the project.

CORBEL: In masonry a projection or one of a series of projections each stepped progressively farther forward
with height.

CORNICE: Any molded projection which crowns or finishes the part which it is affixed.

CRIPPLE: In a building frame, a structural element that is shorter than usual, as a stud above a door opening or
below a windowsill.

DENTIL: A band of small, square, toothlike blocks utilized in an ornamental manner.

DERRICK: A hoisting machine for heavy loads, usually has a vertical mast and a horizontal or sloping boom whose
movement is controlled by wire rope.

DESIGN/BUILD A method of project delivery in which the owner contracts directly with a single entity that is
responsible for both design and construction services for a construction project.

DESIGN DEVELOPMENT The architect prepares more detailed drawings and finalizes the design plans, showing
correct sizes and shapes for rooms. Also included is an outline of the construction specifications, listing the major
materials to be used.

DORMER: A structure projecting from a sloping roof usually housing a window or ventilating louver.

DOVETAIL: A splayed tenon, shaped like a dove's tail, broader at its end than at its base.

DRESSED: Descriptive of brick, lumber, or stone which has been prepared, shaped, or finished by cutting, planing,
rubbing, or sanding one or more surfaces.

EASEMENT: A right of accommodation in land owned by another, such as right of way or free access to light or
air.

ENTABULATURE: In classical architecture the elaborated beam member carried by the columns.

EURYTHMY: Harmony, orderliness, and elegance of proportions.

FASCIA: Any flat horizontal member or molding with little projection.

FENESTRATION: The arrangement and design of windows in a building.

FORMWORK: A temporary construction to contain web concrete in the required shape while it is cast and setting.

GIRANDOLE: A branched light holder, either standing on a base or projecting from a wall.

GROIN: The ridge, edge, or curved line formed by the intersection of the surfaces of two intersecting vaults.

GROTTO: A natural or artificial cave, often decorated with shells or stones and incorporating waterfalls or
fountains.

HAUNCH: The middle part between the crown and the springing of an arch.

HEPTASTYLE: A portico having seven columns at one or both ends.

HIERON: The sacred enclosure of a temple or shrine.

HIP: The external angle at the junction of two sloping roofs or sides of a roof.

HYPOTHYRUM: A frieze and cornice arranged and decorated in various ways for the lintel of a door.

ILLUMINANCE: The luminous flux density incident on a surface, ie the luminous flux per unit area.

JALOUSIE: A shutter or blind with fixed or adjustable slats which exclude rain and provide ventilation, shade, and
visual privacy.

KEYSTONE: In masonry the central often embellished voussoir of an arch.

LANCET: A narrow window with a sharp pointed arch typically found in Gothic architecture.
LIFE CYCLE COST ANALYSIS The architect calculates expected future operating, maintenance, and replacement
costs of desired designs and features to assist homeowners in developing a realistic design and budget estimate.

LINTEL: A horizontal structural member over an opening which carries the weight of the wall above it.

LOGGIA: An arcaded or colonnaded structure, open on one or more sides, sometimes with an upper level.

LUNETTE: A crescent shaped or semicircular area on a wall or vaulted ceiling framed by an arch or vault.

MASTERSPEC: A proprietary master specification for the construction industry developed by the AIA.

MEGALITHIC: Structure built of unusually large stones.

MEZZANINE: A low ceilinged story or extensive balcony, usually constructed above the ground floor.

MORTISE: A hole, cavity, notch, slot, or recess cut into a timber or piece of another material usually receives a
tenon.

NAVE: The middle aisle of a church.

NICHE: A recess in a wall usually to contain a sculpture or an urn.

OBELISK: A monumental, four-sided stone shaft tapering to a pyramidal tip.

ORTHOSTYLE: A colonnade in a straight line.

PAGODA: A multistoried shrine like tower, originally a Buddhist monument crowned by a stupa.

PARAPET: A low guarding wall at any point of sudden drop, as at the edge of a terrace, roof, or balcony.

PEDIMENT: In classical architecture, the triangular gable end of the roof above the horizontal cornice.

PERGOLA: A garden structure with an open wooden framed roof, often latticed, supported by regularly spaced
post or columns.

PERIPTERAL: Surrounded by a single row of columns.

PIAZZA: A public open space or square surrounded by buildings.

PROGRAMMING The architect and homeowner first discuss the goals, needs and function of the project, design
expectations and available budget, pertinent building code and zoning regulations. The architect prepares a written
statement setting forth design objectives, constraints, and criteria for a project, including special requirements
and systems, and site requirements.

PROJECT BUDGET The sum established by the owner as available for the entire project, including the
construction budget, land costs, costs of furniture, furnishings, and equipment; financing costs; compensation for
professional services; cost of owner-furnished goods and services; contingency allowance; and similar established
or estimated costs.

PROSCENIUM: In a theater, the part of stage which lies between the curtains and the orchestra.
QUADRIPARTITE: Divided by the system of construction employed, into four compartments, as a vault.

REGULATION: Any rule prescribing permitted or forbidden conduct, whether found in legislation or in the actions
of an administrative agency.

RELIEF: Carving, chasing, or embossing raised above a background plane.

RETEMPERING: The addition of water and remixing of concrete or mortar which as started to stiffen.

SCALLOP: One of a continuous series of curves resembling segments of a circle used as a decorative element.

SCHEMATIC DESIGN The architect consults with the owner to determine the requirements of the project and
prepares schematic studies consisting of drawings and other documents illustrating the scale and relationships of
the project components for approval by the owner. The architect also submits to the owner preliminary estimate of
construction cost based on current area, volume, or other unit costs.

SCUPPER: An opening in a wall or parapet that allows water to drain from a roof.

SERVICE CONNECTION: An electrical connector that attaches the utility company's conductors to the
customer's wiring.

SERVICE DROP: The portion of service conductors between the last pole of the utility supply and the junction
with service entrance conductors of the building supplied.

SPECIFICATIONS A part of the construction documents contained in the project manual consisting of written
requirements for materials, equipment, construction systems, standards and workmanship.

SQUARE FOOTAGE Can be calculated as both gross and net square footage. No uniform standard for computing
residential square footage yet exists. Architects, builders and realtors each measure square footage differently.
Square footage is not always an indication of the livable space available in a structure. Buyers are encouraged to
ask for an explanation of which spaces were included in the square footage calculation.

STUCCO: An exterior finish, usually textured composed of portland cement, lime, and sand, which are mixed with
water.

TABERNACLE: A decorative niche often topped with a canopy and housing a statue.

TENON: The projecting end of a piece of wood, or other material, which is reduced in cross section, so that it may
be inserted into a corresponding cavity, a mortise, to form a secure joint.

TORCHERE: An indirect floor lamp which sends all or nearly all of its light upward.

TRACERY: The curvilinear openwork shapes of stone or wood creating a pattern within the upper part of a Gothic
window.

TRAVERTINE: A variety of limestone deposited by springs, usually banded.

TRELLIS: An open grating or latticework, of either metal or wood.

TRIFORIUM: In medieval church architecture, a shallow passage above the arches of the nave and choir and below
the clerestory.

UNDERLAYMENT: A material such as plywood placed on a subfloor to provide a smooth even surface for applying
the finish.

VISTA: A usually unobstructed view into the distance.

VOMITORY: An entrance or opening usually one of a series which pierce a bank of seats in a stadium.

VOUSSOIR: A wedge shaped masonry unit in an arch or vault whose converging sides are cut as radii of one of the
centers of the arch or vault.

WAINSCOT: A decorative or protective facing applied to the lower portion of an interior partition or wall.

WEEP HOLE: A small opening in a wall or window member, through which accumulated condensation or water may
drain to the buildings exterior.

XYST: In classical architecture, a roofed colonnade, opened to at least one side for exercising in bad weather.

YOKE: The horizontal piece forming the head of a window or door frame.

ZONING: The control by a municipality of the use of land and buildings.

 ARCHITECTURAL STYLES

NEOLITHIC ARCHITECTURE

Neolithic Period also called Nnew Stone Age, the final stage of cultural evolution or technological development
among prehistoric humans. It was characterized by stone tools shaped by polishing or grinding, dependence on
domesticated plants or animals, settlement in permanent villages, and the appearance of such crafts as pottery and
weaving. The Neolithic followed the Paleolithic Period, or age of chipped-stone tools, and preceded the Bronze Age,
or early period of metal tools.

The Neolithic stage of development was attained during the Holocene Epoch (the last 10,000 years of Earth
history). During this time, humans learned to raise crops and keep domestic livestock, and were thus no longer
dependent on hunting, fishing, and gathering wild plants. Neolithic cultures made more useful stone tools by
grinding and polishing relatively hard rocks, rather than merely chipping softer ones down to the desired shape.
The cultivation of cereal grains enabled Neolithic peoples to build permanent dwellings and congregate in villages,
and the release from nomadism and a hunting-gathering economy gave them the time to pursue specialized crafts.

Archaeological evidence indicates that the transition from food-collecting cultures to food-producing ones
gradually occurred across Asia and Europe from a starting point in the Fertile Crescent. Cultivation and animal
domestication first appeared in southwestern Asia by about 9000 BC, and a way of life based on farming and
settled villages had been firmly achieved by 7000 BC in the Tigris and Euphrates river valleys (now in Iraq and
Iran) and in what are now Syria, Israel, Lebanon, and Jordan. These earliest farmers raised barley and wheat and
kept sheep and goats, later supplemented by cattle and pigs. Their innovations spread from the Middle East
northward into Europe by two routes: across Turkey and Greece into central Europe, and across Egypt and North
Africa and thence to Spain. Farming communities appeared in Greece as early as 7000 BC,and farming spread
northward throughout the continent over the next four millennia. This long and gradual transition was not
completed in Britain and Scandinavia until after 3000 BC and is known as the Mesolithic Period.

Neolithic technologies also spread eastward to the Indus River valley of India by 5000 BC. Farming communities
based on millet and rice appeared in the Huang Ho (Yellow River) valley of China and in Southeast Asia by about
3500 Bc. Neolithic modes of life were achieved independently in the New World. Corn (maize), beans, and squash
were gradually domesticated in Mexico and Central America from 6500 BC on, though sedentary village life did not
commence there until much later, at about 2000 BC. In the Old World the Neolithic Period was succeeded by the
Bronze Age when human societies learned to combine copper and tin to make bronze, which replaced stone for use
as tools and weapons.

Egyptian Architecture

The two principal building materials used in ancient Egypt were unbaked mud brick and stone. From the Old
Kingdom onward stone was generally used for tombs--the eternal dwellings of the dead--and for temples--the
eternal houses of the gods. Mud brick remained the domestic material, used even for royal palaces; it was also used
for fortresses, the great walls of temple precincts and towns, and for subsidiary buildings in temple complexes.

Most ancient Egyptian towns have been lost because they were situated in the cultivated and flooded area of the
Nile Valley; many temples and tombs have survived because they were built on ground unaffected by the Nile flood.
Any survey of Egyptian architecture will in consequence be weighted in favor of funerary and religious buildings.
Yet the dry, hot climate of Egypt has allowed some mud brick structures to survive where they have escaped the
destructive effects of water or man.

Mortuary architecture in Egypt was highly developed and often grandiose. The tomb was not simply a place in which
a corpse might be protected from desecration. It was the home of the deceased, provided with material objects to
ensure continued existence after death. Part of the tomb might reproduce symbolically the earthly dwelling of the
dead person; it might be decorated with scenes that would enable the individual to pursue magically an afterlife
suitable and similar to his worldly existence. For a king the expectations were quite different; for him the tomb
became the vehicle whereby he might achieve his exclusive destiny with the gods in a celestial afterlife.

Most tombs comprised two principal parts, the burial chamber (the tomb proper) and the chapel, in which offerings
for the deceased could be made. In royal burials the chapel rapidly developed into a temple, which in later times
was usually built separately and at some distance from the tomb. In the following discussion, funerary temples built
separately will be discussed with temples in general and not as part of the funerary complex.

GREEK ARCHITECTURE

Throughout the history of Greek art, the architect's main role was to design cult buildings, and until the Classical
period it was virtually his only concern. The focus of worship in Greek religion was the altar, which for a long time
was a simple block and only much later evolved into a monumental form. It stood in the open air, and, if there was a
temple, generally the altar was positioned to the east of it. The temple wasbasically a house (oikos) for the deity,
who was represented there by his cult statue. Temple plans, then, were house plans--one-room buildings with
columnar porches. To distinguish the divine house from a mortal one, the early temple was given an elongated plan,
with the cult statue placed at the back, viewed distantly beyond a row of central pillar supports. The exterior came
to be embellished by a peristyle, an outer colonnade of posts supporting extended eaves. This colonnade provided a
covered ambulatory (roofed walkway), and it was also a device to distinguish the building from purely secular
architecture. This plan can be seen in buildings on Samos and at Thermum in central Greece. The construction
remained simple: well-laid rubble and mud brick, with timbering and a thatched or flat clay roof. By about 700 BC,
fired-clay roof tiles made possible a lower pitched roof, and by the mid-7th century, fired- and painted-clay
facings were being made to decorate and protect the vulnerable wooden upperworks of buildings. As yet, nothing
had been constructed in finished stone.

From about 650 on, the Greeks began to visit Egypt regularly, and their observation of the monumental stone
buildings there was the genesis of the ultimate development of monumental architecture and sculpture in Greece.
The first step in architecture was simply the replacement of wooden pillars with stone ones and the translation of
the carpentry and brick structural forms into stone equivalents. This provided an opportunity for the expression of
proportion and pattern, an expression that eventually took the form of the invention or evolution of the stone
"orders" of architecture. These orders, or arrangements of specific types of columns supporting an upper section
called an entablature, defined the pattern of the columnar facades and upperworks that formed the basic
decorative shell of the Greek temple building.

The Doric order was invented in the second half of the 7th century, perhaps in Corinth. Its parts--the simple,
baseless columns, the spreading capitals, and the triglyph-metope (alternating vertically ridged and plain blocks)
frieze above the columns--constitute an aesthetic development in stone incorporating variants on themes used
functionally in earlier wood and brick construction. Doric long remained the favourite order of the Greek mainland
and western colonies, and it changed little throughout its history. Early examples, such as the temple at Thermum,
were not wholly of stone but still used much timber and fired clay.

The Ionic order evolved later, in eastern Greece. About 600 BC, at Smyrna, the first intimation of the style
appeared in stone columns with capitals elaborately carved in floral hoops--an Orientalizing pattern familiar mainly
on smaller objects and furniture and enlarged for architecture. This pattern was to be the determining factor in
the full development of the Ionic order in the 6th century.
By far the most impressive examples of Greek architecture of the high Classical period were the buildings
constructed under Pericles for the Athenian Acropolis. The Acropolis architecture, which is in several ways a clear
display of civic pride, also exhibits considerable subtlety of design in the use of the Doric and Ionic orders. The
ensemble of the major buildings--the Parthenon, a temple to Athena; the Erechtheum, a temple housing several
cults; and the monumental gateway to the Acropolis, the Propylaea--shows the orders used in deliberate contrast:
the Erechtheum provides a decorative Ionic counterpart to the severe Doric of the Parthenon, which itself has an
Ionic frieze; and in the Propylaea, columns of both orders complement each other.

The Parthenon, designed by the architect Ictinus, is a broader, more stately building than most Doric temples, with
an eight-column facade instead of the usual six. With the four-square Doric style there had always been the
possibility of giving an impression of dull immobility, a danger that in the Archaic period was partially avoided
through the use of bulging columns and capitals. In the Classical period--and best observed in the Parthenon--a
subtle deviation from strict linearity accomplishes the same correction. The Parthenon was the display place for a
great statue of Athena by the sculptor Phidias, a statue that honoured the city goddess but not the oldest cult of
Athena, which was housed in the Erechtheum. The obvious implications of civic pride are enhanced by the
unparalleled portrayal of a contemporary event on the frieze of the building: the procession of citizens in the
yearly festival in honour of Athena. The Erechtheum was a more complicated building than the Parthenon; built on
an awkward site, it also had to serve different cults, which meant that its architect had to design a building with
three porches and three different floor levels. Its Caryatid porch, with figures of women for columns, makes use
of an old Oriental motif that had appeared earlier, in Archaic treasuries at Delphi. The Propylaea was designed by
Mnesicles, who had to adapt the rigid conventions of colonnade construction to a steeply rising site. In the
precision and finish of their execution, which complements the brilliant innovation of their design, these three
buildings had no rival in the Greek world.

ROMAN ARCHITECTURE

The art and architecture of Rome and its empire, which at its apogee extended from the British Isles to the
Caspian Sea. The earliest Roman art is generally associated with the overthrow of the Etruscan kings and the
establishment of the Republic in 509 bc. The point at which the age of Roman art ended and the era of Early
Christian, leading to medieval, art began is usually taken, somewhat arbitrarily, to have occurred with the
conversion of the emperor Constantine to Christianity and the transfer of the capital of the empire from Rome to
Constantinople in ad 330. Roman styles and even pagan Roman subjects continued, however, for centuries, often in
Christian guise.

. Roman art is traditionally divided into two main periods, that of the Roman Republic and that of the Roman Empire
(from 27 bc on), with subdivisions corresponding to the major emperors or to imperial dynasties. When the
Republic was founded, the term “Roman art” was virtually synonymous with the art of the city of Rome, which still
bore the stamp of its Etruscan past. Gradually, as the Roman Empire expanded throughout Italy and the
Mediterranean and as the Romans came into contact with other artistic traditions, notably that of Greece, Roman
art shook off its dependence on Etruscan art; during the last two centuries before the birth of Christ, a
distinctive Roman manner of building, painting, and sculpture emerged. Nevertheless, because of the
extraordinarily wide geographical extent of the Roman Empire and the number of culturally diverse peoples
encompassed within its boundaries, the art and architecture of the Romans was always eclectic; it is also
characterized by a variety of styles resulting from the influence of diverse regional tastes and the differing
preferences of a wide range of patrons.

Roman art is not just the art of the emperors, senators, and aristocracy, but of all the peoples of Rome's vast
empire, including middle-class businessmen, freedmen, slaves, and soldiers in Italy and the provinces. Curiously,
although examples of Roman architecture, sculpture, painting, and decorative arts survive in great numbers, few
Roman artists and architects are known by name today. In general, Roman monuments were designed to serve the
needs of their patrons rather than to express the artistic personality of their makers.

A clear picture of Roman architecture can be drawn from the impressive remains of ancient Roman public and
private buildings and from contemporaneous writings, such as De Architectura (trans. 1914), the ten-volume
architectural treatise compiled by Vitruvius towards the close of the 1st century bc.

The typical Roman city of the later Republic and empire had a rectangular plan and resembled a Roman military
camp: it had two main streets—the cardo on a north-south axis and the decumanus on an east-west axis—and a grid
of smaller streets dividing the town into blocks, and was surrounded by a wall with gates. Older cities, such as
Rome itself, founded before the adoption of regularized town planning, could, however, consist of a maze of
crooked streets. The focal point of the city was its forum, usually situated in the centre of the city at the
intersection of the cardo and the decumanus. The forum, an open area bordered by colonnades with shops,
functioned as the chief meeting place of the town. It was also the site of the city's primary religious and civic
buildings, among them the Senate house, records office, and basilica. The basilica was a roofed hall with a wide
central area—the nave—flanked by side aisles, and it often had two or more storeys. In Roman times business
transactions and legal proceedings took place in the basilica, but the building type was adapted in Christian times as
the standard form of Western Church, with an apse and altar at the end of the long nave. The first basilicas were
erected in the early 2nd century bc in Rome's own Forum, but the earliest well-preserved example of a basilica (c.
120 bc) is found at Pompeii.

The chief temple of a Roman city, the capitolium, was generally located at one end of the forum. The standard
Roman temple was a blend of Etruscan and Greek elements; rectangular in plan, it had a gabled roof, a deep porch
with free-standing columns, and a frontal staircase giving access to its high plinth, or platform. The traditional
Greek orders of architecture (Doric, Ionic, Corinthian) were usually retained, but the Romans also developed a new
type of capital called the composite capital, a mixture of Ionic and Corinthian elements. An excellent example of
the classic Roman temple is the Maison Carrée (c. ad 4) in Nîmes, France. Such temples were erected not only in
the forum, but throughout the Roman city and in the countryside as well. Many other types are known; one of the
most influential in later times was the type used for the Pantheon (ad 118-128) in Rome, consisting of a standard
gable-roofed columnar porch with a domed rotunda behind it replacing the traditional rectangular main room, or
cella. Simpler temples based on Greek prototypes, with round cellae and an encircling colonnade, such as that built
about 75 bc at Tivoli, near Rome, were also popular.

ROMAN ARCHITECTURE

Various secular buildings and shops were dispersed throughout the Roman city. The shops were usually one-room
units (tabernae) opening on to pavements; many, including bakeries where flour was also milled, can still be seen at
Pompeii and elsewhere. Sometimes an entire unified complex of shops was constructed; the markets built in the
reign (ad 98-117) of Trajan still to be seen on the Quirinal Hill in Rome, for example, incorporated scores of
tabernae on several levels and a large vaulted two-storey hall.

Roman theatres first appeared in the late Republic. They were semicircular in plan and consisted of a tall stage
building (the proscenium) abutting a semicircular space for dancers and chorus (the orchestra) and tiered seating
area (the cavea). Unlike Greek theatres, which were built into natural hillsides, Roman theatres were supported by
their own framework of piers and vaults and thus could be constructed in the heart of the city. Theatres were
popular in all parts of the empire; impressive examples may be found at Orange (early 1st century ad), in France,
and Sabratha (late 2nd century ad), in Libya. Amphitheatres (literally, double theatres) were elliptical in plan with a
central arena, where gladiatorial and animal combats took place, and a surrounding seating area built on the pattern
of Roman theatres. The earliest known amphitheatre (75 bc) is at Pompeii, and the grandest, the Colosseum (ad 70-
80) in Rome, held approximately 50,000 spectators, roughly the capacity of today's large sports stadiums.
Racecourses, or circuses, were also built in many cities; Rome's circus-shaped Piazza Navona occupies the site of
one that was built during the reign (ad 81-96) of Domitian.
Large cities and small towns alike also had public baths (thermae); under the Republic they were generally made up
of a suite of dressing rooms and bathing chambers with hot-, warm-, and cold-water baths (caldaria, tepidaria, and
frigidaria) alongside an exercise area, the palaestra. The baths (75 bc) near the forum in Pompeii are an excellent
example of the early type. Under the empire these comparatively modest structures became progressively grander;
such late examples as the Baths of Caracalla (about ad 217) in Rome also incorporated libraries, lecture halls, and
vast vaulted public spaces elaborately decorated with statues, mosaics, paintings, and stucco.

Among the other great public building projects undertaken by the Romans, the most noteworthy are the network of
roads and the bridges that facilitated travel throughout the empire, and the aqueducts such as the Pont du Gard
(19 bc), near Nîmes, France, that brought water to the towns from mountain sources.

Quarried stone, used in conjunction with timber beams and terracotta tiles and plaques, was the essential Roman
building material from Republican times on. The stone chosen ranged from central Italian tufa and travertine to
gleaming white marble shipped from Greece and Asia Minor—or, from the time of Caesar on, from Luna (modern
Luni, near Carrara) in Italy—and multicoloured marbles imported from quarries all over the ancient world. Thin
revetment plaques of fine marble were often used to sheathe walls constructed of cheaper stone blocks or rubble.

Marble lent splendour to Roman buildings, as it had done to those of the Greeks, but it was concrete, a material
perfected by the Romans, that revolutionized the history of architecture and enabled them to erect buildings that
had been impossible to construct using the traditional stone post-and-lintel system of earlier architecture. Roman
concrete was an amalgam of hydrated lime and pozzolana, a volcanic sand, mixed with aggregate. It allowed Roman
architects to make use of the arch and vault on a much larger scale than had previously been possible, and to
liberate architectural design from the rectilinear framework of Classical architecture.

Concrete vaulting made possible the construction of the great amphitheatres and baths of the Roman world, as well
as the dome of the Pantheon and such spectacular hillside temples as that of the Sanctuary of Fortuna Primigenia
(late 2nd century bc) at Palestrina. Because concrete walls and ceilings consisted of sections cast in moulds,
architects were encouraged to experiment with irregular configurations that lent visual excitement to the interior
of buildings. Although Roman concrete could be faced with a variety of materials, the most popular during the
empire was brick. Indeed, during the first two centuries ad, brick first came to be appreciated as a facing for
buildings in its own right; brick-faced concrete quickly became the favoured material for large buildings such as
residential blocks, baths, and horreae, or warehouses (for example, the horrea of Epagathius, ad 145-150, at
Ostia).

Chief among these buildings are the triumphal arches, commemorative monuments that were erected in all parts of
the empire. The original purpose of triumphal arches was solely to support honorific statuary, although almost none
of the great statuary groups (often chariot groups) that once crowned them has survived. The arches themselves
were originally very plain. Under Augustus and succeeding emperors, however, they became more and more
elaborate, and were eventually covered with extensive series of relief panels advertising the victories and good
deeds of the emperors in whose name they were erected. The reliefs often recounted specific historical events,
but frequently allegorical scenes were also depicted; an emperor might appear in the company of the gods or accept
the submission of conquered peoples personified by kneeling figures.

Among the most important preserved arches in the capital are those of Titus (c. ad 81), in the Roman Forum, and of
Constantine (ad 315), near the Colosseum. In two panels on the Arch of Titus the triumphal procession of the
emperor is represented, complete with the spoils from the sack of the great temple in Jerusalem. The Arch of
Constantine presents a mixture of reliefs reused from earlier monuments and new reliefs made specifically for the
arch. The panels and friezes depict a host of subjects, including scenes of battle, sacrifice, and the distribution of
largesse. In the reused reliefs the head of Constantine was substituted for those of his predecessors. Such reuse
and refashioning of older reliefs was not uncommon in imperial Rome. The monuments of dead emperors who had
suffered official condemnation (damnatio memoriae) by the Senate were either altered or destroyed.

Richly decorated arches are also found outside Rome. At Benevento, in southern Italy, a grand arch with 14 panels
honouring Trajan was put up about ad 114. At Orange, in France, the Arch of Tiberius (ad 25) is covered with
representations of military trophies and bound captives, scenes of Romans fighting Gauls, and panels of captured
arms and armour.

GOTHIC ARCHITECTURE

Throughout this period, the central corridor of Europe running northwest from Lombardy to England, between
Cologne and Paris, retains an exceptional importance. Much of the significant art--especially architecture--was
produced within this geographic area, because it appears to have been an extraordinarily wealthy area, with enough
funds to attract good artists and to pay for expensive materials and buildings. Paris--for much of this period the
home of a powerful and artistically enlightened court--played an especially important role in the history of Gothic
art. The Gothic style is divided into three distinctive categories, early, high, and late Gothic.

Early Gothic

At the technical level Gothic architecture is characterized by the ribbed vault (a vault in which stone ribs carry
the vaulted surface), the pointed arch, and the flying buttress (normally a half arch carrying the thrust of a roof
or vault across an aisle to an outer pier or buttress). These features were all present in a number of earlier,
Romanesque buildings, and one of the major 12th- and early 13th-century achievements was to use this engineering
expertise to create major buildings that became, in succession, broader and taller. How their visual appearance
changed is easy to see if one compares, for instance, the early 13th-century Reims cathedral, in France, with the
late 11th-century Durham cathedral, in England. A broad comparison of this sort also brings out the artistic ends to
which the new engineering means were applied. Skilled use of the pointed arch and the ribbed vault made it
possible to cover far more elaborate and complicated ground plans than hitherto. Skilled use of buttressing,
especially of flying buttresses, made it possible both to build taller buildings and to open up the intervening wall
spaces to create larger windows. In the 12th century larger windows produced novel lighting effects, not lighter
churches. The stained glass of the period was heavily coloured and remained so--for example, at Chartres
cathedral--well into the 13th century.

One of the earliest buildings in which these techniques were introduced in a highly sophisticated architectural plan
was the abbey of Saint-Denis, Paris. The east end was rebuilt about 1135-44, and, although the upper parts of the
choir and apse were later changed, the ambulatory and chapels belong to this phase. The proportions are not large,
but the skill and precision with which the vaulting is managed and the subjective effect of the undulating chain
windows around the perimeter have given the abbey its traditional claim to the title "first Gothic building." The
driving figure was Suger, the abbot of Saint-Denis, who wrote two accounts of his abbey that are infused with his
personal aesthetic of light as a reflection of the infinite light of God. Something similar to what he intended at
Saint-Denis was attempted soon after at Notre-Dame, Paris, begun in 1163 (the east end was subsequently altered;
see photograph), and Laon cathedral, begun about 1165 (the east end was rebuilt in the early 13th century).
Perhaps because of liturgical inconvenience, it later became more common to keep firm the architectural divisions
between the peripheral eastern chapels, as at Reims (rebuilt after a fire destroyed the original cathedral in 1210)
and Amiens (begun 1220) cathedrals, for example. This particular feature of Saint-Denis did not, therefore, have a
very long subsequent history.

It is not known what the original 12th-century interior elevation of Saint-Denis was like. Elsewhere, though, the
problems that followed in the wake of the increasing ability to build gigantic buildings are easily seen. Possibly the
most important one concerns the disposition of the main interior elevation. The chief elements are the arcade, the
tribune (upper gallery set over the aisle and normally opening into the church) or triforium galleries (arcaded wall
passages set above the main arcade) or both, and the clerestory. These may be given equivalent treatment, or one
may be stressed at the expense of the others. Precedents for almost every conceivable combination existed in
Romanesque architecture. In a building such as Sens cathedral (begun c. 1140), the arcade is given prominence, but
in Noyon (begun c. 1150) and Laon cathedrals the four elements mentioned above are all used, with the result that
the arcade is comparatively small. Subsequently, the arcade came back into prominence with Bourges cathedral
(begun c. 1195). But one of the most influential buildings was Chartres cathedral (present church mainly built after
1194). There, the architect abandoned entirely the use of the tribune gallery, but, instead of increasing the size of
the arcade, he managed, by a highly individual type of flying buttress, to increase the size of the clerestory. This
idea was followed in a number of important buildings, such as the 13th-century Reims and Amiens cathedrals. The
conception that the content of a great church should be dominated by large areas of glazing set in the upper parts
was influential in the 13th century.

The decorative features of these great churches were, on the whole, simple. In the second half of the 12th
century it became fashionable, as at Laon cathedral, to "bind" the interior elevation together by series of
colonettes, or small columns, set vertically in clusters. Again, as at Laon, much of the elaborate figured carving of
Romanesque buildings was abandoned in favour of a highly simplified version of the classical Corinthian capital--
usually called a "crocket" capital. Under the influence of Chartres cathedral, window tracery (decorative ribwork
subdividing the window opening) was gradually evolved.

There is one group of churches, built for houses of the Cistercian order, that requires separate consideration.
They tend to be similar, but it is often a similarity of general simplicity as much as of architectural detail. The
Cistercian order was bound to ideas of austerity laid down by St. Bernard of Clairvaux. During his lifetime these
ideals were maintained largely through the degree of centralized control exercised from the head house at Cîteaux
(Burgundy). Thus, many of the Cistercian churches built in England, Italy, or Germany seem to have had
characteristics in common with French Cistercian churches. A good French example survives at Fontenay (begun
1139). These buildings probably encouraged the early dissemination of the pointed arch. That they did much more
than this is doubtful.

If one examines the architecture outside north and northeastern France, one finds, first, that buildings in what
might be called a Romanesque style continued up to the end of the 12th and into the 13th century and, second, that
the appreciation of the developments in France was often partial and haphazard. In England the most influential
building in the new fashion was the choir of Canterbury cathedral (1175-84), which has many of the features of
Laon cathedral. It is the decorative effects of Laon that are used rather than its overall architectural plan,
however. There is only a rather depressed tribune gallery, and the building retains a passage at clerestory level--an
Anglo-Norman feature that remained standard in English architecture well into the 13th century. Both in the shape
of the piers and in the multiplicity of attached colonettes, Canterbury resembles Laon. Colonettes became
extremely popular with English architects, particularly because of the large supplies of purbeck marble, which gave
any elevation a special coloristic character. This is obvious at Salisbury cathedral (begun 1220), but one of the
richest examples of the effect is in the nave of Lincoln cathedral (begun c. 1225).

The early stages of architectural development in the Gothic period are untidy and have a strong regional flavour.
During this period in Germany, large buildings showing northern French characteristics are few. The Church of Our
Lady at Trier (begun c.1235) and the Church of St. Elizabeth at Marburg (begun 1235) both have features, such as
window tracery, dependent on northern French example; but the church at Trier is highly unusual in its centralized
plan, and St. Elizabeth is a "hall church" (that is, the nave is virtually the same height as the aisles), which places it
outside the canon of contemporary French building.

In Spain the two most important early Gothic buildings were Burgos (begun 1222) and Toledo (begun 1221)
cathedrals. Their architects probably knew Reims and Amiens; but their models were undoubtedly Bourges and Le
Mans (begun 1217), since the main internal architectural feature is a giant arcade rather than an extended
clerestory. By contrast, Scandinavian architects seem to have been influenced, to begin with, by English buildings.
Certainly there is a strong English flavour in the 13th-century Trondheim cathedral (Norway).
High Gothic

During the period from about 1250 to 1300 European art wasdominated for the first time by the art and
architecture of France. The reasons for this are not clear, although it seems certain that they are connected with
the influence of the court of King Louis IX (1226-70).

By about 1220-30 it must have been clear that engineering expertise had pushed building sizes to limits beyond
which it was unsafe to go. The last of these gigantic buildings, Beauvais cathedral, had a disastrous history, which
included the collapse of its vaults, and it was never completed. In about 1230 architects became less interested in
size and more interested in decoration. The result was the birth of what is known as the Rayonnant style (from the
radiating character of the rose windows, which were one of its most prominent features). The earliest moves in
this direction were at Amiens cathedral, where the choir triforium and clerestory were begun after 1236, and at
Saint-Denis, where transepts and nave were begun after 1231. Architects opened up as much of the wall surface as
possible, producing areas of glazing that ran from the top of the main arcade to the apex of the vault. The
combination of the triforium gallery and clerestory into one large glazed area had, of course, a unifying effect on
the elevations. It produced an intricate play of tracery patterns and instantly unleashed an era of intense
experiment into the form that these patterns should take. Many of the achievements of the Rayonnant architects
are extremely fine--for instance, the two transept facades, begun during the 1250s, of Notre-Dame, Paris. The
decorative effect of this architecture depends not only on the tracery of the windows but also on the spread of
tracery patterns over areas of stonework and on architectural features such as gables.

In the history of this development, one building deserves special mention, the Sainte-Chapelle, Paris (consecrated
1248). This was Louis IX's palace chapel, built to house an imposing collection of relics. It is a Rayonnant building in
that it has enormous areas of glazing. Its form was extremely influential, and there were a number of subsequent
"saintes-chapelles"--for instance, at Aachen and Riom--that were clearly modeled on the Parisian one. The interior
of the Parisian Sainte-Chapelle is extraordinarily sumptuous. Although the sumptuosity itself set new standards,
its characteristics belonged, curiously, to a past age. The glass is heavily coloured, the masonry heavily painted, and
there is much carved detail. One of the characteristics of the second half of the 13th century is that glass
became lighter, painting decreased, and the amount of carved decoration dwindled. Thus, in its chronological
context, the Sainte-Chapelle is a Janus-like building--Rayonnant in its architecture but, in some ways, old-
fashioned in its decoration.

Of the many smaller Rayonnant monuments that exist in France, one of the most complete is Saint-Urbain, Troyes
(founded 1262). There, one can see the virtuosity practiced by the architects in playing with layers of tracery,
setting off one "skin" of tracery against another.

In a sense, the Rayonnant style was technically a simple one. Depending, as it did, not primarily on engineering
expertise or on sensitivity in the handling of architectural volumes and masses but on the manipulation of
geometric shapes normally in two dimensions, the main prerequisites were a drawing board and an office.

Most countries produced versions of the Rayonnant style. In the Rhineland the Germans began one of the largest
Rayonnant buildings, Cologne cathedral, which was not completed until the late 19th century. The German masons
carried the application of tracery patterns much further than did the French. One of the most complicated essays
is the west front of Strasbourg cathedral (planned originally in 1277 but subsequently altered and modified). One
feature of Strasbourg and of German Rayonnant architecture in general was the application of tracery to spires--
at Freiburg im Breisgau (spire begun c. 1330), for example, and the spire of Strasbourg that was begun about 1399.
Few such medieval spires survive (though often they were completed in the 19th century).

Of all the European buildings of this period, the most important is probably the cathedral of Prague (founded in
1344). The plan was devised according to routine French principles by the first master mason, Mathieu d'Arras.
When he died in 1352, his place was taken (1353-99) by Petr Parlér, the most influential mason in Prague and a
member of a family of masons active in south Germany and the Rhineland. Parlér's building included the start of a
south tower and spire that clearly continued the traditions of the Rhineland. His originality lay in his experiments
with vault designs, from which stem much of the virtuoso achievement of German masons in the 15th century.

London, too, has Rayonnant monuments. Westminster Abbey was rebuilt after 1245 by Henry III's order, and in
1258 the remodeling of the east end of St. Paul's Cathedral began. King Henry was doubtless inspired by the work
carried out by his brother-in-law, King Louis IX of France, at the Sainte-Chapelle and elsewhere. Westminster
Abbey, however, lacks the clear lines of a Rayonnant church, mainly because, like the Sainte-Chapelle, it was heavily
decorated with carved stonework and with colour.

In fact, English architects for a long time retained a liking for heavy surface decoration; thus, when Rayonnant
tracery designs were imported, they were combined with the existing repertoire of colonettes, attached shafts,
and vault ribs. The result, which could be extraordinarily dense--for instance, in the east (or Angel) choir (begun
1256) at Lincoln cathedral and at Exeter cathedral (begun before 1280)--has been called the English Decorated
style, a term that is in many ways an oversimplification. The interior architectural effects achieved (notably the
retrochoir of Wells cathedral or the choir of St. Augustine, Bristol) were more inventive generally than those of
contemporary continental buildings. The inventive virtuosity of the masons of Decorated style also produced
experiments in tracery and vault design that anticipated by 50 years or more similar developments in the
Continent.

English Decorated was, however, never really a court style. Already by the end of the 13th century, a style of
architecture was evolving that ultimately developed into the true English equivalent of Rayonnant, generally known
as Perpendicular. The first major surviving statement of the Perpendicular style is probably the choir of
Gloucester cathedral (begun soon after 1330). Other major monuments were St. Stephen's Chapel, Westminster
(begun 1292 but now mostly destroyed) and York Minster nave (begun 1291).

Spain also produced Rayonnant buildings: León cathedral (begun c. 1255) and the nave and transepts of Toledo
cathedral, both of which have, or had, characteristics similar to the French buildings. But, since the Spanish
partiality for giant arcades (already seen in the earlier parts of Toledo and at Burgos) persisted, one can hardly
classify as French the three major cathedrals of this period: Gerona (begun c. 1292), Barcelona (begun 1298), and
Palma-de-Mallorca (begun c. 1300). They are, in fact, so individual that it is difficult to classify them at all,
although peculiarities in the planning and buttressing of the outer walls gives them some similarity to the French
cathedral of Albi (begun 1281).

Late Gothic

During the 15th century much of the most elaborate architectural experiment took place in southern Germany and
Austria. German masons specialized in vault designs; and, in order to get the largest possible expanse of ceiling
space, they built mainly hall churches (a type that had been popular throughout the 14th century). Important hall
churches exist at Landshut (St. Martin's and the Spitalkirche, c.1400), and Munich (Church of Our Lady, 1468-88).
The vault patterns are created out of predominantly straight lines. Toward the end of the 15th century, however,
this kind of design gave way to curvilinear patterns set in two distinct layers. The new style developed particularly
in the eastern areas of Europe: at Annaberg (St. Anne's, begun 1499) and Kuttenberg (St. Barbara's, 1512).

Such virtuosity had no rival elsewhere in Europe. Nevertheless, other areas developed distinctive characteristics.
The Perpendicular style is a phase of late Gothic unique to England. Its characteristic feature is the fan vault,
which seems to have begun as an interesting extension of the Rayonnant idea in the cloisters of Gloucester
cathedral (begun 1337), where tracery panels were inserted into the vault (Figure 7). Another major monument is
the nave of Canterbury cathedral, which was begun in the late 1370s, but the style continued to evolve, the
application of tracery panels tending to become denser. St. George's Chapel, Windsor (c.1475-1500), is an
interesting prelude to the ornateness of Henry VII's Chapel, Westminster Abbey. Some of the best late Gothic
achievements are bell towers, such as the crossing tower of Canterbury cathedral (c. 1500).

In France the local style of late Gothic is usually called Flamboyant, from the flamelike shapes often assumed by
the tracery. The style did not significantly increase the range of architectural opportunities. Late Gothic vaults,
for instance, are not normally very elaborate (one of the exceptions is Saint-Pierre in Caen [1518-45], which has
pendant bosses). But the development of window tracery continued and, with it, the development of elaborate
facades. Most of the important examples are in northern France--for example, Saint-Maclou in Rouen (c. 1500-14)
and Notre-Dame in Alençon (c.1500). France also produced a number of striking 16th-century towers (Rouen and
Chartres cathedrals).

The most notable feature of the great churches of Spain is the persistence of the influence of Bourges and the
partiality for giant interior arcades. This is still clear in one of the last of the large Gothic churches to be built--
the New Cathedral of Salamanca (begun 1510). By this time, Spanish architects were already developing their own
intricate forms of vaulting with curvilinear patterns. The Capilla del Condestable in Burgos cathedral (1482-94)
provides an elaborate example of Spanish Flamboyant, as does--on a larger scale--Segovia cathedral (begun 1525).

There was a final flowering of Gothic architecture in Portugal under King Manuel the Fortunate (1495-1521). The
fantastic nature of much late Gothic Iberian architecture has won for it the name Plateresque, meaning that it is
like silversmith's work. The decorative elements used were extremely heterogeneous, and Arabic or Mudéjar forms
emanating from the south were popular. Ultimately, during the 16th century, antique elements were added,
facilitating the development of a Renaissance style. These curious hybrid effects were transplanted to the New
World, where they appear in the earliest European architecture in Central America.

During the 15th century much of the most elaborate architectural experiment took place in southern Germany and
Austria. German masons specialized in vault designs; and, in order to get the largest possible expanse of ceiling
space, they built mainly hall churches (a type that had been popular throughout the 14th century). Important hall
churches exist at Landshut (St. Martin's and the Spitalkirche, c.1400), and Munich (Church of Our Lady, 1468-88).
The vault patterns are created out of predominantly straight lines. Toward the end of the 15th century, however,
this kind of design gave way to curvilinear patterns set in two distinct layers. The new style developed particularly
in the eastern areas of Europe: at Annaberg (St. Anne's, begun 1499) and Kuttenberg (St. Barbara's, 1512).

Such virtuosity had no rival elsewhere in Europe. Nevertheless, other areas developed distinctive characteristics.
The Perpendicular style is a phase of late Gothic unique to England. Its characteristic feature is the fan vault,
which seems to have begun as an interesting extension of the Rayonnant idea in the cloisters of Gloucester
cathedral (begun 1337), where tracery panels were inserted into the vault (Figure 7). Another major monument is
the nave of Canterbury cathedral, which was begun in the late 1370s, but the style continued to evolve, the
application of tracery panels tending to become denser. St. George's Chapel, Windsor (c.1475-1500), is an
interesting prelude to the ornateness of Henry VII's Chapel, Westminster Abbey. Some of the best late Gothic
achievements are bell towers, such as the crossing tower of Canterbury cathedral (c. 1500).

In France the local style of late Gothic is usually called Flamboyant, from the flamelike shapes often assumed by
the tracery. The style did not significantly increase the range of architectural opportunities. Late Gothic vaults,
for instance, are not normally very elaborate (one of the exceptions is Saint-Pierre in Caen [1518-45], which has
pendant bosses). But the development of window tracery continued and, with it, the development of elaborate
facades. Most of the important examples are in northern France--for example, Saint-Maclou in Rouen (c. 1500-14)
and Notre-Dame in Alençon (c.1500). France also produced a number of striking 16th-century towers (Rouen and
Chartres cathedrals).

The most notable feature of the great churches of Spain is the persistence of the influence of Bourges and the
partiality for giant interior arcades. This is still clear in one of the last of the large Gothic churches to be built--
the New Cathedral of Salamanca (begun 1510). By this time, Spanish architects were already developing their own
intricate forms of vaulting with curvilinear patterns. The Capilla del Condestable in Burgos cathedral (1482-94)
provides an elaborate example of Spanish Flamboyant, as does--on a larger scale--Segovia cathedral (begun 1525).

There was a final flowering of Gothic architecture in Portugal under King Manuel the Fortunate (1495-1521). The
fantastic nature of much late Gothic Iberian architecture has won for it the name Plateresque, meaning that it is
like silversmith's work. The decorative elements used were extremely heterogeneous, and Arabic or Mudéjar forms
emanating from the south were popular. Ultimately, during the 16th century, antique elements were added,
facilitating the development of a Renaissance style. These curious hybrid effects were transplanted to the New
World, where they appear in the earliest European architecture in Central America.

ISLAMIC ARCHITECTURE

Early Islamic architecture is most original in its decoration. Mosaics and wall paintings followed the practices of
antiquity and were primarily employed in Syria, Palestine, and Spain. Stone sculpture existed, but stucco sculpture,
first limited to Iran, spread rapidly throughout the early Islamic world. Not only were stone or brick walls covered
with large panels of stucco sculpture, but this technique was used for sculpture in the round in the Umayyad
palaces of Qasr al-Hayr West and Khirbat al-Mafjar. The latter was a comparatively short-lived technique,
although it produced some of the few instances of monumental sculpture anywhere in the early Middle Ages. A
variety of techniques borrowed from the industrial arts were used for architectural ornamentation. The mihrab
wall of al-Qayrawan's Great Mosque, for example, was covered with ceramics, while fragments of decorative
woodwork have been preserved in Jerusalem and Egypt.

The themes and motifs of early Islamic decoration can be divided into three major groups. The first kind of
ornamentation simply emphasizes the shape or contour of an architectural unit. The themes used were vegetal
bands for vertical or horizontal elements, marble imitations for the lower parts of long walls, chevrons or other
types of borders on floors and domes, and even whole trees on the spandrels or soffits (undersides) of arches as in
the Umayyad Mosque of Damascus or the Dome of the Rock; all these motifs tend to be quite traditional, being
taken from the rich decorative vocabularies of pre-Islamic Iran or of the ancient Mediterranean world.

The second group consists of decorative motifs for which a concrete iconographic meaning can be given. In the
Dome of the Rock and the Umayyad Mosque of Damascus, as well as possibly the mosques of Córdoba and of
Medina, there were probably iconographic programs. It has been shown, for example, that the huge architectural
and vegetal decorative motifs at Damascus were meant to symbolize a sort of idealized paradise on earth, while the
crowns of the Jerusalem sanctuary are thought to have been symbols of empires conquered by Islam. But it is
equally certain that this use of visual forms in mosques for ideological and symbolic purposes was not easily
accepted, and most later mosques are devoid of iconographically significant themes. The only exceptions fully
visible are the Qur'anic inscriptions in the mosque of Ibn Tulun at Cairo, which were used both as a reminder of
the faith and as an ornamental device to emphasize the structural lines of the building. Thus the early Islamic
mosque eventually became austere in its use of symbolic ornamentation, with the exception of the mihrab, which
was considered as a symbol of the unity of all believers.

Like religious architecture, secular buildings seem to have been less richly decorated at the end of the early
Islamic period than at the beginning. The paintings, sculptures, and mosaics of Qasr al-Hayr West, Khirbat al-
Mafjar, Qasr 'Amrah, and Samarra' primarily illustrated the life of the prince. There were official iconographic
compositions, such as the monarch enthroned, or ones of pleasure and luxury, such as hunting scenes or depictions
of the prince surrounded by dancers, musicians, acrobats, and unclad women. Few of these so-called princely
themes were iconographic inventions of the Muslims. They usually can be traced back either to the classical world
of ancient Greece and Rome or to pre-Islamic Iran and Central Asia.

The third type of architectural decoration consists of large panels, most often in stucco, for which no meaning or
interpretation is yet known. These panels might be called ornamental in the sense that their only apparent purpose
was to beautify the buildings in which they were installed, and their relationship to the architecture is arbitrary.
The Mshatta facade's decoration of a huge band of triangles is, for instance, quite independent of the building's
architectural parts. Next to Mshatta, the most important series of examples of the third type of ornamentation
come from Samarra', although striking examples are also to be found at Khirbat al-Mafjar, Qasr al-Hayr East and
West, al-Fustat, Siraf, and Nishapur. Two decorative motifs were predominately used on these panels: a great
variety of vegetal motifs and geometric forms. At Samarra' these panels eventually became so abstract that
individual parts could no longer be distinguished, and the decorative design had to be viewed in terms of the
relationships between line and shape, light and shade, horizontal and vertical axes, and so forth. Copied
consistently from Morocco to Central Asia, the aesthetic principles of this latter type of a complex overall design
influenced the development of the principle of arabesque ornamentation.

Islamic architectural ornamentation does not lend itself easily to chronological stylistic definition. In other words,
it does not seem to share consistently a cluster of formal characteristics. The reason is that in the earliest
Islamic buildings the decorative motifs were borrowed from an extraordinary variety of stylistic sources: classical
themes illusionistically rendered (e.g., the mosaics of the Umayyad Mosque of Damascus), hieratic Byzantine
themes (e.g., the Umayyad Mosque of Damascus and Qasr 'Amrah), Sasanian motifs, Central Asian motifs
(especially the sculpture from Umayyad palaces), and the many regional styles of ornamentation that had developed
in all parts of the pre-Islamic world. It is the wealth of themes and motifs, therefore, that constitutes the
Umayyad style of architecVery little is known about early Islamic gold and silver objects, although their existence
is mentioned in many texts as well as suggested by the wealth of the Muslim princes. Except for a large number of
silver plates and ewers belonging to the Sasanian tradition, nothing has remained. These silver objects were
probably made for Umayyad and 'Abbasid princes, although there is much controversy among scholars regarding
their authenticity and date of manufacture.

For entirely different reasons it is impossible to present any significant generalities about the art of textiles in
the early Islamic period. Problems of authenticity are few. Dating from the 10th century are a large number of
Buyid silks, a group of funerary textiles with plant and animal motifs as well as poetic texts. Very little order has
yet been made of an enormous mass of often well-dated textile fragments, and therefore, except for the Buyid
silks, it is still impossible to identify any one of the textile types mentioned in early medieval literary sources.
Furthermore, since it can be assumed that pre-Islamic textile factories were taken over by the Muslims and since
it is otherwise known that textiles were easily transported from one area of the Muslim world to the other or even
beyond it, it is still very difficult to define Islamic styles as opposed to Byzantine or to Coptic ones. The obvious
exception lies in those fragments that are provided with inscriptions, and the main point to make is therefore that
one of the characteristic features of early Islamic textiles is their use of writing for identifying and decorative
purposes. But, while true, this point in no way makes it possible to deny an Islamic origin to fragments that are not
provided with inscriptions, and thus one must await further investigations of detail before being able to define
early Islamic textiles.

The most important medium of early Islamic decorative arts is pottery. Initially Muslims continued to sponsor
whatever varieties of ceramics had existed before their arrival. Probably in the last quarter of the 8th century
new and more elaborate types of glazed pottery were produced. This new development did not replace the older
and simpler types of pottery but added a new dimension to the art of Islamic ceramics. Because of the still
incompletely published studies on the unfinished excavations carried out at Nishapur, Siraf, Qasr al-Hayr East, and
al-Fustat, the scholarship on these ceramics is likely to be very much modified. Therefore, this section will treat
only the most general characteristics of Islamic ceramics, avoiding in particular the complex archaeological
problems posed by the growth and spread of individual techniques.

The area of initial technical innovation seems to have been Iraq. Trade with Central Asia brought Chinese ceramics
to Mesopotamia, and Islamic ceramicists sought to imitate them. It is probably in Iraq, therefore, that the
technique of lustre glazing was first developed in the Muslim world. This gave the surface of a clay object a
metallic, shiny appearance. Egypt also played a leading part in the creation of the new ceramics. Since the earliest
datable lustre object (a glass goblet with the name of the governor who ruled in 773, now in the Cairo Museum of
Islamic Art) was Egyptian, some scholars feel that it was in Egypt and not Iraq that lustre was first used. Early
pottery was also produced in northeastern Iran, where excavations at Afrasiyab (Samarkand) and Nishapur have
brought to light a new art of painted underglaze pottery. Its novelty was not so much in the technique of painting
designs on the slip and covering them with a transparent glaze as in the variety of subjects employed.

While new ceramic techniques may have been sought to imitate other mediums (mostly metal) or other styles of
pottery (mostly Chinese), the decorative devices rapidly became purely and unmistakably Islamic in style. A wide
variety of motifs were combined: vegetal arabesques or single flowers and trees; inscriptions, usually legible and
consisting of proverbs or of good wishes; animals that were usually birds drawn from the vast folkloric past of the
Near East; occasionally human figures drawn in a strikingly abstract fashion; geometric designs; all-over abstract
patterns; single motifs on empty fields; and simple splashes of colour, with or without underglaze sgraffito designs
(i.e., designs incised or sketched on the body or the slip of the object). All of these motifs were used on both the
high-quality ceramics of Nishapur and Samarkand as well as on Islamic folk pottery.

Although ceramics has appeared to be the most characteristic medium of expression in the decorative arts during
the early Islamic period, it has only been because of the greater number of preserved objects. Glass was as
important, but examples have been less well preserved. A tradition of ivory carving developed in Spain, and the
objects dating from the last third of the 10th century onward attest to the high quality of this uniquely Iberian
art. Many of these carved ivories certainly were made for princes; therefore it is not surprising that their
decorative themes were drawn from the whole vocabulary of princely art known through Umayyad painting and
sculpture of the early 8th century. These ivory carvings are also important in that they exemplify the fact that an
art of sculpture in the round never totally disappeared in the Muslim world--at least in small objects.tural
decoration. The 'Abbasids, on the other hand, began to be more selective in their choice of ornamentation.

There are three general points that seem to characterize the art of the early Islamic period. It can first be said
that it was an art that sought self-consciously, like the culture sponsoring it, to create artistic forms that would
be identifiable as being different from those produced in preceding or contemporary non-Islamic artistic
traditions. At times, as in the use of the Greco-Roman technique of mosaics or in the adoption of Persian and
Roman architectural building technology, early Islamic art simply took over whatever traditions were available. At
other times, as in the development of the mosque as a building type, it recomposed into new shapes the forms that
had existed before. On the other hand, in ceramics or the use of calligraphic ornamentation, the early Islamic
artist invented new techniques and a new decorative vocabulary. Whatever the nature of the phenomenon, it was
almost always an attempt to identify itself visually as unique and different. Since there was initially no concept
about what should constitute an Islamic tradition in the visual arts, the early art of the Muslims often looks like
only a continuation of earlier artistic styles, forms, subjects, and techniques. Many mosaics, silver plates, or
textiles, therefore, were not considered to be Islamic until recently. In order to be understood, then, as examples
of the art of a new culture, these early buildings and objects have to be seen in the complete context in which they
were created. When so seen they appear as conscious choices by the new Islamic culture from its immense artistic
inheritance.

A second point of definition concerns the question of whether there is an early Islamic style or perhaps even
several styles in some sort of succession. The fascinating fact is that there is a clear succession only in those
artistic features that are Islamic inventions--nonfigurative ornament and ceramics. For it is only in development of
these features that one can assume to find the conscious search for form that can create a period style.
Elsewhere, especially in palace art, the Muslim world sought to relate itself to an earlier and more universal
tradition of princely art; its monuments, therefore, are less Islamic than typological. In the new art of the Muslim
bourgeoisie, however, uniquely Islamic artistic phenomena began to evolve.

Finally, the geographical peculiarities of early Islamic art must be reiterated. Its centers were Syria, Iraq, Egypt,
northwestern Iran, and Spain. Of these, Iraq was probably the most originally creative, and it is from Iraq that a
peculiarly Islamic visual koine (a commonly accepted and understood system of forms) was derived and spread
throughout the Islamic world. This development, of course, is logical since the capital of the early empire and some
of the first purely Muslim cities were in Iraq. In western Iran, in Afghanistan, in northern Mesopotamia, and in
Morocco the more atypical and local artistic traditions were more or less affected by the centralized imperial
system of Iraq. This tension between a general pan-Islamic vocabulary and a variable number of local vocabularies
was to remain a constant throughout the history of Islamic art and is certainly one of the reasons for the
difficulty, if not impossibility, one faces in trying to define an Islamic style.

Historically, architecture in Japan was influenced by Chinese architecture, although the differences between the
two are many. Whereas the exposed wood in Chinese buildings is painted, in Japanese buildings it traditionally has
not been. Also, Chinese architecture was based on a lifestyle that included the use of chairs, while in Japan people
customarily sat on the floor (a custom that began to change in the Meiji period [1868-1912]).

Architecture in Japan has also been influenced by the climate. Summers in most of Japan are long, hot and humid, a
fact that is clearly reflected in the way homes are built. The traditional house is raised somewhat so that the air
can move around and beneath it. Wood was the material of choice because it is cool in summer, warm in winter and
more flexible when subjected to earthquakes.

In the Asuka period (593-710), Buddhism was introduced into Japan from China, and Buddhist temples were built in
the continental manner. From this time on, Buddhist architecture had a profound influence on architecture in
Japan.

In the Nara period (710-794), a capital city called Heijokyo was laid out in Nara in a manner similar to the Chinese
capital, whereby streets were arranged in a checkerboard pattern. Horyuji Temple, built under the increasing
influence of Buddhism in 607, is the oldest wooden structure in the world. It was registered as a UNESCO World
Heritage property in 1993.

In the Heian period (794-1185), the homes of the nobility were built in the shinden-zukuri style, in which the main
buildings and sleeping quarters stood in the center and were connected to other surrounding apartments by
corridors. Tosanjo Palace (1043) was an example of this style.

Tea cottages, built when the tea ceremony became popular in the Muromachi period (1333-1568), employed a style
called sukiya-zukuri, characterized by a delicate sensibility, slender wood elements and unornamented simplicity.
Kyoto's Katsura Rikyu is a prime example of this style. People liked the harmony formed by the cottage and the
landscaped garden.

In the sixteenth century, when feudal lords dominated Japanese society, many castles were built. Though
constructed for military defense, these castles were also used to enhance the lords' prestige. A few of them
remain today, admired especially for their tenshukaku (watchtowers). The living rooms inside the castles were
tastefully decorated, and rooms for reading and waiting were developed in a style known as shoin-zukuri. The
Shiroshoin at Nishi-Hongenji in Kyoto, a National Treasure of Japan, is an example of this style.

After the Meiji Restoration, Western architecture was introduced in Japan. Stone and brick came to be used in
construction. In more recent times, the trend is toward the construction of buildings that incorporate aspects of
traditional Japanese architecture, using modern technology and new materials.

Modern architectural techniques were introduced into Japan with the launch of the Meiji Restoration in 1868. The
first buildings to result from this effort combined traditional Japanese methods of wood construction with
Western methods and designs. An elementary school in Nagano Prefecture became the standard and prototype for
schools built throughout the land.
In the 1880s, reactionary opinion turned against the rush toward Westernization, even in architecture, and Asian
models were advocated. After World War I, traditional Japanese architecture underwent a reassessment when
architects like Frank Lloyd Wright (1869-1959) of the United States and Bruno Taut (1880-1938) of Germany
came to work in Japan.

The years following World War II saw a continuation of efforts to reconcile traditional and modern architecture.
Tange Kenzo, one of Japan's most famous and influential post-war architects, managed to fuse traditional
Japanese architecture with scientific and technological advancements. In the 1950s and '60s he designed several
striking edifices, including the Yoyogi National Stadium for the 1964 Olympic Games in Tokyo.

For Japan, which is frequently hit by earthquakes, development of earthquake-resistant construction has always
been a major problem in architecture. The first skyscraper in Japan, the Kasumigaseki Building, was completed in
1968, having made use of the latest earthquake-resistant technology. A number of skyscrapers were built
thereafter, including those in Nishi-Shinjuku in Tokyo and the Landmark Tower (296 meters high) in Yokohama.

A redirecting of architectural priorities away from unmitigated commercialization was led by Arata Isozaki, who as
a young man had worked under Tange. His work and writings had a great influence on the younger generation of
architects. The 1970s also saw the appearance of architects who stressed an artistic approach to architecture, a
departure from the previous emphasis on technical expertise.

Domestic architects' offices were kept busy during the high-riding decade of the '80s, as were some major
foreign architects who were invited to work in Japan. The collapse of the "bubble economy" of Japan in the early
'90s caused a slowdown in the architecture industry. Many Japanese architects, however, are still highly ranked in
Japan and elsewhere, and a large number of foreign architects find business markets in Japan, a trend that has
spread even to local areas. Among some outstanding works of the '90s are the Tokyo International Forum (1997)
and the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Office (1991), both by Kenzo Tange.

In the '80s and '90s, Japanese architects were recruited increasingly for overseas assignments. Among them were
Isozaki, to do the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles; Kurokawa Kisho, for the Pacific Tower in Paris,
France; Maki Fumihiko, for the Floating Pavilion of the Groningen Festival in Holland; Tange, for Singapore's OUB
Center and for city planning in Shanghai and Guangzhou, China; and Ando Tadao, for the Meditation Tower at the
UNESCO complex in Paris. Ando has been especially well received abroad. He has taken several international prizes
such as the Pritzker Architecture Prize, given by the Hyatt Foundation in 1995, and the Royal Gold Medal for
architecture, awarded by the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1997.

Japanese architecture created from the last quarter of the 19th century is remarkable in its rapid assimilation of
Western architectural forms and the structural technology necessary to achieve results quite foreign to
traditional Japanese sensibilities. Large-scale official and public buildings were no longer constructed of wood but
of reinforced brick, sometimes faced with stone, in European styles. Steel-reinforced concrete was introduced in
the Taisho period, allowing for larger interior spaces.

As part of the Meiji government's general thrust to quickly import Western specialists to function both as
practitioners and instructors, the two main influences notable in the field of architecture are English and German.
The English architect and designer Josiah Conder (1852-1920) arrived in Japan in 1877. His eclectic tastes
included adaptations of a number of European styles, and the work of his Japanese students was significant
through the second decade of the 20th century. The Bank of Japan (1890-96) and Tokyo Station (1914), designed
by Tatsuno Kingo (1854-1919), and the Hyokeikan (1901-09), now an archaeological museum within the complex of
buildings at the Tokyo National Museum, and the Akasaka Detached Palace (1909), both by Katayama Tokuma
(1853-1917), are but a few of the best-known examples of Japanese attempts at stately monumentality in a
Western mode.
The German architects Hermann Ende and Wilhelm Böckmann were active in Japan from the late 1880s. Their
expertise in the construction of government ministry buildings was applied to the growing complex of such
structures in the Kasumigaseki area of Tokyo. The now much-altered Ministry of Justice building (1895) is a major
monument to their work. The Germans also trained a group of protégés, including Tsumaki Yorinaka (1859-1916).
His design of the Nippon Kangyo Bank (1899; no longer extant) and Okada Shinichiro's (1883-1932) Kabuki Theatre
(1924) in Tokyo are representative of attempts to combine the grand scale of Western buildings with such
traditional elements of Japanese architecture as tiled hip-gabled roofs, curved Chinese gables, and curved,
overhanging eaves.

The striving for monumentality reached its most awkward form in the highly nationalistic period of the 1930s. The
Tokyo National Museum (1937) by Watanabe Hitoshi and the Diet Building (1936), Tokyo, designed by Watanabe
Fukuzo are examples of massive, blocky scale without grandeur.

Frank Lloyd Wright's Imperial Hotel in Tokyo (1915-22; dismantled in 1967) seemed to have little lasting influence,
although Wright's creations in the West revealed his indebtedness to his perceptions of the Japanese aesthetic.
Similarly, the Bauhaus movement stirred interest in Japan, but Walter Gropius was even more thoroughly
impressed and influenced by such Japanese classics as the Katsura Imperial Villa in Kyoto.

Postwar architecture, while widely eclectic and international in scope, has seen its most dramatic achievements in
contemporary interpretations of traditional forms. The structures created for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics by Tange
Kenzo (b. 1913) evoke early agricultural and Shinto architectural forms while retaining refreshing abstraction. The
residential and institutional projects of Tadao Ando (b. 1941) are marked by stark, natural materials and a careful
integration of building with nature. In general, Japanese architects of the 20th century have been fully conversant
in Western styles and active in developing a meaningful modern style appropriate to Japanese sites.

ROMANESQUE ARCHITECTURE

The disintegration of Roman culture and economy, led in turn to a collapse of the framework in which skilled
architects and trained artisans could flourish. Without their skills, attempts at large-scale building, which were
usually restricted to churches, resulted in structures that were often crude and of relatively modest proportions.
The exception to this type of architecture, which from the end of the 5th to the 8th century was generally simple,
was that in the city of Ravenna, Italy, then under Byzantine rule. Buildings there are often composed of, or
decorated with, elements removed from Roman structures.

In many regions the pre-Romanesque style was a continuation of Early Christian art and architecture; such, for
example, were the churches of Rome, built on the plan of the basilica.

Circular or polygonal domed churches inspired by Byzantine architecture were also built during the pre-Romanesque
period; later they were built in the region of Aquitaine in south-western France and in Scandinavia. The best-known
and most elaborate examples of this type are San Vitale (526-548) in Ravenna, built for the Byzantine Emperor
Justinian, and the octagonal palace chapel built between 792 and 805 by Charlemagne at Aix-la-Chapelle (now
Aachen, Germany) and directly inspired by San Vitale. One of the creations of Carolingian architects was the
westwork, a multi-storey entrance façade flanked by bell towers, attached to Christian basilicas. Westworks were
prototypes of the great Romanesque and Gothic cathedral façades.

Important buildings were also constructed by the monastic orders. Monasticism, a religious and social
manifestation characteristic of the period, required vast building complexes comprising chapels, cloisters,
libraries, workshops, kitchens, refectories, and dormitories for the monks. New building skills were developed,
particularly by the monks of the Benedictine and Cistercian orders. Elaborate pre-Romanesque monastic
establishments were built at St Gall, Switzerland, on the island of Reichenau on the German side of Lake Constance
(Bodensee), and at Monte Cassino, Italy, by Benedictine monks.

An outstanding achievement of Romanesque architecture was the development of stone-vaulted buildings. A major
reason for the development of stone vaulting was the need to find an alternative to the highly flammable wooden
roofs of pre-Romanesque structures. Attempts to solve new structural problems resulting from the use of vaults,
especially barrel vaults, were endlessly varied. The dome, round and pointed vaults, and plain and ribbed groined
vaulting were used. However, a masonry structure in which the thrusts, or pressures, of the vaults are perfectly
contained by isolated piers and buttresses was not achieved until the Gothic period.

Stone vaulting, being much heavier than wooden roofing, needed to be supported by heavy walls and sturdy columns.
In the mature Romanesque style, especially that which developed in France, the use of massive walls and piers as
supports for the heavy stone vaults resulted in a typical building plan in which the entire structure was treated as
a complex composed of smaller interlinked units. These units, called bays, are the square or rectangular spaces
enclosed by groin vaults; in late Romanesque architecture, these bays tended to be treated as basic building units,
and separate rectangular bays became a characteristic and distinguishing feature of the Romanesque style.

The massiveness of stone structures is another major characteristic of Romanesque architecture. The nave in
Romanesque churches was usually made higher and narrower than in earlier structures in order to accommodate
windows, called clerestory windows, in the sidewalls below the vault. Doors and windows were usually framed by
round arches, or, sometimes, by slightly pointed arches. These openings were generally small and were decorated
with mouldings, carvings, and sculptures that became increasingly rich and varied as the Romanesque period drew to
a close.

RENAISSANCE ARCHITECTURE

The Renaissance, a name meaning "rebirth or re-creation" symbolized the rebirth of ancient classical culture,
originated in Florence in the early 15th century and thence spread throughout most of the Italian peninsula; by the
end of the 16th century the new style pervaded almost all of Europe, gradually replacing the Gothic style of the
late Middle Ages. It encouraged a revival of naturalism, seen in Italian 15th-century painting and sculpture, and of
classical forms ornament in architecture, such as the column and round arch, the tunnel vault, and the dome.

Knowledge of the classical style in architecture was derived during the Renaissance from two sources: the ruins of
ancient buildings, particularly in Italy but also in France and Spain, and the treatise De architectura by the Roman
architect Vitruvius. For classical antiquity and, therefore, for the Renaissance, the element of architectural design
was the order, which was a system of traditional architectural units. During the Renaissance five orders were used,
the Tuscan, Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, and Composite, with various ones prevalent in different periods. For example,
the ornate decorative quality of the Corinthian order was embraced during early Renaissance, while the masculine
simplicity and strength of the Doric was preferred during the Italian High Renaissance. ancient Roman practice
(e.g., the Colosseum or the Theatre of Marcellus), Renaissance architects often superimposed the order--that is,
used a different order for each of the several stories of a building--commencing with the heavier, stronger Tuscan
or Doric order below and then rising through the lighter, more decorative Ionic, Corinthian, and Composite.

For the Renaissance, proportion was the most important predetermining factor of beauty. The great Italian
humanist and architect Leon Battista Alberti defined beauty in architecture as

"A Harmony of all the Parts in whatsoever Subject it appears, fitted together with such Proportion and Connection,
that nothing could be added, diminished or altered, but for the Worse."

On the authority of Vitruvius, the Renaissance architects found a harmony between the proportions of the human
body and those of their architecture. There was even a relationship between proportions and the Renaissance
pictorial device of perspective; the Italian painter Piero della Francesca said that perspective represented objects
seen from afar "in proportion according to their respective distance." In fact, it was an Italian Renaissance
architect, Filippo Brunelleschi, who was the first to formulate perspective. The concern of these architects for
proportion caused that clear, measured expression and definition of architectural space and mass that
differentiates the Renaissance style from the Gothic and encourages in the spectator an immediate and full
comprehension of the building.

The Renaissance was the great moment in the history of architecture for the expression of architectural theory.
Inspired by the rediscovery or reevaluation of the treatise by Vitruvius, many architects recorded their theories
of architecture; some were preserved in manuscript (e.g., those of the 15th-century Italian architects Francesco
di Giorgio and Antonio Filarete), but most were published. Alberti's treatise De re aedificatoria (Ten Books on
Architecture), modeled on Vitruvius, was written in the middle of the 15th century and published in 1485. But it
was during the last three-quarters of the 16th century that architectural theory flourished. The Italians
Sebastiano Serlio, Giacomo da Vignola, and Andrea Palladio published famous books on architecture at that time.
Elsewhere, works were published by the Frenchmen Jacques Androuet du Cerceau, Philibert Delorme, and Jean
Bullant; the Fleming Vredeman de Vries; the German Wendel Dietterlin; and John Shute in England.

Early Renaissance in Italy (1401-95) The Renaissance began in Italy, where there was always a residue of classical
feeling in architecture. A Gothic building such as the Loggia dei Lanzi in Florence continued to use the large round
arch instead of the usual Gothic pointed arch and preserved the simplicity and monumentality of classical
architecture. The Renaissance have been expected to appear first in Rome, where there was greatest quantity of
ancient Roman ruins; but during the 14th and early 15th centuries, when the Italians were impelled to renew
classicism, the political situation in Rome was very unfavorable artistic endeavor. Florence, however, under the
leadership of the Medici family, was economically prosperous and politically stable.

In 1401 a competition was held among sculptors and goldsmiths to design a pair of doors for the old baptistery at
Florence. The sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti won, and a losing goldsmith, Filippo Brunelleschi, resolving to be the leader
in one of the arts, then turned to the study of architecture. Brunelleschi spent the period between and 1418
alternately in Florence and Rome. During this time he studied mathematics intensively and formulated linear
perspective which was to become a basic element of Renaissance art. At the same time, Brunelleschi investigated
ancient Roman architecture and acquired the knowledge of classical architecture and ornament he used as a
foundation for Renaissance architecture. He was also influenced by the local Florentine tradition, which had
flowered the 11th and 12th centuries in the so-called Tuscan proto-Renaissance style found in churches such as San
Miniato Monte. Brunelleschi's great opportunity came in 1418 with competition for the completion of the duomo, or
cathedral, Florence. The medieval architects had intended a great dome the crossing of the cathedral, but it had
never been created, and no one knew how to accomplish it. Winning the competition, Brunelleschi began the great
dome in 1420 (the finishing touches were not applied until 1467, after his death).

The Florentine dome still belongs within the Gothic tradition, as it was built with rib construction and a pointed
arch form, but the introduction of a drum, which made the dome more prominent, was to become characteristic of
the Renaissance dome.

Brunelleschi also produced in Florence other notable examples of the Renaissance style. The loggia of the Ospedale
degli Innocenti (1419-51) was the first building in the Renaissance manner; a very graceful arcade was designed
with Composite columns, and windows with classical pediments were regularly spaced above each of the arches. This
style was more fully exploited in the church of San Lorenzo (c. 1421 to c. 1460). Using the traditional basilica plan
the plan and elevations were organized on a system of proportions with the height of the nave equal to twice its
width. All the ornament is classical, with Corinthian columns, pilasters, and classical moldings. Brunelleschi used
almost exclusively the Corinthian order. All the moldings, door and window frames, and orders are of a soft blue-
gray stone (piètra serena) contrasted against a light stucco wall. The ornamental features have very little
projection, being rather lines on a surface. Colour was used in Florentine architecture to stress the linear
relationship rather than for overall patternistic uses (as in northern Italian architecture).
The traditional plan for medieval churches was the Latin cross plan, as at San Lorenzo; the longer arm of the cross
formed the nave of the church. During the Middle Ages this plan was considered a symbolic reference to the cross
of Christ. During the Renaissance the ideal church plan tended to be centralized; that is, it was symmetrical about
a central point, as is a circle, a square, or a Greek cross (which has four equal arms). Many Renaissance architects
came to believe that the circle was the most perfect geometric form and, therefore, most appropriate in
dedication to a perfect God. Brunelleschi also worked with the central plan. In the Pazzi Chapel (1429-60),
constructed in the medieval cloister of Santa Croce at Florence, the plan approaches the central type. On the
inside it is actually a rectangle, slightly wider than it is deep; at its rear is a square bay for the sanctuary, and at
the front is a porch. There are three domes, a large one over the center of the chapel and small ones over the
sanctuary and over the center of the porch on the exterior. Its plan, but not its interior space, resembles a Greek
cross. On the exterior the large dome is covered by a conical roof with a lantern at the top. The porch has a
horizontal entablature supported by six Corinthian columns but broken in the center by a semicircular arch that
centralizes the composition, repeats the shape of the dome in the porch behind it, and gives a lift to the horizontal
facade.

Soon after the commencement of the Pazzi Chapel, Brunelleschi began a central-plan church, that of Santa Maria
degli Angeli (begun 1434) at Florence, which was never completed. It was very important because it was the first
central-plan church of the Renaissance, the type of plan which dominates Renaissance thinking. The plan is an
octagon on the interior and 16-sided on the exterior, with a domical vault probably intended to cover the center.

An outstanding example of secular architecture was the Medici Palace (1444-59; now called the Palazzo Medici-
Riccardi) at Florence by Michelozzo, a follower of Brunelleschi. Created for Cosimo de' Medici, a great political
leader and art patron of Florence, the palace was arranged around a central court, the traditional Florentine palace
plan. Medieval Florentine palaces were built of great rusticated blocks of stone, as if they had just been hacked
out of the quarry, giving the impression of fortification. With the Renaissance, some fundamental changes
appeared. Michelozzo crowned his palace with a massive horizontal cornice in the classical style and regularized the
window and entrance openings. Even the rustication of the stonework was differentiated in each of the three
stories. The ground floor has the usual heavy rustication; the second story is marked by drafted stonework with
smooth blocks outlined by incised lines; and the third story has ashlar stonework with no indications of the blocks.
Unlike medieval patternistic rustication, that of the Renaissance, which carefully distinguished between the
stories, set up a logical relationship among them.

This Renaissance treatment of a palace facade was carried further in the Palazzo Rucellai (1452?-1470?) at
Florence, following the design of the great architect Alberti. Classical orders were applied to the palace elevation
by Alberti, using pilasters of the different orders superimposed on the three stories, so that there was another
relationship established among the differentiated stories, from the short, strong Tuscan pilaster on the ground
floor to the tall, decorative Corinthian at the top. For Alberti the beauty of architecture consisted of a
harmonious relationship among the parts, with ornament, including the classical orders, being auxiliary to the
proportional relationships.

The culmination of Alberti's style is seen at Mantua in the church of Sant'Andrea (begun 1472, completed in the
18th century), an early Renaissance masterpiece that was to exert much influence on later religious architecture.
It is important as a brilliant application of the ancient Roman triumphal arch motif both to the facade of a church
and to its interior articulation. The plan, as completed, is a Latin cross with one long arm for the nave flanked by
side chapels, but the crossing at the sanctuary end was treated as a central plan with the nave added to it. It is
unknown whether this plan corresponds to Alberti's intention, for only the nave portion was erected in the 15th
century. The facade is of square proportion, with a wide bay at the center twice the width of each of the side
bays. The interior elevation was organized on this same alternating system, the so-called rhythmic bay that was to
be popularized in the early 16th century by Bramante. As a result of this system, there is a close correspondence
between the interior and exterior composition of Sant'Andrea.
From Florence the early Renaissance style spread gradually over Italy, becoming prevalent in the second half of
the 15th century. In the architecture of northern Italy there was a greater interest in pattern and color. Color
was emphasized by the use of variegated marble inlays, as in the facade of the church of the Certosa di Pavia
(begun 1491) or in most Venetian architecture. The favorite building material of northern Italy was brick with
terra-cotta trim and decoration, a combination by means of which a pattern of light and dark was created over the
entire building. On occasions when stone was used, as at the Palazzo Bevilacqua in Bologna (c. 1479-84), the blocks
were cut with facets forming a diamond pattern on the facade. This was actually a decorative treatment of
rustication. Even the classical orders were affected by this decorative approach. Classical pilasters often had
panels of candelabra and arabesque decoration in delicate relief on the surfaces of their shafts; the lower third of
a column was frequently carved with relief sculpture.

Florentine artists, such as Filarete with his project for the Ospedale Maggiore at Milan (begun 1457), brought
classical decoration and a slight knowledge of Renaissance architecture to the region of Lombardy. The style was
transferred to Venice by such Lombard architects as Pietro Lombardo and Mauro Coducci. The church of Santa
Maria dei Miracoli (1481-89) at Venice, with its facade faced with coloured marble, is typical of Lombardo's work.

The Venetian palace, as exemplified by the Palazzo Corner-Spinelli (late 15th century) and the Palazzo Vendramin-
Calergi (c. 1500-09), both of which are the work of Coducci and both with large and numerous windows, was more
open than the palaces found in central Italy.

In Rome in the second half of the 15th century, there were several notable Renaissance palaces, principally derived
from the style of Alberti, who spent extensive periods in Rome as a member of the papal court. The Palazzo
Venezia (1455-1503) has a rather medieval exterior, but set within the palace is a characteristically Renaissance
court (1468-71), of which only two sides forming an angle were completed. It has been suggested without definite
proof that Alberti may have furnished the design for this court; it at least reveals his influence in its full
understanding of the classical style. The court consists of two stories of semicircular arches supported by piers,
on which are attached superimposed classical half columns, Tuscan below and Ionic above. The model for this
arcade is the ancient Colosseum of Rome. The sense of mass created by the heavy piers contrasted with the
lighter effect of the early Renaissance court typical of Florence, which has arches supported on columns. The
Palazzo della Cancelleria (1495) shows its dependence upon Alberti's style in its facade, which resembles in part his
Palazzo Rucellai in Florence. The lower story simply has drafted or leveled and squared stonework, but the two
upper stories have rather flat Corinthian pilasters as well as the drafted stone. Unlike the Rucellai palace, the bays
composed by the pilasters alternate wide and narrow, but this alternation had been used by Alberti already in
Sant'Andrea at Mantua. Alberti's influence is also visible in the facades of the churches of Sant'Agostino (1479-
83) and Santa Maria del Popolo (rebuilt 1472-77) in Rome.

These examples of the early Renaissance in Rome were rapidly approaching the simplicity, monumentality, and
massiveness of the High Renaissance of the early 16th century. Donato Bramante, who was to create this new style,
was active in Lombardy in northern Italy, but his work in Milan, as at Santa Maria presso San Satiro (about 1480-
86), was still in the Lombard early Renaissance manner. He was in contact at this time, however, with the great
Florentine Leonardo da Vinci, who was active at the Milanese court. Leonardo was then considering the concept of
the central-plan church and filling his notebooks with sketches of such plans, which Bramante must have studied.
When Bramante moved to Rome at the very end of the 15th century, his study of ancient ruins--combined with the
ideas of Leonardo and the growing classicism of Roman early Renaissance architecture--resulted in the flourishing
of the High Renaissance.

High Renaissance in Italy (1495-1520) High Renaissance architecture first appeared at Rome in the work of
Bramante at the beginning of the 16th century. The period was a very brief one, centered almost exclusively in the
city of Rome; it ended with the political and religious tensions that shook Europe during the third decade of the
century, culminating in the disastrous sack of Rome in 1527 and the siege of Florence in 1529. The High
Renaissance was a period of harmony and balance in all the arts, perhaps the most classic moment in this respect
since the 5th century BC in Greece.

Political and cultural leadership shifted from Florence to Rome particularly because of a succession of powerful
popes who wanted to develop the papacy as a secular power. The greatest of all was Julius II (1503-13), who was
likewise a fabulous patron of the arts. Almost all the leading Italian artists were attracted to Rome. With the
exception of Giulio Romano, none of the important artists active in Rome at this time was Roman by birth.

Bramante, the leader of this new manner, had already acquired an architectural reputation at Milan. Almost
immediately after his arrival in Rome, in 1499, there was an amazing change in Bramante's work, as he became the
exemplar of the High Renaissance style and lost his Lombard early Renaissance qualities. The Tempietto (1502), or
small chapel, next to San Pietro in Montorio, typifies the new style. Erected on the supposed site of the martyrdom
of St. Peter, the Tempietto is circular in plan, with a colonnade of 16 columns surrounding a small cella, or enclosed
interior sanctuary. The chapel was meant to stand in the center of a circular court, which was likewise to be
surrounded by a colonnade, so that the whole structure was to be self-contained and centralized. The enclosing
circular court was never erected. The ultimate inspiration of the Tempietto was a Roman circular temple, like the
temples of Vesta at Rome or Tivoli, but so many notable changes were made that the Renaissance chapel was an
original creation. On the exterior it was organized in two stories, the Doric colonnade forming the first story.
Above is a semicircular dome raised high on a drum. The present large finial, or crowning ornament, on the dome is
of a later date and destroys some of the simplicity of the massing. Niches cut into the wall of the drum help to
emphasize the solidity and strength of the whole, as does the heavy Doric order that Bramante was so fond of--in
contrast to Brunelleschi, who had a predilection for the ornate Corinthian. The monument is very simple,
harmonious, and comprehensible.

Several churches present the same qualities as the Tempietto on a larger physical scale. The church of Santa
Maria della Consolazione (1504-1617) at Todi, probably by Bramante, is likewise centralized in plan, being square
with a semicircular or polygonal apse opening off each side. The mass is built up of simple geometric forms capped
by the cylinder of a drum and a slightly pointed dome. On the interior the outstanding quality is a sense of quiet,
harmonious spaciousness. The Florentine architect Antonio da Sangallo the Elder, influenced by Bramante, created
his church of San Biagio at Montepulciano (1518-29) on a Greek cross plan. On the facade in the two recesses of
the arms of the cross were to rise two towers, the right one never completed. Otherwise the massing is similar to
that of Todi, with dome and drum above. All the moldings and ornamental elements were carved with strong
projection, so that on the interior heavy Roman arches, with deep coffers containing rosettes, define the tunnel
vaults rising over the arms of the church. The churches at Todi and Montepulciano are pilgrimage churches or
shrines and thus have the centralized planning characteristic of the martyrium or church built over the tomb of a
martyr or saint.

Sangallo's church at Montepulciano reflects Bramante's greatest undertaking, the rebuilding of St. Peter's in
Rome. Early in 1505 Pope Julius II began to consider the question of a tomb for himself that would be appropriate
to his idea of the power and nobility of his position. The sculptor Michelangelo soon presented a great project for a
freestanding tomb, but such a monument required a proper setting. The Renaissance artist and biographer Giorgio
Vasari claimed that the question of an appropriate location for this projected tomb brought to the Pope's mind the
idea of rebuilding St. Peter's, which was in very poor condition. Bramante, therefore, prepared plans for a
monumental church late in 1505, and in April 1506 the foundation stone was laid. Bramante's first design was a
Greek cross in plan, with towers at the four corners and a tremendous dome over the crossing, inspired by that of
the ancient Roman Pantheon but in this case raised on a drum. The Greek cross plan being unacceptable, Bramante
finally planned to lengthen one arm to form a nave with a centralized crossing. At his death in 1514 Bramante had
completed only the four main piers that were to support the dome, but these piers determined the manner in which
later architects attempted the completion of the church.
The largest palace of the High Renaissance is the Palazzo Farnese (1517-89) at Rome, designed and commenced by
a follower of Bramante, Antonio da Sangallo the Younger, nephew of the older Sangallo. At Sangallo's death, in
1546, Michelangelo carried the palace toward completion, making important changes in the third story. On the
exterior Sangallo gave up the use of the classical orders as a means of dividing the facade into a number of equal
bays; he used instead a facade more like those of the Florentines, but with quoins, or rough-cut blocks of stone at
the edges of the building, to confine the composition in a High Renaissance fashion. The facade is composed in
proportions as a double square. On the interior the central square court is more classical, using superimposed
orders. Based on the ancient Roman Theatre of Marcellus or the Colosseum, the two first floors have an arcade
supported by rectangular piers against which are half columns. On the third story Michelangelo eliminated the
arcade and used pilasters flanked by half pilasters, which destroyed the High Renaissance idea of the careful
separation and definition of parts.

One of the most charming buildings of the period is the Villa Farnesina (1509-11) at Rome by Baldassarre Peruzzi
from Siena. Designed for the fabulously wealthy Sienese banker Agostino Chigi, the villa was the scene of
numerous elaborate banquets for the pope and cardinals. A suburban villa, the Farnesina was planned in relation to
the gardens around it with two small wings projecting from the central block to flank the entrance loggia.
Originally, another loggia opened at the side upon the gardens stretching to the bank of the Tiber, but this loggia
was later walled in. The elevation appears as two stories comparted into equal bays by Tuscan pilasters. The neat,
reserved quality of the present building was originally lightened by painted fresco decoration over all the exterior
wall surfaces. Other important buildings were designed by the painter Raphael, such as the Villa Madama (begun
1518) at Rome or the Palazzo Pandolfini (begun c. 1516) at Florence.

Italian Mannerism or Late Renaissance (1520-1600) Mannerism is the term applied to certain aspects of artistic
style, mainly Italian, in the period between the High Renaissance of the early 16th century and the beginnings of
Baroque art in the early 17th. From the third decade of the 16th century, political and religious tensions erupted
violently in Italy, particularly in Rome, which was sacked in 1527 by the imperial troops of Charles V. school of
Bramante and Raphael, which had produced the Renaissance style, was dispersed throughout Italy as the artists
fled from devastated Rome. Mannerism appeared and prevailed in some regions until the end of the 16th century,
when the Baroque style developed. Mannerism was antithetical to many of the principles of the High Renaissance.
In place of harmony, clarity, and repose it was characterized by extreme sophistication, complexity, and novelty.
Mannerist architects were no less interested in ancient classical architecture than were their predecessors, but
they found other qualities in ancient Roman architecture to exploit. In fact, they often displayed an even greater
knowledge of antiquity than did earlier artists.

For Vasari, as a practicing Mannerist architect, the same criteria of stylishness in design could be applied to a
building as to a work of painting or sculpture. Vasari designed and built for an educated elite, one that would
appreciate both his understanding of the rules of Roman architecture and the ingenious liberties that he took with
these rules. Florentine and Roman 16th-century architecture is characterized by a secular cleverness--a building
was judged on elegance, ingenuity, and variety of form.

The change in style between the High Renaissance and Mannerism can be seen in the work of Baldassarre Peruzzi,
who was active in both periods. Unlike his High Renaissance Villa Farnesina, Peruzzi's design for the Palazzo
Massimo alle Colonne (about 1535) in Rome shows indications of Mannerism. The facade of the palace was curved to
fit the site on which it was erected; instead of remaining the passive form it had been in the earlier phases of
Renaissance architecture, the wall surface was beginning to assert itself. The classical order is limited to the
ground floor of the palace; the upper three stories have imitation drafted stonework made of brick covered with
stucco, inscribed to feign stone coursing. Under these three stories in the center of the facade is a loggia or
colonnade, which seems of questionable adequacy as a support for the apparent load. The second story has
rectangular windows crowned by Peruzzi's usual neat lintel supported on volutes, but the windows of the upper two
stories are set horizontally with rather elaborate curvilinear moldings about them. There is, therefore, no longer a
harmonious balance among the various stories. The architecture shows a greater emphasis on decorative qualities
than on the expression of structural relationships.

After the resolved classical order and measured harmony of Bramante's High Renaissance buildings, two main,
though interwoven, directions of Mannerist development become apparent. One of these, emanating largely from
Peruzzi, relied upon a detailed study of antique decorative motifs--grotesques, classical gems, coins, and the like--
which were used in a pictorial fashion to decorate the plane of the facade. This tendency was crystallized in
Raphael's Palazzo Branconio dell'Aquila (destroyed) at Rome, where the regular logic of a Bramante facade was
abandoned in favor of complex, out-of-step rhythms and encrusted surface decorations of medallions and swags.
The detailed archaizing elements of this manner were taken up later by Pirro Ligorio, by the architects of the
Palazzo Spada in Rome, and by Giovanni Antonio Dosio.

The second trend exploited the calculated breaking of rules, the taking of sophisticated liberties with classical
architectural vocabulary. Two very different buildings of the 1520s were responsible for initiating this taste,
Michelangelo's Laurentian Library in Florence and the Palazzo del Te by Giulio Romano in Mantua. Michelangelo's
composition relies upon a novel re-assembly of classical motifs for plastically expressive purposes, while Giulio's
weird distortion of classical forms is of a more consciously bizarre and entertaining kind. The various exterior
aspects of the Palazzo del Te provide a succession of changing moods, which are contrived so as to retain the
surprised attention of the spectator rather than to present him with a building that can be comprehended at a
glance. In the courtyard the oddly fractured cornice sections create an air of ponderous tension, whereas the
loggia is lightly elegant. Similarly, the illusionistic decoration of the interior runs the full gamut from heavy (if
self-parodying) tragedy to pretty delicacy. Giulio also created a series of contrived vistas, through arches and
doors, much like that later projected by Michelangelo for the Palazzo Farnese in Rome. Such management of scenic
effects became one of the hallmarks of later Mannerist architecture.

Increasingly, architecture, sculpture, and walled gardens came to be regarded as part of a complex (but not
unified) whole. In the Villa Giulia (c. 1550-55), the most significant secular project of its time, Vasari appears to
have been in charge of the scenic integration of the various elements; Giacomo da Vignola designed part of the
actual building, while the Mannerist sculptor Bartolommeo Ammanati was largely responsible for the sculptural
decoration. In spite of the continuous stepped vista, the building makes its impact through a succession of diverse
effects rather than by mounting up to a unified climax. There, and in Vasari's design for the Uffizi Palace (1560),
the vista seems to have been based upon the supposed style of antique stage sets, as interpreted by Peruzzi. It is
not surprising that the Venetian architect Andrea Palladio came closest to achieving a fully Mannerist style in his
Teatro Olimpico at Vicenza, where the receding vistas and rich sculptural details create an effect of extraordinary
complexity. Similarly, it is not surprising that the greatest of the later Mannerist architects in Florence, Bernardo
Buontalenti, should have been an acknowledged master of stage design. He was employed at the Medici court as a
designer of grandly fantastic ephemera--mock river battles and stage intermezzi (interval entertainments) in
which elaborate stage machinery effected miraculous transformations, figures descending from the clouds to slay
dragons that spouted realistic blood, followed by music and dance all'antica. As a garden designer, Buontalenti
enriched the traditional formal schemes with entertaining diversions, in which water often played a prominent
role--either in fountains or in wetting booby traps for the strolling visitor. Buontalenti's buildings possess much of
this capricious spirit in addition to his brilliantly inventive command of fluently plastic detailing.

In their treatment of detail, 16th-century Florentine architects inevitably looked toward Michelangelo as their
example of innovative genius. Michelangelo's Medici Chapel in San Lorenzo was executed, in Vasari's opinion, "in a
style more varied and novel than that of any other master," and "thus all artists are under a great and eternal
obligation to Michelangelo, seeing that he broke the fetters and chains that had earlier confined them to the
creation of traditional forms." By Vasari's time the Mannerist quest for novelty had reached a thoroughly self-
conscious level.

Michelangelo's later architecture in Rome was more restrained than his Florentine works. In 1546 he was
commissioned to complete St. Peter's Basilica in Rome, succeeding Antonio da Sangallo the Younger. During the
next 18 years he was able to complete most of his design for the church, except the facade and great dome above.
In plan he returned to a central-plan church reminiscent of Bramante's first project but with fewer parts.
Michelangelo's elevation, still visible at the rear or sides of the church, is composed of gigantic pilasters and a
rather high attic story. Between the pilasters are several stories of windows or niches. Unlike the harmonious
orders and openings of the High Renaissance, these are constricted by the pilasters so that a tension is created in
the wall surface. Michelangelo planned a tremendous semicircular dome on a drum as the climax of the composition.
Engravings of his original project suggest that this dome would have been overwhelming in relation to the rest of
the design. The great central dome was executed toward the end of the 16th century by Michelangelo's follower,
Giacomo della Porta, who gave a more vertical expression to the dome by raising it about 25 feet higher than a
semicircle. In the early 17th century, the Baroque architect Carlo Maderno added a large nave and facade to the
front of the church, converting it into a Latin cross plan and destroying the dominating quality of the dome, at
least from the exterior front.

Early Mannerism in northern Italy developed out of the dissolution of the school of Bramante after 1527. Giulio
Romano, the chief assistant of Raphael, became court artist and architect in the city of Mantua. With the works of
Galeazzo Alessi of Genoa, Leone Leoni of Milan, and Sebastiano Serlio of Bologna, Mannerist architecture gained a
firm hold. In 1537 Serlio began to publish his series of books on architecture, in which antiquity was examined
through Mannerist eyes and a series of pattern-book Mannerist designs was provided. Three years later, Serlio
joined the Italian Mannerist painter Francesco Primaticcio at Fontainebleau, where he helped to consolidate the
early acceptance of Mannerist ideals in France. In the work of Alessandro Vittoria, the influence of central Italy
was pronounced. His heavy ceiling moldings are composed of classical motifs and bold strap work. The north's taste
for bizarre fancies--such as Vittoria's fireplace for the Palazzo Thiene--was often in advance of that in Rome and
Florence.

Even Venice proved to be quickly susceptible to the clever tricks of Mannerist license. Michele Sanmicheli, a pupil
of Bramante and Antonio da Sangallo the Younger, returned after the sack of Rome to his native town of Verona
and later went to Venice, where his architecture shows a clear awareness of Giulio Romano's Mantuan experiments.
Another prominent architect in Venice was the Florentine sculptor Jacopo Sansovino, who also had fled to the
north from Rome after the sack. Sansovino's architecture, as represented by the Loggetta (1537-40) at the foot
of St. Mark's campanile or by the Old Library of St. Mark's (Libreria Vecchia [1536-88]), is rich in surface
decorative qualities. The library has two stories of arcades; it has no basement but merely three low steps, so as
to match the Gothic Palazzo Ducale opposite it. The upper entablature is extremely heavy, equaling half the height
of the Ionic columns on which it rests. The rich application of relief sculpture with no unadorned wall surfaces
creates this decorative quality, which has only superficial affinities with Florentine Mannerism.

This period of free and decorative Mannerism was followed by a more restrained classical architecture seen to
perfection in the work of one of the greatest architects of the Renaissance, Andrea Palladio. The city of Vicenza,
not far from Venice, was almost completely rebuilt with edifices after his design, including the basilica or town hall
(1549) and the Loggia del Capitaniato (1571), as well as many private palaces. In the varied design of these buildings
and in numerous villas in the Venetian mainland around Vicenza, Palladio brilliantly demonstrated the versatility of a
range of neo-antique formulas. The Villa Capra or Rotonda (1550-51; with later changes) is magnificent in its
simplicity and massing. In the center of a cube like block (typical of most Palladian villas) is a circular hall, and on all
four sides are projecting classical temple fronts as porticoes, resulting in an absolute classical symmetry in the
plan. In Venice, Palladio built several churches, all with the Latin-cross plan and rather similar facades. San Giorgio
Maggiore (1566-1610) has a Roman temple front, on four giant half columns, applied to the center of the facade;
abutting the sides are two half temple fronts with smaller coupled pilasters. The resulting composition suggests
the inter penetration of two complete temple fronts in a Mannerist way, since the elements of the composition are
less independent than they would be in High Renaissance architecture. Also typical of Mannerism is the way in
which the interior space, instead of being classically confined, is permitted to escape through a colonnaded screen
behind the sanctuary into a large choir at the rear. Palladio's greatest fame rests on his treatise I quattro libri
dell'architettura (1570; Four Books on Architecture).
The most important architect of this period in Rome is Giacomo da Vignola, who wrote a treatise, Regola delli cinque
ordini d'architettura (1562; "Rule of the Five Orders of Architecture"), devoted solely to a consideration of the
architectural orders and their proportions. Like Palladio's book, Vignola's Regola became a textbook for later
classical architecture.

Of his many buildings the project for the church of Il Gesù (1568) at Rome, the central church of the Jesuit
Order, was very influential on the later history of architecture. The plan is a Latin cross with side chapels flanking
the nave, but the eastern end is a central plan, capped by a dome. Il Gesù's plan was imitated throughout Europe,
but especially in Italy, during the early Baroque period of the 17th century. Vignola built the church except for its
facade, which was executed by Giacomo della Porta. Della Porta, inspired by Vignola's original design, created a
facade concentrated toward its center, which, like the plan, was the prototype for most early Baroque facades of
the late 16th and 17th century.

BAROQUE ARCHITECTURE

Baroque applied by common consent to European art of the period from the early 17th century to the mid-18th
century. Baroque was at first an undisguised term of abuse, probably derived from the Italian word barocco, which
was a term used by philosophers during the Middle Ages to describe an obstacle in schematic logic. Subsequently,
this became a description for any contorted idea or involuted process of thought. Another possible source is the
Portuguese word barroco, with its Spanish form barrueco, used to describe an irregular or imperfectly shaped
pearl; this usage still survives in the jeweler's term baroque pearl.

During the Baroque period (c. 1600-1750), architecture, painting, and sculpture were integrated into decorative
ensembles. Architecture and sculpture became pictorial, and painting became illusionistic. Baroque art was
essentially concerned with the dramatic and the illusory, with vivid colours, hidden light sources, luxurious
materials, and elaborate, contrasting surface textures, used to heighten immediacy and sensual delight. Ceilings of
Baroque churches, dissolved in painted scenes, presented vivid views of the infinite to the worshiper and directed
him through his senses toward heavenly concerns. Seventeenth-century Baroque architects made architecture a
means of propagating faith in the church and in the state. Baroque palaces expanded to command the infinite and
to display the power and order of the state. Baroque space, with directionality, movement, and positive molding,
contrasted markedly with the static, stable, and defined space of the High Renaissance and with the frustrating
conflict of unbalanced spaces of the preceding Mannerist period. Baroque space invited participation and provided
multiple changing views. Renaissance space was passive and invited contemplation of its precise symmetry. While a
Renaissance statue was meant to be seen in the round, a Baroque statue either had a principal view with a
preferred angle or was definitely enclosed by a niche or frame. A Renaissance building was to be seen equally from
all sides, while a Baroque building had a main axis or viewpoint as well as subsidiary viewpoints. Attention was
focused on the entrance axis or on the central pavilion, and its symmetry was emphasized by the central
culmination. A Baroque building expanded in its effect to include the square facing it, and often the ensemble
included all the buildings on the square as well as the approaching streets and the surrounding landscape. Baroque
buildings dominated their environment; Renaissance buildings separated themselves from it.

The Baroque rapidly developed into two separate forms: the strongly Roman Catholic countries (Italy, Spain,
Portugal, Flanders, Bohemia, southern Germany, Austria, and Poland) tended toward freer and more active
architectural forms and surfaces; in Protestant regions (England, the Netherlands, and the remainder of northern
Europe) architecture was more restrained and developed a sober, quiet monumentality impressive in its refinement.
In the Protestant countries and France, which sought the spirit through the mind, architecture was more
geometric, formal, and precise-an appeal to the intellect. In the Roman Catholic south, buildings were more
complex, freer, and done with greater artistic license--an appeal to the spirit made through the senses.

Treatises on the orders and on civil and military architecture provided a theoretical basis for Baroque architects.
While many 16th-century architects published treatises on architecture or prepared them for publication, major
17th-century architects published very little. Two fragmentary volumes by Francesco Borromini appeared years
after his death, and Guarino Guarini's major contribution (though he brought out two volumes on architecture
before he died) did not appear until well into the 18th century. Other Italian publications tended to be repetitions
of earlier ideas with the exception of a tardily published manuscript of Teofilo Gallaccini, whose treatise on the
errors of Mannerist and early Baroque architects became a point of departure for later theoreticians.

In France, François Blondel and Augustin d'Aviler published notes for lectures given at the Academy of
Architecture, but the most important publications were those of Fréart de Chambray and Claude Perrault. Perrault
attacked established Italian theory. Other notable French works included writings by René Ouvard, André Félibien,
Pierre Le Muet, and Julien Mauclerc. In England, Sir Henry Wotton's book was an adaptation of Vitruvius, and
Balthazar Gerbier's was a compendium of advice for builders. Among the notable 17th-century German publications
were books by Georg Boeckler, Josef Furttenbach, and Joachim von Sandrart.

The work of Carlo Maderno in Rome represented the first pure statement of the principles that became the basis
of most of the architecture of the Western world in the 17th century. A northern Italian, Maderno worked most
of his life in Rome where, about 1597, he designed the revolutionary facade of the church of Santa Susanna .
Roman church facades in the late 16th century tended to be either precise, elegant, and papery thin or disjointed,
equivocal, and awkwardly massive. Maderno's Santa Susanna facade is an integrated design in which each element
contributes to the central culminating feature. Precision and elegance were relinquished to gain vitality and
movement. Disjointed and ambiguous features were suppressed to achieve unity and harmony. A towering
massiveness obtained by an increased surface relief and quickened rhythm of architectural members toward the
centre replaced the papery-thin walls and hesitant massiveness of the 16th century. Vertical unification was
achieved by breaking the entablature at similar places on both stories and by repeating pilasters and columns at
both levels. Maderno also conceived the facade as part of an integrated unit, including the two-story church and
one-story associated areas to either side, and thereby gave form to the Baroque desire to associate buildings,
street façades, and squares in a continuous whole.

The basic premises of the early Baroque as reaffirmed by Maderno in the facade and nave of St. Peter's, Rome
(1607), were: (1) subordination of the parts to the whole to achieve unity and directionality; (2) progressive
alteration of pilaster rhythm and wall relief to emphasize massiveness, movement, axiality, and activity; and (3)
directional emphasis in interiors through diagonal views and culminating light and spatial sequences.

The three great masters of the Baroque in Rome were Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Francesco Borromini, and Pietro da
Cortona. Bernini, also a brilliant sculptor, designed both the baldachin (an ornamental canopy-like structure) with
bronze spiral columns over the grave of St. Peter (1624-33) and the vast enclosing colonnade (begun 1656) that
forms the piazza of St Peter's. He was responsible also for the facade of the Palazzo Chigi-Odescalchi (1664), a
model for later urban palaces, and the exquisite oval church of Sant'Andrea al Quirinale (1658-70), the epitome of
richly coloured marble-encrusted church interiors.

In contrast to Bernini, Borromini preferred monochromatic interiors. The buildings of Borromini, who came from
northern Italy, are characterized by their inventive transformations of the established vocabulary of space, light,
and architectural elements in order to increase the content of their work. Borromini's works, composed of fluid
and active concave and convex masses and surfaces (San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, 1634-41), contain spaces that
are intricate, geometrically derived irregular ovals, octagons, or hexagons (Sant'Ivo della Sapienza, 1642-60). His
late palace facade for the College of the Propagation of the Faith (1646-67) was a bold and vigorous essay that
became a major source for Rococo architects in the early years of the 18th century.

Pietro da Cortona's early design for the Villa del Pigneto, near Rome (before 1630), was derived from the ancient
Roman temple complex at Palestrina, Italy, and decisively altered villa design; his San Luca e Santa Martina, Rome
(1635), was the first church to exhibit fully developed high Baroque characteristics in which the movement toward
plasticity, continuity, and dramatic emphasis, begun by Maderno, achieved fruition. Pietro's reworking of a small
square in Rome to include his facade of Santa Maria della Pace (1656-59) as an almost theatrical element is a
cogent example of the Baroque insistence on the participation of a work in its environment.

Architects in northern Italy, notably Guarino Guarini, Filippo Juvarra, and Bernardo Vittone, developed a Baroque
style of great structural audacity. Guarini's San Lorenzo (1668-80) and Palazzo Carignano (1679), both in Turin,
have swelling curvilinear forms, terra-cotta construction, exposed structural members, and intricate spatial
compositions that show his relation to Borromini and also represent significant developments in the relationship
between structure and light. Juvarra's Palazzo Madama, Turin (1718-21), has one of the most spectacular of all
Baroque staircases, but the true heir to Guarini was Vittone. To increase the vertical effect and the unification of
space in churches such as Santa Chiara, Brà (1742), Vittone raised the main arches, eliminated the drum, and
designed a double dome in which one could look through spherical openings puncturing the inner dome and see the
outer shell painted with images of saints and angels: a glimpse of heaven.

ROCOCO ARCHITECTURE

During the period of the Enlightenment (about 1700 to 1780), various currents of post-Baroque art and
architecture evolved. A principal current, generally known as Rococo, refined the robust architecture of the 17th
century to suit elegant 18th-century tastes. Vivid colours were replaced by pastel shades; diffuse light flooded the
building volume; and violent surface relief was replaced by smooth flowing masses with emphasis only at isolated
points. Churches and palaces still exhibited an integration of the three arts, but the building structure was
lightened to render interiors graceful and ethereal. Interior and exterior space retained none of the bravado and
dominance of the Baroque but entertained and captured the imagination by intricacy and subtlety.

The derivation of the word Rococo is uncertain, though its source is most probably to be found in the French word
rocaille, used to describe shell and pebble decorations in the 16th century. In the 18th century, however, the scope
of the word was increased when it came to be used to describe the mainstream of French art of the first half of
the century; Neoclassical artists used it as a derogatory term. Fundamentally a style of decoration, Rococo is much
more a facet of late Baroque art than an autonomous style, and the relationship between the two presents
interesting parallels to that between High Renaissance and Mannerist art. In Rococo architecture, decorative
sculpture and painting are inseparable from the structure. Simple dramatic spatial sequences or the complex
interweaving of spaces of 17th-century churches gave way to a new spatial concept. By progressively modifying the
Renaissance-Baroque horizontal separation into discrete parts, Rococo architects obtained unified spaces,
emphasized structural elements, created continuous decorative schemes, and reduced column sizes to a minimum.
In churches, the ceilings of side aisles were raised to the height of the nave ceiling to unify the space from wall to
wall (Church of the Carmine, Turin, Italy, 1732, by Filippo Juvarra; Pilgrimage Church, Steinhausen, near Biberach,
Ger., 1728, by Dominikus Zimmermann; Saint-Jacques, Luneville, Fr., 1730, by Germain Boffrand). To obtain a
vertical unification of structure and space, the vertical line of a supporting column might be carried up from the
floor to the dome (e.g., church of San Luis, Seville, Spain, begun 1699, by Leonardo de Figueroa). The entire
building was often lighted by numerous windows placed to give dramatic effect (Schloss Brühl, near Cologne,
Balthasar Neumann, 1740) or to flood the space with a cool diffuse light (Pilgrimage Church, Wies, Ger.,
Zimmermann, 1745).

In the early years of the 18th century in Rome, parallel to the development of Rococo in France, renewed interest
in the work of Borromini was shown by Alessandro Specchi in his Ripetta Gate (1704), and by Filippo Juvarra, a
gifted, if unorthodox, pupil of Carlo Fontana, in his early architectural projects and scene designs. Italian Rococo
developed out of this new interest in Borromini. In Rome the Rococo developed further with the so-called Spanish
Steps (1723) by Francesco de Sanctis; the facade of Santa Maria della Quercia (begun 1727) and Piazza
Sant'Ignazio (1727) by Filippo Raguzzini; and, in Piedmont, Santa Caterina, Casale Monferrato (1718) by Giovanni
Battista Scapitta.
VICTORIAN ARCHITECTURE

The Victorian architectural period mostly spans the period of roughly 1825-1900. The Victorians drew deeply from
history, nature, geometry, theory, and personal inspiration to create their designs. Prior to 1890, designers, though
properly trained in the academics of standard architectural systems, still managed to employ their own creative
ideas. Early Victorian structures were relatively simple in style, while those built after the Civil War became more
complicated. They combined styles as they saw fit. The end result was often a stunning visual effect. The building
styles of post-Civil War America were elaborate and flamboyant, very much fueled by new industrial society. Now
collectively called "Victorian" the architecture was made up of several main styles. These include Italianate,
Second Empire, Stick-Eastlake, and Queen Anne. Generally, Italianate style structures have flat roof lines,
corniced eaves, angled bay windows and Corinthian-columned porches. Stick-Eastlake structures often include
square bays, flat roof lines and free-style decorations. Queen Annes have a gabled roof, shingled insets, angled bay
windows under the gable and on occasion a tower.

Contemporary critics accuse the Victorians of needless complexity and clutter. Victorian architecture up to 1870
was thought by some, especially Europeans, to be a failure. This near revulsion by critics was expressed at first
only by a few, but as the decade went on, criticism increased. However, this view was obviously not shared by all
then or now. A charmed critic writing for the San Francisco Morning Call on April 21, 1887 described San
Francisco's Victorian architecture as follows: "The architecture of San Francisco in our residence streets has no
counterpart in the world, and we have no reason to be ashamed of it. It is light, airy and pleasing in style, and is to
the architecture of Europe and the Eastern States as Spanish music is to the grand and heavier compositions of
Wagner."

The latter part of the nineteenth century brought a new attitude toward color. Before then, the houses of the
tract builders tended to be painted all one color, usually white, beige or gray. By 1887, many people were painting
their houses in lighter, brighter colors. The vibrant colors are one of the more easily identifiable features of
Victorian architecture today.

The years from 1870 to 1906 produced the bulk of San Francisco's Victorian buildings in which there was much
overlapping in style trends. One cause of the seemingly infinite variety of Victorian architecture in Northern
California is the abundant coastal redwood. Both the structural members and much of the decoration on San
Francisco Victorian homes are redwood, a local material that had many advantages. It was cheap and plentiful; it
resisted rot, termites and fire; and it was easily worked into different shapes. Many interiors were done in the
grand manner reflecting their owners and builders. As with the exteriors, two general styles prevailed during the
period: the Italian or Renaissance style and the medieval or Queen Anne. Interiors of the Renaissance mode
included smooth plastered walls often in light colors, marble fireplaces usually with heavy gold mirrors above,
elaborate ceiling cornices, elaborate pediments over doors, frescoed ceilings, and chandeliers. French influence was
very strong during the 1870's and early 80's. Italianate interior design had heavily molded , yet graceful door
frames and wainscoting that complemented contemporary furniture styles. Door frames of this type disappeared
with the dominance of the Queen Anne interior. The shift to the brooding medieval style resulted in dark colorful
interiors. Californians at this period closely followed national trends.

From about 1895 to 1915, middle-class tastes turned away from the clutter and closed off rooms of the Victorian
home to more simple, open, flexible spaces: the living room replaced the parlor. Natural wood furniture and
interiors displaced the artificial, upholstered and multi-layered look typical of the Victorian home. At the turn of
the nineteenth and into the twentieth century, working-class and middle-class homes reflected contrasting
material standards.

Today, all over the United States, many homes from the Victorian architectural period still stand and are
considered among the most beautifully rustic in almost any neighborhood. Many have been turned into bed and
breakfast inns, hotels and some just opened to the public as historic sites.
ART NOUVEAU ARCHITECTURE

Although known as Jugendstil in Germany, Sezessionstil in Austria, Modernista in Spain, and Stile Liberty or Stile
Floreale in Italy, Art Nouveau has become the general term applied to a highly varied movement that was
European-centred but internationally current at the end of the century. Art Nouveau architects gave idiosyncratic
expression to many of the themes that had preoccupied the 19th century, ranging from Viollet-le-Duc's call for
structural honesty to Sullivan's call for an organic architecture. The extensive use of iron and glass in Art Nouveau
buildings was also rooted in 19th-century practice. In France bizarre forms appeared in iron, masonry, and
concrete, such as the structures of Hector Guimard for the Paris Métro (c. 1900), the Montmartre church of
Saint-Jean L'Évangéliste 1894-1904) by Anatole de Baudot, Xavier Schollkopf's house for the actress Yvette
Guilbert at Paris (1900), and the Samaritaine Department Store (1905) near the Pont Neuf in Paris, by Frantz
Jourdain (1847-1935). The Art Nouveau architect's preference for the curvilinear is especially evident in the
Brussels buildings of the Belgian Victor Horta. In the Hôtel Van Eetvelde (1895) he used floral, tendrilous
ornaments, while his Maison du Peuple (1896-99) exhibits undulating enclosures of space. Decorative exploitation of
the architectural surface with flexible, S-shaped linear ornament, commonly called whiplash or eel styles, was
indulged in by the Jugendstil and Sezessionstil architects. The Studio Elvira at Munich (1897-98) by August Endell
and Otto Wagner's Majolika Haus at Vienna (c. 1898) are two of the more significant examples of this German and
Austrian use of line.

Wagner continued to combine academic geometry with classical modified Art Nouveau decoration in his Karlsplatz
Stadtbahn Station (1899-1901) and in the Postal Savings Bank (1904-06), both in Vienna. Wagner's pupils broke
free of his classicism and formed the Secessionists. Joseph Olbrich joined the art colony at Darmstadt, in
Germany, where his houses and exhibition gallery of about 1905 were boxlike, severe buildings. Josef Hoffmann
left Wagner to found the Wiener Werkstätte, an Austrian equivalent of the English Arts and Crafts Movement; his
best work, the Stoclet House at Brussels (1905), was an asymmetrical composition in which white planes were
defined at the edges by gilt lines and decorated by formalized Art Nouveau motifs reminiscent of Wagner's
ornament. Josef Plecnik, a talented pupil of Wagner, began his career in 1903-05 with the office and residence of
Johannes Zacherl in Vienna. This was in a Wagner-inspired style that Plecnik developed in the 1930s in a
fascinating series of buildings, especially in his native city of Ljubljana, now in Slovenia.

In Finland Eliel Saarinen brought an Art Nouveau flavour to the National Romanticism current in the years around
1900. His Helsinki Railway Station (1906-14) is close to the work of Olbrich and the Viennese Secessionists. Close
links existed between Art Nouveau designers in Vienna and in Glasgow, where Charles Rennie Mackintosh's School
of Art (1896-1909), with its rationalist yet poetic aesthetic, is one of the most inventive and personal of all Art
Nouveau buildings. In The Netherlands, Hendrik Petrus Berlage also created a sternly fundamentalist language of
marked individuality that is best appreciated in his masterpiece, the Amsterdam Exchange (1897-1903). The
exterior is in a rugged and deliberately unpicturesque vernacular, while the even more ruthless interior deploys
brick, iron, and glass in a manner that owes much to the rationalist aesthetic of Viollet-le-Duc.

In the United States the Art Nouveau movement arrived with Louis Comfort Tiffany and was especially influential
on ornamental rather than spatial design, particularly on Sullivan's decorative schemes and, for a time, those of
Frank Lloyd Wright. Decorative exuberance and the formally picturesque were elements of Stile Floreale buildings
by the Italian Raimondo D'Aronco, such as the main building for the Applied Art Exhibition held at Turin, Italy, in
1902. These qualities, along with dynamic spatial innovations, were manifested in the works of perhaps the most
singular Art Nouveau architect, the Spaniard Antonio Gaudí. His imaginative and dramatic experiments with space,
form, structure, and ornament fascinate the visitor to Barcelona. With their peculiar organicism, the Casa Milá
apartment house (1905-10; Figure 24), the residence of the Batlló family (1904-06), Gaudí's unfinished lifetime
projects of the surrealistic Güell Park and the enigmatic Church of the Holy Family were personal statements.
Their effect, like that of most Art Nouveau architecture, was gained through bizarre form and ornament.

ARTS AND CRAFTS ARCHITECTURE

A movement which developed in the second half of the 19th century, in opposition to industrialization and
associated social changes. The idea spread after the Great Exhibition of 1851, which had supposedly shown off in
London the best craftsmanship of the day, but it had earlier roots in the emphasis which Jean-Jacques Rousseau
had placed on craftsmanship in the 18th century and on the medievalism of Gothic revivalists like Pugin in the early
19th century. It was articulated in the writings of Ruskin, whose belief in the moral qualities of art led him to
oppose machine production, and who believed in the ultimate inspiration of nature, rather than the rehashed
historicism of the period. It was exemplified by the design work of William Morris, through his firm Morris,
Marshall, Faulkner and Co., established in 1861. He employed artists such as Burne Jones and produced many
designs himself, notably for wallpaper, textiles and stained glass, in which natural inspiration and truth to materials
are the paramount considerations. The movement also inspired a generation of architects, led by Webb (who
designed the Red House for Morris), Shaw, Ashbee and Voysey, who used vernacular architecture and traditional
materials without resorting to the overt period style of the Queen Anne Movement.

The Arts and Crafts Movement had a strong socialist streak, seen in Morris's own writings (e.g. News from
Nowhere, 1891) and in the numerous attempts to educate the masses (e.g. Ashbee's Guild and School of Arts and
Crafts established in 1888). But the politics was always tempered by a nostalgia for the Middle Ages with their
craftsmanship, guilds and religious endeavour. The movement organized exhibitions from 1888, but by then was
already being superseded by the development of Art Nouveau which shared similar ideas but with a more
contemporary outlook. However, its ideal lingered and is apparent in Gropius' Bauhaus manifesto.

ART DECO ARCHITECTURE

Art Deco, or Style Moderne as it is often referred to as, was a movement in the decorative arts and architecture
that originated in the 1920s and developed into a major style in western Europe and the United States during the
1930s. Its name was derived from the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes, held
in Paris in 1925, where the style was first exhibited. Art Deco design represented modernism turned into fashion.
Its products included both individually crafted luxury items and mass-produced wares, but, in either case, the
intention was to create a sleek and antitraditional elegance that symbolized wealth and sophistication.

The distinguishing features of the style are simple, clean shapes, often with a "streamlined" look; ornament that is
geometric or stylized from representational forms; and unusually varied, often expensive materials, which
frequently include man-made substances (plastics, especially bakelite; vita-glass; and ferroconcrete) in addition to
natural ones (jade, silver, ivory, obsidian, chrome, and rock crystal). Though Art Deco objects were rarely mass-
produced, the characteristic features of the style reflected admiration for the modernity of the machine and for
the inherent design qualities of machine-made objects (e.g., relative simplicity, planarity, symmetry, and unvaried
repetition of elements).

Among the formative influences on Art Deco were Art Nouveau, the Bauhaus, Cubism, and Sergey Diaghilev's
Ballets Russes. Decorative ideas came from American Indian, Egyptian, and early classical sources as well as from
nature. Characteristic motifs included nude female figures, animals, foliage, and sunrays, all in conventionalized
forms.

Most of the outstanding Art Deco creators designed individually crafted or limited-edition items. They included
the furniture designers Jacques Ruhlmann and Maurice Dufrène; the architect Eliel Saarinen; metalsmith Jean
Puiforcat; glass and jewelry designer René Lalique; fashion designer Erté; artist-jewelers Raynmond Templier, Jean
Fouquet René Robert, H.G. Murphy, and Wiwen Nilsson; and the figural sculptor Chiparus. The fashion designer Paul
Poiret and the graphic artist Edward McKnight Kauffer represent those whose work directly reached a larger
audience. New York City's Rockefeller Center (especially its interiors supervised by Donald Deskey), the Chrysler
Building by William Van Alen, and the Empire State Building by Shreve, Lamb & Harmon are the most monumental
embodiments of Art Deco. Although the style went out of fashion during World War II, beginning in the late 1960s
there was a renewed interest in Art Deco design.
PRAIRIE STYLE ARCHITECTURE

Name given to a group of US architects and referring specifically to the domestic architecture they produced
between c. 1900 and c. 1920, mostly in Chicago and its suburbs. The seminal house in this style is generally taken to
be Frank Lloyd Wright's Winslow House of 1893-4 and most of the architects in this 'school' worked either with
Wright himself or for the employer of Wright's early years, Louis Sullivan. In addition, other architects
throughout the country were influenced through the dissemination of architectural pattern books. Prairie Houses
are characterized by low-pitched, usually hipped, roofs with widely overhanging eaves. They are generally open-
planned, of two stories with single storey wings and/or porches. The ornamental detailing of eaves, cornices and
façades are generally calculated to emphasize horizontality. Among the leading architects included in the school
are George W. Maher, Walter Burley Griffin, William G. Purcell and George G. Elmslie.

CHICAGO SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE

The Chicago school of architecture defines a group of architects and engineers who, in the late 19th century,
developed the skyscraper. They included Daniel Burnham, William Le Baron Jenney, John Root, and the firm of
Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan.

Among the buildings representative of the school in Chicago are the Montauk Building (Burnham and Root, 1882),
the Auditorium Building (Adler and Sullivan, 1889), the Monadnock Building (Burnham and Root, 1891), and the
Carson Pirie Scott Store (originally the Schlesinger-Mayer Department Store; Sullivan, 1899-1904). Chicago,
because of this informal school, has been called the "birthplace of modern architecture."

NEOCLASSICAL ARCHITECTURE

Toward the end of the colonial period, architectural styles based on a more precise study of ancient Roman and
Greek buildings were beginning to appear in Europe. This shift in taste coincided with the American Revolution, and
the neoclassical style became closely identified with the political values of the young republic. In interior
decoration, the Adam style (see Adam, Robert), as it was then popularly known in England, was soon translated to
American use through the pattern books of Asher Benjamin.

A more monumental aesthetic, which became known as the Federal style, was typical of the work of Charles
Bulfinch in Boston and of Samuel McIntire in Salem, both of whom were among the growing number of native-born
designers. Presidents George Washington and Thomas Jefferson gave serious thought to architecture and were
deeply involved in the planning and building of Washington, D.C. Both statesmen looked to the classical world as the
best source of inspiration. Jefferson's conception of the Roman ideals of beauty and proportion was elegantly
expressed in his design for the Virginia state capitol at Richmond (1785-89).

Architecture, previously the domain of gentlemen amateurs and master builders, became increasingly
professionalized in the first half of the 19th cent. The field was also greatly enhanced by the arrival of several
European architects, including the English-born Benjamin Henry Latrobe. Architectural books continued to exert
considerable influence as well. The later pattern books of Asher Benjamin and those of Minard Lafever spread the
taste for classicism beyond the major cities of the east coast to the hinterlands.

The South built great mansions during the antebellum period, often with two-story colonnades, such as Dunleith
Plantation in Natchez, Miss. (c.1848). In both port cities and small towns there was a subtle shift in taste from the
earlier Roman-based classicism to Greek sources. Prominent Greek revival buildings of the period include William
Strickland's Merchant's Exchange in Philadelphia (1832-34) and Robert Mills's Treasury Building in Washington,
D.C. (1836-42)
MODERN ARCHITECTURE

The Modern movement was an attempt to create a nonhistorical architecture of functionalism in which a new sense
of space would be created with the help of modern materials. A reaction against the stylistic pluralism of the 19th
century, the Modern movement was also coloured by the belief that the 20th century had given birth to "modern
man," who would need a radically new kind of architecture.

The Viennese architect Adolf Loos opposed the use of any ornament at all and designed purist compositions of bald,
functional blocks such as the Steiner House at Vienna (1910), one of the first private houses of reinforced
concrete. Peter Behrens, having had contact with Olbrich at Darmstadt and with Hoffmann at Vienna, was in 1907
appointed artistic adviser in charge of the AEG (Allgemeine Elektricitäts Gesellschaft), for which he designed a
turbine factory (1909) at Berlin. Behrens strongly affected three great architects who worked in his office:
Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.

In Germany, Gropius followed a mechanistic direction. His Fagus Works factory at Alfeld-an-der-Leine in Germany
(1911) and the Werkbund exposition building at the Cologne exhibition (1914) had been models of industrial
architecture in which vigorous forms were enclosed by masonry and glass; the effect of these buildings was gained
by the use of steel frames, strong silhouette, and the logic of their plans. There were no historical influences or
expressions of local landscape, traditions, or materials. The beauty of the buildings derived from adapting form to
a technological culture.

Gropius succeeded van de Velde as director of the ducal Arts and Crafts School at Weimar in 1919. Later called
the Bauhaus, it became the most important centre of modern design until the Nazis closed it in 1933. While he was
at Weimar, Gropius developed a firm philosophy about architecture and education, which he announced in 1923. The
aim of the visual arts, he said, is to create a complete, homogeneous physical environment in which all the arts have
their place. Architects, sculptors, furniture makers, and painters must learn practical crafts and obtain knowledge
of tools, materials, and forms; they must become acquainted with the machine and attempt to use it in solving the
social problems of an industrial society. At the Bauhaus, aesthetic investigations into space, colour, construction,
and elementary forms were flavoured by Cubism and Constructivism. Moving the school to Dessau in 1925, Gropius
designed the pioneering new Bauhaus (1925-26) in which steel frames and glass walls provided workshops within
severely Cubistic buildings. Gropius assembled a staff of modern teachers, including the artists László Moholy-
Nagy, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Marcel Breuer, and Adolf Meyer, whose projects, such as the 116 experimental
standardized housing units of the Törten Estate at Dessau, Ger. (1926-28), bore a highly machined, depersonalized
appearance.

In France, Tony Garnier caught the modern currents in materials, structure, and composition when he evolved his
masterful plan for a Cité industrielle (1901-04), published in 1917, in which reinforced concrete was to be used to
create a modern city of modern buildings. With insight, Garnier developed a comprehensive scheme for residential
neighbourhoods, transportation terminals, schools, and industrial centers, and his plan became a major influential
scheme for 20th-century urban design. Garnier received no mandate to build such a city, but his town hall at
Boulogne-Billancourt (1931-34) recalled the promise he had shown, though it was not so innovative and masterful as
might have been expected.

The Futurist movement counted among its members another early 20th-century urban planner, the Italian
architect Antonio Sant'Elia. Influenced by American industrial cities and the Viennese architects Wagner and
Loos, he designed a grandiose futuristic city, entitled "Città nuova" ("New City"), the drawings for which were
exhibited at Milan in 1914. He conceived of the city as a symbol of the new technological age. It was an affirmative
environment for the future, however, in opposition to the negating inhuman Expressionistic city of the future
conceived by Fritz Lang in the 1926 film classic Metropolis.
Centred in Germany between 1910 and 1925, Expressionist architects, like the painters who were part of the
Brücke and Blaue Reiter groups, sought peculiarly personal and often bizarre visual forms and effects. Among the
earliest manifestations of an Expressionistic building style were the highly individual early works of Hans Poelzig,
such as the Luban Chemical Factory (1911-12) and the municipal water tower (1911) of Posen, Ger. (now Poznan, Pol.),
which led to his monumental, visionary "space caves," such as the project for the Salzburg Festival Theatre (1920-
21) and the Grosses Schauspielhaus, built in Berlin (1919) for Max Reinhardt's Expressionistic theatre. These later
works by Poelzig show the influence of the structural audacity of Max Berg's Centenary Hall at Breslau, Ger. (now
Wroclaw, Pol.; 1912-13), with its gigantic reinforced concrete dome measuring 213 feet in diameter. The second
generation of Expressionists centred their activities in postwar Germany and The Netherlands. Distinctly personal
architectural statements were given form in such dynamically sculptured structures as the Einstein Observatory in
Potsdam (1920), by Erich Mendelsohn; the anthroposophically based design by Rudolf Steiner for the Goetheanum
in Dornach, Switz. (1925-28); the Eigen Haard Estates (housing development) at Amsterdam (1921), by Michel de
Klerk; and Fritz Höger's (1877-1949) Chilehaus office building in Hamburg (1922-23), with its imperative thrust of
mass and acute angularity.

As Germany was the centre of Expressionism, Paris was the stronghold of the advocates of a new vision of space,
Cubism, which Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso developed in 1906. Forms were dismembered into their faceted
components; angular forms, interpenetrated planes, transparencies, and diverse impressions were recorded as
though seen simultaneously. Soon architectural reflections of the Cubist aesthetic appeared internationally.
Interior spaces were defined by thin, discontinuous planes and glass walls; supports were reduced to slender metal
columns, machine-finished and without ornamentation; and Cubistic voids and masses were arranged
programmatically in asymmetric compositions.

The Dutch de Stijl movement was influenced by Cubism, although it sought a greater abstract purity in its
geometric formalism. Organized in Leiden in 1917, the painters Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg and the
architects Jacobus Johannes Oud and Gerrit Thomas Rietveld were counted among its members. Their Neoplastic
aesthetic advocated severe precision of line and shape, austerely pristine surfaces, a Spartan economy of form,
and purity of colour. Rietveld's Schroeder House, built in 1924 at Utrecht, was a three-dimensional parallel to
Mondrian's paintings of the period. Van Doesburg's work for the Bauhaus art school at Weimar brought the
influence of Dutch Neoplasticism to bear upon Gropius and Mies, whose plans for houses at times markedly
resembled van Doesburg's paintings. Meanwhile Oud collaborated with van Doesburg for a time and vigorously
proclaimed the new style in housing developments he built at Rotterdam (after 1918), Hook of Holland (1924-27),
and Stuttgart, Ger. (1927).

Cubism and the related movements of Futurism, Constructivism, Suprematism, and Neoplasticism, like any artistic
styles, might have faltered and fallen into a merely decorative cliché, as at the Paris Exposition of 1925, but for
Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, and Le Corbusier.

Gropius was succeeded at the Bauhaus in 1930 by Mies van der Rohe, whose training as a mason was supplemented
by the engineering experience he had gained from 1908 to 1911 in the office of Behrens; both of these elements of
his education were synthesized in his project for the Kröller House in The Hague (1912). Influenced by van
Doesburg's de Stijl, Mies's natural elegance and precise orderliness soon revealed themselves in unrealized
projects for a brick country house, a steel and glass skyscraper, and a glazed, cantilevered concrete-slab office
building (1920-22). He directed the Weissenhof estate project of the Werkbund Exposition at Stuttgart (1927),
contributing the design for an apartment house. Such practical problems failed to show his talent, which was not
fully known until he designed the German pavilion for the International Exposition at Barcelona in 1929. The
continuous spaces partitioned with thin marble planes and the chromed steel columns drew international applause.
His Tugendhat House at Brno, Czech Republic (1930), along with Le Corbusier's Savoye House, epitomized the
Modern domestic setting at its best.

The Swiss-French architect Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, known as Le Corbusier, gave the new architecture,
sometimes referred to as the International Style, a firm foundation by writing the strong theoretical statement,
Vers une architecture (Towards a New Architecture), published in 1923. It revealed a world of new forms--not
classical capitals and Gothic arches but ships, turbines, grain elevators, airplanes, and machine products, which Le
Corbusier said were indexes to 20th-century imagination. His love of machines was combined with a belief in
communal authority as the best means of accomplishing social reforms, and Le Corbusier directed his attention
toward the problems of housing and urban patterns. An architectural attack, using standardized building
components and mass production, was required. His sociological and formal ideas appeared in a Cubist project for
Domino housing (1916), and his aesthetic preferences led him to develop an extreme version of Cubist painting that
he and the painter Amedée Ozenfant called Purism. Returning to architecture in 1921, he designed a villa at
Vaucresson, Fr. (1922), the abstract planes and strip windows of which revealed his desire to "arrive at the house
machine"--that is, standardized houses with standardized furniture. In 1922 he also brought forth his project for
a skyscraper city of 3,000,000 people, in which tall office and apartment buildings would stand in broad open plazas
and parks with the Cubist spaces between them defined by low row housing.

Much of his work thereafter--his Voisin city plan, his Pavilion of the New Spirit at the Paris Exposition of 1925, his
exhibit of workers' apartments at the Werkbund Exposition at Stuttgart (1927), and his influential but
unexecuted submittal to the League of Nations competition--was a footnote to that dream of a new city. The villa,
Les Terrasses, at Garches, Fr. (1927), was a lively play of spatial parallelepipeds (six-sided solid geometric forms
the faces of which are parallelograms) ruled by horizontal planes, but his style seemed to culminate in the most
famous of his houses, the Savoye House at Poissy, Fr. (1929-30). The building's principal block was raised one story
above the ground on pilotis (heavy reinforced-concrete columns); floors were cantilevered to permit long strip
windows; and space was molded plastically and made to flow horizontally, vertically, and diagonally until, on the
topmost terrace, the whole composition ended in a cadenza of rounded, terminating spaces. Gaining greater facility
in manipulating flowing spaces, Le Corbusier designed the dormitory for Swiss students at the Cité Universitaire
(1931-32) in Paris.

In the period after the Revolution the erstwhile Soviet Union at first encouraged modern art, and several
architects, notably the German Bruno Taut, looked to the new government for a sociological program. The
Constructivist project for a monument to the Third International (1920) by Vladimir Tatlin was a machine in which
the various sections (comprising legislative houses and offices) would rotate within an exposed steel armature. A
workers' club in Moscow (1929) had a plan resembling half a gear, and the Ministry of Central Economic Planning
(1928-32), designed by Le Corbusier, was intended to be a glass-filled slab but, because of Stalin's dislike of
modern architecture, was never completed. Its foundation later was used for an outdoor swimming pool.

Modern European styles of architecture were subjected to official disfavour in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, as
Stalin's government adopted classical monuments--such as Boris Mikhaylovich Iofan's winning design for the Palace
of the Soviets (1931), which was intended to pile classical colonnades to a height of 1,365 feet and have a colossal
statue of Lenin at its summit. With its gigantic Corinthian columns, the building for the Central Committee of the
Communist Party at Kiev (1937) showed an overbearing scale.

After 1930 the Modern movement spread through Europe. In Switzerland Robert Maillart's experiments with
reinforced concrete attained great grace in his Salginatobel Bridge (1930). Finland's Alvar Aalto won a competition
for the Municipal Library at Viipuri (now Vyborg, Russia) in 1927 with a building of glass walls, flat roof, and round
skylights (completed 1935; destroyed 1943); but he retained the traditional Scandinavian sympathy for wood and
picturesque planning that were evident in his Villa Mairea at Noormarkku (1938-39), the factory and housing at
Sunila (1936-39, completed 1951-54), and his later civic centre at Säynätsalo (1950-52). Aalto and other
Scandinavians gained a following among those repelled by severe German modernism. Sweden's Erik Gunnar Asplund
and Denmark's Kay Fisker, Christian Frederick Møller, and Arne Jacobsen also brought regional character into
their modern work. In The Netherlands, Johannes Andreas Brinkman and Lodewijk Cornelis van der Vlugt, at the
Van Nelle Tobacco Factory in Rotterdam (1929-30), aimed at more mechanistic, universal form. In England,
refugees from Germany and other countries, alone or with English designers, inaugurated a radical modernism--for
example, the apartment block known as Highpoint I, Highgate, London (by Berthold Lubetkin and the Tecton group,
(1935).

The locus for creative architecture in the United States remained the Middle West, although Californians such as
the brothers Charles Sumner Greene and Henry Mather Greene struck occasional regional and modern notes, as in
the Gamble House at Pasadena, California. (1908-09). The second generation of architects of the Chicago school,
such as William G. Purcell, G.G. Elmslie, and William Drummond, disseminated Middle Western modern architecture
throughout the United States.

The greatest of all these new Chicago architects was Frank Lloyd Wright. His "prairie architecture" expressed its
site, region, structure, and materials and avoided all historical reminiscences; beginning with its plan and a
distinctive spatial theme, each building burgeoned to its exterior sculptural form. Starting from Richardson's
rustic, shingle houses and making free use of Beaux-Arts composition during the 1880s and 1890s, Wright hinted
at his prairie house idiom with the Winslow House at River Forest, Ill. (1893), elaborated it in the Coonley House at
Riverside, Ill. (1908), and, ultimately, realized it in 1909 in the flowing volumes of space defined by sculptural
masses and horizontal planes of his Robie House at Chicago (Figure 25). Meanwhile, he scored a triumph with his
administration building for the Larkin Company at Buffalo in 1904 (destroyed 1950), which grouped offices around
a central skylighted court, sealed them hermetically against their smoky environs, and offered amenities in
circulation, air conditioning, fire protection, and plumbing. In its blocky fire towers, sequences of piers and
recessed spandrels were coupled together in a powerful composition. Wright was, however, ignored by all except a
select following. The buildings of the single figure who gave international distinction to early 20th-century
American architecture remained the cherished property of personal clients, such as Aline Barnsdall, for whom
Wright designed the Hollyhock House at Los Angeles (1918-20).

Wright's Autobiography (1943) recorded his frustrations in gaining acceptance for organic architecture. The first
edition summarized the chief features of that architecture: the reduction to a minimum in the number of rooms
and the definition of them by point supports; the close association of buildings to their sites by means of extended
and emphasized planes parallel to the ground; the free flow of space, unencumbered by boxlike enclosures; harmony
of all openings with each other and with human scale; the exploitation of the nature of a material, in both its
surface manifestations and its structure; the incorporation of mechanical equipment and furniture as organic parts
of structure; and the elimination of applied decoration. There were also four new properties: transparency, which
was obtained through the use of glass; tenuity, or plasticity of mass achieved through the use of steel in tension,
as in reinforced concrete; naturalism, or the expression of materials; and integration, in which all ornamental
features were natural by-products of manufacture and assembly.

The Millard House at Pasadena, Calif. (1923), exemplified many of these principles; its concrete-block walls were
cast with decorative patterns. Taliesin East, Wright's house near Spring Green, Wisc., went through a series of
major rebuildings (1911, 1914, 1915, and 1925), and each fitted the site beautifully; local stone, gabled roofs, and
outdoor gardens reflected the themes of the countryside. A period of withdrawal at Taliesin afforded Wright
several years of intensive reflection, from which he emerged with fabulous drawings for the Doheny ranch in
California (1921), a skyscraper for the National Life Insurance Company at Chicago (1920-25), and St. Mark's
Tower, New York City (1929). The last was to have been an 18-story apartment house comprising a concrete stem
from which four arms branched outward to form the sidewalls of apartments cantilevered from the stem to an
exterior glass wall. Unexecuted like most of Wright's most exciting projects, St. Mark's Tower testified to his
revolutionary thinking about skyscraper architecture. His ideas gained a wide hearing in 1931 when he published the
Kahn lectures he had delivered at Princeton in 1930. In keeping with the needs of the United States during the
Depression, Wright turned his attention to the low-cost house, designing a "Usonian house" for Herbert Jacobs
near Madison, Wisc. (1937), and a quadruple house, "the Sun houses," at Ardmore, Pa. (1939). These exemplified
the residences he intended for his ideal communities, such as rural, decentralized Broadacre City (1936), which was
Wright's answer to European schemes for skyscraper cities.
At about the same time, Wright produced four masterpieces: Fallingwater, Bear Run, Pennsylvania. (1936), the
daringly cantilevered weekend house of Edgar Kaufmann; the administration building of S.C. Johnson & Son, in
which brick cylinders and planes develop a series of echoing spaces, culminating in the forest of graceful
"mushroom" columns in the main hall, and the Johnson House (1937), aptly called Wingspread, both at Racine, Wisc.;
and Taliesin West at Paradise Valley, near Phoenix, Arizona. (begun 1938), where rough, angular walls and roofs
echo the desert valley and surrounding mountains. With increasing sensitivity to local terrain and native forms and
materials, Wright stated more complex spatial and structural themes than European modernists, who seldom
attempted either extreme programmatic plans or organic adaptation of form to a particular environment.
Eventually, Wright himself developed a more universal geometry, as he revealed in the sculptural Solomon R.
Guggenheim Museum at New York City (1956-59).

The emblem of business, the office building, continued to suffer from demands for unique, distinctive towers.
Harvey Wiley Corbett, a New York architect, admitted that publicity was the ruling motivation. Sometimes a
business with nationwide suboffices developed a corporate iconography; Sears, Roebuck and Company, Bell
Telephone, Howard Johnson, A & P, and the various gasoline companies were recognizable nstantly. The Gothic
skyscraper, popularized by Gilbert's Woolworth Building, was the style used by Raymond Hood for his winning entry
in the Chicago Tribune competition (1922). Some buildings gained attention through their classical ornament;
others were Renaissance palaces. About 1920 some architects developed simple cubical forms, and the stepped
ziggurat was popularized by renderers, notably Hugh Ferriss, and such painters as Georgia O'Keeffe, John Marin,
and Charles Sheeler. This soaring and jagged form received legal support from the New York City zoning law of
1916 and economic justification from the fact that, in order to obtain rentable, peripheral office space in the
upper floors, where the banks of elevators diminished, whole increments of office space had to be omitted. These
cubical envelopes were not without ornament at their crests, as in Hood's American Radiator Building in New York
City (1924-25), suitably described as "one huge cinder incandescent at the top." Such decoration might be chic, as
in New York City's Barclay-Vesey (telephone company) Building, where Ralph Walker re-created the Art Deco
interiors of the Paris Exposition of 1925. In San Francisco, Miller, Pflueger, & Cantin used Chinese ornament to
enliven their telephone building (1926). Paradoxically, one archaeological find led to simpler buildings when, about
1930, Mayan pyramids inspired Timothy Pflueger in his work on the 450 Sutter building in San Francisco. Clifflike
blocks arose in Chicago, the Daily News and Palmolive buildings (1929) being the best examples; New York City
acquired a straightforward expression of tall vertical piers and setback cubical masses in the Daily News Building
(1930), by the versatile Hood, who had run the course from Gothic to modern form. The bank and office building of
the Philadelphia Savings Fund Society (1931-32) by George Howe and William Lescaze, a Swiss architect, gave the
skyscraper its first thoroughly 20th-century form, and Hood, again, produced a counterpart in New York City, the
McGraw-Hill Building (1931). Few of these, including the Empire State Building (1931), did anything to solve urban
density and transportation problems; indeed, they intensified them. Rockefeller Center, however, begun in 1929,
was, with its space for pedestrians within a complex of slablike skyscrapers, outstanding and too seldom copied.

American industry showed some inclination to respect function, materials, and engineering between the world wars,
as was evident in Joseph Leland's glazed, skeletal buildings for the Pressed Steel Company at Worcester, Mass.
(1930). Occasionally, a traditional architect had produced an innovation, such as Willis Polk's (1867-1924) Hallidie
Building at San Francisco (1918). With the aid of Ernest Wilby, the engineering firm of Albert Kahn created a work
of architectural merit in Detroit's Continental Motors Factory (about 1918). The National Cash Register, United
States Shoe Company, National Biscuit, Sears, Roebuck and Company and various automobile companies, such as
Ford, sponsored Functional architecture.

Rockefeller Center indicated that by 1930 there was a move toward simple form, which was presaged by the
architecture of the TVA (Tennessee Valley Authority). European modernism gained a firm following in the United
States as some of its best practitioners emigrated there. Eliel Saarinen, who won second prize in the Chicago
Tribune competition, gained the acclaim of Sullivan and other architects. He settled in Bloomfield Hills, Mich., a
Detroit suburb, where he established a school of architecture at the Cranbrook Academy. Saarinen designed its
new buildings, gradually freeing himself from historical reminiscences of his native Scandinavia. He remained
sensitive to the role of art in architecture, best revealed by his use of the sculpture of the Swede Carl Milles. The
Austrian architect Richard Neutra established a practice in California, notable products of which were the Lovell
House at Los Angeles (1927-28) and the Kaufmann Desert House at Palm Springs (1946-47).

A modern architecture exhibit in the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, in 1932, recorded by the
architectural historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock and the architect Philip Johnson in the book International Style;
Architecture Since 1922, familiarized Americans with the International Style. After 1933, as modernists fled the
Soviet Union, Germany, and Italy, the United States received Gropius, Breuer, and Mies. Gropius joined the
architectural school of Harvard University and established an educational focus recalling the Bauhaus.

Initially, the leading interwar architects of modernism, Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, Wright, and
Aalto, continued to dominate the scene. In the United States, Gropius, with Breuer, introduced modern houses to
Lincoln, Mass., a Boston suburb, and formed a group, The Architects Collaborative, the members of which designed
the thoroughly modern Harvard Graduate Center (1949-50). Mies became dean of the department of architecture
at the Illinois Institute of Technology at Chicago in 1938 and designed its new campus. Crown Hall (1952-56)
marked the apogee of this quarter-century project.

Not all the immigrants remained in the United States. Aalto, whose work first appeared on the American scene in
the Finnish pavilion at the New York World's Fair and again in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Baker
Dormitory (1947-49), returned to Finland. The European who might have contributed most was Le Corbusier. The
United Nations buildings at New York City, for which he was a member of a 10-man commission headed by New
York architect Wallace Harrison, is a token of the new forms he might have suggested for American cities. His plan
for rebuilding Saint-Dié, Fr. (1945), was the inspiration for many city-planning proposals made after mid-century.

Beginning with private houses by Hood, Lescaze, Edward Stone, Neutra, Gropius, and Breuer during the 1930s,
American Modernism gradually supplanted the historical styles in a range of building types, including schools and
churches; for example, Eliel Saarinen's simple, brick Christ Lutheran Church (1949-50) at Minneapolis, Minnesota.

After World War II, big industry turned to Modern architects for distinctive emblems of prestige. The
Connecticut General Life Insurance Company hired one of the largest modern firms, Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill,
to design their new decentralized headquarters outside Hartford, Conn. (1955-57). Lever Brothers turned to the
same firm for New York City's Lever House (1952), in which the parklike plaza, glass-curtain walls, and thin
aluminum mullions realized the dreams of Mies and others in the 1920s of freestanding crystalline shafts. Designed
by Eliel Saarinen's son Eero, the General Motors Technical Center (1948-56) at Warren, Mich., was compared with
Versailles in its extent, grandeur, and rigorous conformity to an austere, geometric aesthetic of Miesian forms.
The Harrison and Abramovitz's tower for the Aluminum Company of America at Pittsburgh (1954) advertised its
own product, as did Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill's Inland Steel Building at Chicago (1955-57). Perhaps the most
chaste of all was the Seagram Building (1954-58) at New York City, designed by Mies and Philip Johnson. Wright
alone avoided the rectilinear geometry of these office buildings. In 1955 he saw his Price Tower rise at
Bartlesville, Okla., a richly faceted, concrete and copper fulfillment of the St. Mark's Tower he had designed more
than 25 years earlier.

About 1952 there was a significant shift within Modernism from what had come to be called Functionalism, or the
International Style, toward a monumental Formalism. There was increasing interest in highly sculptural masses and
spaces, as well as in the decorative qualities of diverse building materials and exposed structural systems. Wright's
Guggenheim Museum is a manifestation of this aesthetic. Those who had focused their attention on the rectilinear
portions of Le Corbusier's Savoye House and Unité d'Habitation apartments at Marseille (1946-52), tended to
ignore the plastic sculpture on the roofs of those buildings; to such people, Le Corbusier's highly individual
buildings at Chandigarh, India (begun 1950), and the cavernous space in the lyrical church of Notre-Dame-du-Haut
at Ronchamp, Fr., seemed to be examples of personal whimsy. Pier Luigi Nervi in Italy gave structural integrity to
the complex curves and geometry of reinforced-concrete structures, such as the Orbetello aircraft hangar (begun
1938) and Turin's exposition hall (1948-50). The Spaniard Eduardo Torroja, his pupil Felix Candela, and the
American Frederick Severud followed his lead. Essentially, each attempted to create an umbrella roof the interior
space of which could be subdivided as required, such as Torroja's grandstand for the Zarzuela racetrack in Madrid
(1935). Mies constructed rectilinear versions of such a space in Crown Hall and in his Farnsworth House at Plano,
Ill. (1946-50), while Philip Johnson allowed a single functional unit, the brick-cylinder utility stack, to protrude
from his precise glass house at New Canaan, Conn. (1949). Other designers used curvilinear structural geometry,
best indicated by Matthew Nowicki's (1910-49) sports arena at Raleigh, N.C. (1952-53), in which two tilted
parabolic arches, supported by columns, and a stretched-skin roof enclose a colossal space devoid of interior
supports. In 1949 Nowicki had challenged Louis Sullivan's precept, form follows function, with another, form
follows form, a dictum that freed architecture from programmatic expression. Hugh Stubbins' congress hall, at
Berlin (1957), and Eero Saarinen's Trans World Airlines terminal at John F. Kennedy International Airport, New
York City (1956-62), were outstanding examples of these dynamically monumental, single-form buildings the
geometric shapes and silhouettes of which were derived from mathematical computation and technological
innovation. International competitions for the opera house at Sydney (1957) and a government centre at Toronto
(1958) were won by the Dane Jørn Utzon and the Finn Viljo Revell, respectively. Both architects were exponents of
the new monumentalism.

These designs posed problems in structural engineering and in scale, but many architects, such as the American
Minoru Yamasaki in the McGregor Building for Wayne State University at Detroit (1958), attempted to make
structure become decorative, while the decorative screen, as used by Edward Durell Stone at the U.S. embassy in
New Delhi (1957-59), offered a device for wrapping programmatic interiors within a rich pattern of sculptured
walls.

Mexico and South America broke their bonds to French, Spanish, and Portuguese academic design during the
1930s. Le Corbusier's influence became partially strong in Brazil, where the Brazilian Oscar Niemeyer and other
architects designed the Corbusier-inspired Ministry of Education and Public Health at Rio de Janeiro (1937-42).
Brazil's Lúcio Costa, Affonso Reidy, and Niemeyer; Mexico's Felix Candela, Juan O'Gorman, José Villagran Garcia,
and Luis Barragán; and Venezuela's Carlos Raúl Villanueva were the vanguard of Latin-American architectural
modernism. Whole communities such as Caracas and São Paulo essentially were rebuilt during the 1950s, and new
cities, such as Brasília, the capital of Brazil, and "university cities," such as those of Mexico and Venezuela, were
conceived and erected. In Mexico there was avid support for modern design in buildings such as the Presidente
Juárez housing at Mexico City (1950) by Mario Pani and Salvador Ortega. In Colombia, after World War II,
enormous strides were made in thin-shelled reinforced-concrete construction. In Brazil, dramatic complexes were
erected from concrete by Reidy, such as the school and gymnasium at Pedregulho housing at Rio de Janeiro (1953)
and Rio's Museum of Modern Art (1960-67).

After 1959, office buildings for administrative headquarters of large corporations followed the 1955-57 suburban-
campus model of Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill's Connecticut General Life Insurance Company or, if urban, the
towerlike form, often with strong structural expression (Torre Velasca, Milan, by Belgiojoso, Peressutti, and
Rogers, 1959) or the slab form, usually emphasizing glazed walls (Mannesmann Building, Düsseldorf, by Paul
Schneider-Esleben, 1959), but they rarely achieved an urban composition such as the 1962 Place Ville-Marie, built
at Montreal by the Chinese-born American architect I.M. Pei.

Air transportation, trade exhibitions, and spectator sports summoned the often awesome spatial resources of
modern technology. The stadiums for the 1964 Olympics at Tokyo by Tange Kenzo, Rome's Pallazzi dello Sport done
by Nervi (1960), Eero Saarinen's Dulles International Airport at Chantilly, Va. (1958-62), and Chicago's exposition
hall, McCormick Place, by C.F. Murphy and Associates (1971) are examples of the colossal spaces achieved in
reinforced concrete or steel and glass. International exhibitions seldom offered comparable architecture. At the
New York World's Fair (1964) the Spanish pavilion by Javier Carvajal and the Japanese pavilion by Maekawa Kunio
were buildings of merit. There were also several notable examples at Montreal's Expo 67: the West German
pavilion by Frei Otto, the U.S. pavilion by R. Buckminster Fuller, and the startling Constructivist apartment house,
Habitat 67, by the Israeli Moshe Safdie, in association with David, Barott, and Boulva, whose 158 precast-concrete
apartment units were hoisted into place and post-tensioned to permit dramatic cantilevers and terraces. World's
fairs continued to provide a setting for occasionally distinguished examples of modern structures that
demonstrated innovations in building technology.

The architecture of South and Southeast Asia as well as of Japan has been decisively influenced by Western
architects, particularly Le Corbusier. The leading figure in Japan was Kenzo Tange, whose many powerful buildings
of rough concrete include the Peace Centre, Hiroshima (1949-55), and St. Mary's Roman Catholic Cathedral at
Tokyo (1965). His disciples included the so-called Metabolism Group, led by Kikutake Kiyonori, Maki Fumihiko, and
Otaka Masato. Their work, characterized by a dynamic science-fiction quality expressive of fluidity and change,
culminated in the Osaka Expo 1970, with constructions such as Tange's giant space frame, known as the Theme
Pavilion, and Kikutake's Landmark Tower.

Much significant architecture in the postwar period was sponsored by cultural centers and educational institutions,
such as Berlin's philharmonic hall (1963) by Hans Scharoun. Louis I. Kahn, in his design for the Richards Medical
Research Building (1960), gave the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia a linear programmatic composition of
laboratories, each served by vertical systems for circulating gases, liquids, and electricity. Paul Rudolph's art and
architecture building (1963) at Yale University in New Haven, Conn., gathered its studios, galleries, classrooms, and
light wells on 36 interpenetrating levels distributed over six stories. The Morse and Stiles colleges (1962), also at
Yale, were designed by Eero Saarinen and set a new standard for multiple-entry urban dormitories. Even the
traditionalist campuses of New England preparatory schools gained modern architecture, such as the art building
and science building at Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., by Benjamin A. Thomson (1963) and the dormitories at
St. Paul's School in Concord, N.H., by Edward Larrabee Barnes (1965).

The innovations in educational architecture were international. In England, distinctive educational architecture
arrived at Hunstanton Secondary School, Norfolk (1949-54), by Peter and Alison Smithson. An example of what
became known as the New Brutalism, this building was influenced by Mies van der Rohe. Most New Brutalist
buildings, however, owed more to Le Corbusier's late work--for example, the gray concrete masses of Denys
Lasdun's University of East Anglia, Norfolk (1962-68)--while James Stirling's History Faculty, Cambridge (1964-
67), brought a neo-Constructivist element to the Brutalist tradition. Canada gained the Central Technical School
Arts Center by Robert Fairfield Associates (1964) and Scarborough College by John Andrews, with Page and
Steele (1966), both at Toronto. Italian innovative educational architecture is exemplified in Milan's Instituto
Marchiondi (1959) by Vittoriano Viganò. Led by disciples of Le Corbusier, the Japanese built Waseda University
(1964), which was designed by Katsuo Ardo, and Maekawa Kunio's Gakushuin University (1964), both in Tokyo.

Some of the new educational settings proposed solutions to what was undoubtedly the mid-20th century's greatest
problem, its urban environment. The high-rise, dense campus at Boston University by José Luis Sert and the
skyscraper towers of MIT's earth-sciences building (1964) by I.M. Pei, as well as Harvard's behavioral sciences
building (1964) by Minoru Yamasaki, were imaginative single buildings responding to urban circumstances. The Air
Force Academy at Colorado Springs, Colo., and the Chicago Circle Campus of the University of Illinois (1965), both
by the firm of Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill with Walter A. Netsch as the principal designer (1956), and the Salk
Institute for Biological Studies at La Jolla, Calif., by Louis I. Kahn (1966), all offered intimations of a new city built
around a cultural, educational centre.

No comparable concentration of intensive, harmonious urban architecture was achieved for cities, even though,
after 1955, the building of new cities produced some remarkable examples such as Vällingby, Swed.; Brasília, the
new capital of Brazil; Cumbernauld, in Scotland; and Chandigarh, in India; and some remarkable renovations of old
cities, as in Eastwicks in Philadelphia (Reynolds Metals Co.; plans by Constantinos Doxiadis, 1960) and Constitution
Plaza in Hartford, Conn. (Charles DuBose, with Sasaki, Walker & Associates 1964), and New York's Lincoln Center
for the Performing Arts (1962). By this time, however, it was beginning to be felt that the application of Modern
movement principles had caused visual damage to historic cities and had also failed to create a humane environment
in new cities. It was at this moment that the postmodernist era began.

NEW BRUTALISM ARCHITECTURE

A term coined in 1954 to describe architecture influenced by Le Corbusier's Unité d'Habitation at Marseilles. It is
particularly associated with post-war British architects, although the style had adherents in America (Paul Rudolf)
and Japan (Kenzo Tange). The style was characterized by the use of rough, heavy reinforced concrete, by chunky
angular solids and by the creation of spatial tension, and was used to reflect the harshness and the confusions of
modern life. In England, the style was exemplified by the work of Alison and Peter Smithson, who began their
career working in a Mies van der Rohe-influenced form (e.g. Hunstanton School, 1954) but moved to the creation of
urban housing and office blocks (e.g. Economist Building, London, 1962-4). Stirling was associated with the
movement in his early career (e.g. Ham Housing Project) and Denys Lasdun continued the style into the 1970s with
the South Bank Complex in London. New Brutalism has become discredited in recent years, along with much post-
war modernist work.

INTERNATIONAL STYLE ARCHITECTURE

This architectural style that developed in Europe and the United States in the 1920s and '30s and became the
dominant tendency in Western architecture during the middle decades of the 20th century. The most common
characteristics of International Style buildings are rectilinear forms; light, taut plane surfaces that have been
completely stripped of applied ornamentation and decoration; open interior spaces; and a visually weightless quality
engendered by the use of cantilever construction. Glass and steel, in combination with usually less visible
reinforced concrete, are the characteristic materials of construction. The term International Style was first used
in 1932 by Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson in their essay entitled The International Style:
Architecture Since 1922, which served as a catalog for an architectural exhibition held at the Museum of Modern
Art.

The International Style grew out of three phenomena that confronted architects in the late 19th century: (1)
architects' increasing dissatisfaction with the continued use of stylistically eclectic buildings--e.g., ones
incorporating a mix of decorative elements from different architectural periods and styles that bore little or no
relation to the building's functions; (2) the economical creation of large numbers of office buildings and other
commercial, residential, and civic structures that served a rapidly industrializing society; and (3) the development
of new building technologies centering on the use of iron and steel, reinforced concrete, and glass. These three
phenomena dictated the search for an honest, economical, and utilitarian architecture that would both use the new
materials and satisfy society's new building needs while still appealing to aesthetic taste. Technology was a crucial
factor; the new availability of cheap, mass-produced iron and steel and the discovery in the 1890s of those
materials' effectiveness as primary structural members effectively rendered the old traditions of masonry (brick
and stone) construction obsolete. The new use of steel-reinforced concrete as secondary support elements (floors,
etc.) and of glass as sheathing for the exteriors of buildings completed the technology needed for modern building,
and architects set about incorporating that technology into an architecture that openly recognized its new
technical foundation. The International Style was thus formed under the dictates that modern buildings' form and
appearance should naturally grow out of and express the potentialities of their materials and structural
engineering. A harmony between artistic expression, function, and technology would thus be established in an
austere and disciplined new architecture.

The International Style grew out of the work of a small group of brilliant and original architects in the 1920s who
went on to achieve great influence in their field. These major figures included Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van
der Rohe in Germany and the United States, J.J.P. Oud in The Netherlands, Le Corbusier in France, and Richard
Neutra and Philip Johnson in the United States.
Gropius and Mies were best known for their structures of glass curtain walls spanning steel girders that form the
skeleton of the building. Important examples of Gropius' work are the Fagus Works (Alfeld-an-der-Leine, Ger.;
1911), the Bauhaus (Dessau, Ger.; 1925-26), and the Graduate Center at Harvard University (Cambridge, Mass.;
1949-50)--all of which show his concern for uncluttered interior spaces. Mies van der Rohe and his followers in the
United States, who did much to spread the International Style, are most clearly identified with glass-and-steel
skyscrapers such as the Lake Shore Drive Apartments (Chicago; 1949-51) and the Seagram Building, done jointly
with Philip Johnson (New York City; 1958). Oud helped to bring more rounded and flowing geometric shapes to the
movement. Le Corbusier, too, was interested in the freer treatment of reinforced concrete but added the concept
of modular proportion in order to maintain a human scale in his work. Among his well-known works in the
International Style is the Savoye House (Poissy, France; 1929-30).

In the 1930s and '40s the International Style spread from its base in Germany and France to North and South
America, Scandinavia, Britain, and Japan. The clean, efficient, geometric qualities of the style came to form the
basis of the architectural vocabulary of the skyscraper in the United States in the 1950s and '60s. The
International Style provided an aesthetic rationale for the stripped-down, clean-surfaced skyscrapers that became
the status symbols of American corporate power and progressiveness at this time.

By the 1970s, some architects and critics had begun to chafe at the constraints and limitations inherent in the
International Style. The bare and denuded quality of the steel-and-glass "boxes" that embodied the style by then
appeared stultifying and formulaic. The result was a reaction against modernist architecture and a renewed
exploration of the possibilities of innovative design and decoration. Architects began creating freer, more
imaginative structures that used modern building materials and decorative elements to create a variety of novel
effects. This movement became prominent in the late 1970s and early '80s and became known as Postmodernism.

POST MODERN ARCHITECTURE

The 1960s saw the rise of dissatisfaction with consequences of the Modern movement, especially in North
America, where its failings were exposed in two influential books, Jane Jacobs' The Death and Life of Great
American Cities (1961) and Robert Venturi's Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966). Jacobs
highlighted the destruction of urban coherence wrought by the utopian iconoclasm of the Modern movement,
whereas Venturi implied that Modern buildings were without meaning because they were designed in a simplistic
and puritan way that lacked the irony and complexity which enrich historical architecture. This dissatisfaction was
translated into direct action in 1972 with the demolition of several 14-story slab blocks that had been built only 20
years earlier from designs by Yamasaki as part of the award-winning Pruitt-Igoe housing development in St. Louis,
Mo. Similar apartment blocks in Europe and North America were demolished in the following decades, but it was at
St. Louis that the postmodernist era was begun.

Venturi's Learning from Las Vegas (with Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour) was also published in 1972. In
seeking to re-humanize architecture by ridding it of the restricting purism of the Modern movement, the authors
pointed for guidance to the playful commercial architecture and billboards of the Las Vegas highways. Venturi and
his partner John Rauch reintroduced to architectural design elements of wit, humanity, and historical reference in
buildings such as the Tucker House, Katonah, N.Y. (1975), and the Brant-Johnson House, Vail, Colo. (1976). These
owed something to Lutyens, who, as a master of paradox and complexity, exercised a deep appeal for Venturi and
for his followers, such as Charles Moore and Michael Graves. Graves's Portland Public Service Building, Portland,
Ore. (1980-82), and Humana Tower, Louisville, Ky. (1986), have the bulk of the modern skyscraper yet incorporate
historical souvenirs such as the colonnade, belvedere, keystone, and swag. Like Moore's Piazza d'Italia, New
Orleans (1975-80), and Alumni Center, University of California at Irvine (1983-85), these confident and colorful
buildings are intended to reassure the public that it need no longer feel that its cultural identity is threatened by
modern architecture.

That mood was encapsulated in Venice in 1980 when a varied group of American and European architects, including
Venturi, Moore, Paolo Portoghesi, Aldo Rossi, Hans Hollein, Ricardo Bofill, and Léon Krier, provided designs for an
exhibition organized by the Venice Biennale under the title, "The Presence of the Past." These key architects of
postmodernism represented several different outlooks but shared the ambition of banishing the fear of memory
from modern architectural design.

The many American architects in the 1970s and '80s who adopted a populist language scattered with classical
souvenirs included Philip Johnson and his partner John Burgee and the prolific Robert Stern. Johnson and Burgee
designed the AT&T Building, New York City (1978-84), a skyscraper with a Chippendale skyline. Their School of
Architecture Building, University of Houston (1982-85), is inspired by Ledoux's project for a House of Education
at Chaux (1773-79). Stern's Observatory Hill Dining Hall, University of Virginia, Charlottesville (1982-84), is in a
cheerful Jeffersonian classicism, while his Prospect Point Office Building, La Jolla, Calif. (1983-85), incorporates
Spanish Colonial references. Many postmodernist architects were either trained by or began their careers as
modernists, and many elements of Modernism carried over into postmodernism, especially in the work of architects
such as Graves, Venturi, and Richard Meier.

Rejecting the playful elements in such buildings as kitsch, some architects, notably Allan Greenberg and John
Blatteau, chose a more historically faithful classical style, as in their official reception rooms of the U.S.
Department of State in Washington, D.C. (1984-85). The most complete instance of historical accuracy is probably
the J. Paul Getty Museum, Malibu, Calif. (1970-75), an essay in Neoclassicism designed by the Los Angeles
partnership of Langdon and Wilson, who relied on archaeological advice to achieve the authentic character of a
Roman villa at Herculaneum.

A similar duality existed in this period in Britain, where the populist style of Graves was paralleled in the work of
Terry Farrell (TV-am Studios, Camden Town, London, 1983), and of James Stirling (Clore Gallery at the Tate
Gallery, London, 1980-87), while undeviating classicism was pursued by Quinlan Terry (Riverside Development,
Richmond, Surrey, 1986-88), Julian Bicknell (Henbury Rotunda, Cheshire, 1984-86), and John Simpson (Ashfold
House, Sussex, 1985-87). The spirit of classical urban renewal was represented in France by Christian Langlois's
Senate Building, rue de Vaugirard, Paris (1975), and the Regional Council Building in Orléans (1979-81). Urban
preoccupations have been more dramatically expressed in France by Ricardo Bofill's vast housing developments,
such as Les Espaces d'Abraxas, Marne-la-Vallée, near Paris (1978-83; Figure 27). The gargantuan scale of this
columnar architecture of prefabricated concrete pushes the language of classicism to its limits and beyond.

A third branch of postmodernism was represented by a neorationalist or elementalist approach that echoes the
stripped classicism of the 19th and early 20th century. This movement was again in part a reaction to changes in
the urban environment by the combination of commercial pressure and Modern movement ideology. Neorationalism
originated in Italy where the architect Aldo Rossi published an influential book, L'architettura della città (1966;
The Architecture of the City). Rossi's Modena Cemetery (1971-77) exhibits both his austerely fundamental
classicism and his concern for contextualism, since it echoes features of the local farms and factories of
Lombardy.

Neorationalist ideals have also been realized in the Italian-speaking Swiss canton of Ticino: for example, in the
work of Mario Campi (Casa Maggi, Arosio, 1980); Mario Botta; and Bruno Reichlin and Fabio Reinhardt, whose Casa
Tonino, Torricella (1972-74), is a pristine stripped Palladian essay in white concrete. Close to this work is a group of
buildings in the Basque region, including the School at Ikastola (1974-78) by Miguel Garay and José-Ignacio
Linazasoro; Casa Mendiola at Andoian (1977-78) by Garay; and the Rural Centre at Cordobilla (1981) by Manuel
Iniguez and Alberto Ustarroz. The projects of the German architect Oswald Matthias Ungers--for example, his
Stadtloggia in the Hildesheim marketplace (1980)--promoted the same kind of rationalist contextualism in
Germany. They have been influential on the design of infill buildings in other historic towns in Germany, Italy, and
France. The Viennese architect Hans Hollein also contributed to this vein of radical eclecticism, as in his
sophisticated interiors in the Austrian Travel Bureau, Vienna (1978), which distantly recall the city of Otto
Wagner and Josef Hoffmann. The urban work of the Belgian architect Rob Krier has been related to this
movement, as can be seen in his housing in the Ritterbergstrasse, Berlin (1978-80). His brother, Léon Krier, has
been influential in both the United States and Britain for his iconlike drawings of city planning schemes in a
ruthlessly simple classical style and for his polemical attacks on what he sees as the destruction by modern
technology of civic order and human dignity.

The 1920s revivalist element in the neorationalist movement is demonstrated in the United States in the work of
Richard Meier, for example in his Smith House, Darien, Conn. (1965-67), inspired by Le Corbusier's Citrohan and
Domino houses, and his more complex High Museum, Atlanta (1980-83). Helmut Jahn's Bank of the South West,
Houston (1982), recalls the Art Deco glass skyscraper, while the prolific Kevin Roche, originally a minimalist trained
in the 1950s by Eero Saarinen, returned to the heroic formalism of the early skyscrapers for his Morgan Bank
headquarters, New York City (1983-87), a 48-story skyscraper resting on a 70-foot-high entrance loggia of coupled
granite columns.

In Japan, Isozaki Arata and Yamashita Kazumasa led the move away from Brutalism and Metabolism toward a
postmodernism inspired by Charles Moore--for example, Isozaki's Tsukuba Centre building, Tsukuba Science City,
Ibaraki (1983), and Yamashita's Japan Folk Arts Museum, Tokyo (1982). In India, Charles Correa led a parallel
shift away from high-rise mass-housing of the Le Corbusier type. In the 1950s he worked in the International
style, as in his hotel of white concrete at Ahmadabad, but in later low-rise housing and in his book, The New
Landscape (1985), he demonstrated the virtues of a return to the more indigenous building types of the Third
World.

The spirit of technology is, by contrast, celebrated in the Centre Pompidou, Paris (1971-77), by Renzo Piano and
Richard Rogers. With its services and structure exposed externally and painted in primary colours, this exhibition
centre can be seen as an outrageous joke in the historic centre of Paris. Though defiantly "modern," it has a
postmodernist flavour as a playful statement of the modernist belief, going back at least to Viollet-le-Duc, in the
truthful exposure of the structural bones of a building. Rogers repeated the theme in his Lloyd's Building, London
(1984-86), but Stirling's addition to the Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart, Ger. (1977-82), is a key postmodernist building
in the Venturi sense: that is, it makes ironic references to the language of Schinkel without accepting the
fundamental principles of classicism.

EXPRESSIONIST ARCHITECTURE

Expressionism was a style in the Western arts which straddled the latter half of the 19th century and the first
half of the 20th. Until the 19th century, the arts had been principally concerned with the depiction of reality, and
artists used emotion--their own or their subject's--as one component of expression and not its guarantor.
Expressionist art, by contrast, dealt directly with the transmission of emotion. It was subjective and incoherent
rather than objective and precise. The urge towards the overt expression of feeling began with the Romantic
movement at the end of the 18th century, but true expressionism was only liberated a century later, when Freud's
work made complexes, neuroses and private obsessions acceptable subjects for polite study and for the arts.

In architecture, expressionism was identified with the works of architects in Germany, Holland and Scandinavia
from the end of World War I until the 1920s. The expressionist buildings are characterized by unusual angular or
organic forms and internal volumes, to some extent made possible by the imaginative use of reinforced concrete.
The historian Pevsner saw the style as a deviation from the development of the Modernist movement, working
under the influence of Art Nouveau in the political crisis following World War I. The prewar work most closely
identified with expressionism is probably that of Peter Behrens (1868 - 1940), particularly his factories for A.E.G.
in Berlin (1908-1913), and certainly the postwar work of Bauhaus, during the Weimar period, is felt to have
absorbed the principal features of expressionism, visually the stark expressive simplicity and theoretically a sense
of architecture's ethical obligation, as a tool for raising social standards. The best-known examples of postwar
expressionist architecture are the Chilehaus in Hamburg of 1923, the work of , Fritz Hoeger (1877 - 1949) and the
interior of the Grosses Schauspielhaus in Berlin of 1919 by , Hans Poelzig (1869 - 1936). Perhaps one of the most
striking of all buildings in the expressionist idiom was an early work of , Erich Mendelson (1887 - 1953), the
'Einstenurm', an observatory tower, built at Potsdam in 1920, an organic form with a motif of streamlining which
was to become so important in Western industrial design.

HIGH TECH ARCHITECTURE

High Tech is a 20th-century attitude to industrial materials which influenced architecture and design. The name
was a 1970s invention for fashionable attitudes to designing buildings and objects for the home, and the cult was
the title of a best-selling 1978 book by Joan Kron and Suzanne Slesin, High Tech: The Industrial Style and Source
Book for The Home. This book illustrated how to integrate into the home industrial products such as warehouse
shelving systems and factory floor coverings. It sparked off a fashion for such products all over the world. The
roots of High Tech can be traced back to the ideals of the Modern Movement during the 1920s. In the 1920s, for
example, the French architect Pierre Chareau used industrial glass bricks and shop steel ladders in several of his
buildings; in the 1930s the Museum of Modern Art in New York put on exhibitions showing the public the beauty of
industrial products such as laboratory glass. Later examples include Charles Eames's house in Santa Monica, built
using off-the-peg factory components, and the 1970s Pompidou Centre in Paris (by Renzo Piano and Richard
Rogers), which revealed heating ducts and utility conduits as decorative features for the outside of the building.
In the 1980s, High Tech became part of the language of postmodernist design.

DECONSTRUCTIVISM ARCHITECTURE

Deconstruction or deconstructivism is "part of a research into the dissolving limits of architecture," according to
Bernard Tschumi words at the 1988 Frist international symposium on deconstruction in London. It is looking for
"the between" According to Peter Eisenman at the same symposium, architects who fracture are merly illustrative;
they are not challenging an preconceptions. While the theory the "new way of seeing" for architects and academics
may be viewed as a decadence it more importantly offered an alternative incluence to the increasing banality of
postmodern formality.

The resulting buildings actually seem to fit the word - dismantled, fractured dissasmblages, with no visual logic, no
attempt at haramoniuos composition of facades no pragmatic reason. In a critique of Eisenmans Aronoff center at
UoC Frank gehry said " The best thing about peters buildings is the insane spaces he ends up with. All that other
stuff, the philosophy and all, is just bullshit as far as I'm concerned."

Deconstructivism basically means that something is disassembled, or taken apart instead of put together, and so
the postmodernists did with the old values and ideals of modernity that were no longer acceptable. They started to
undo those values, like the belief in authority, science, Christianity, and especially the structures of thinking that
stood behind these things. For instance, the protagonists of modernity had been proclaiming the death of God, but
the "mode" of dominion in the society of modernity remained fairly unchanged.

This necessarily went hand in hand with an analysis of all these structures, leading the postmodern movement to
some pertinent definitions of what modernity is or was. The consequence was a radical denial, a scepticism of
modernity as such, together with the emotional expression of feeling misled by the cultural paradigms of
modernity.

The case was (and is) then being made against all the features of modernity - which had been handed down to us,
namely from the founders of the "Modern Age", traditional scientists, philosophers and economists -and they were
exposed to a disassembly/dismantling, which could also be called deconstruction. This means that all the values and
habits and former models of thinking, all those "-isms", are simply being abolished in the first place. This is a very
radical starting point, for whoever tries to get rid of his thinking habits consequently will probably find him- or
herself ending up either in nonsense (lack of logic, being no longer necessary) or at the least in absolute nihilism
(lack of values, having no justification any more). Especially this nihilistic idea is apparently one of the significant
features of the postmodern movement, since the endeavour can always be found to replace the characteristics of
modernity with their negation, leading not seldom into a total rejection of all values together with a rather
anarchistic, however not aggressive, worldview.

ARCHITECTURE THEORY

You asked for it and here it is .... an Archpedia webpage dedicated to architectural theory. Providing individuals the
opportunity to explore the underlying meanings of architecture through theoretical essay's and interactive
deliberation.

One has assuredly pondered inquisitively how, what, and why on more than one occasion. Asking do you see white as
I see blue, or does it see you? A unique experience for you and I, that relies on our ability to comprehend
another's intentions. No you haven't entered the twilight zone you've only begun to reckon with the philosophical
variance or indifference as it may be of an architectural conspiracy.

The capacity for architecture to act as a discriminate mechanism that serves to invoke an impassioned response
and as an instrument to provoke individual experiences of space is seen as a function of how buildings are seen and
understood. This perceptual experience of individual subject's is restricted by each subject's personal ability to
comprehend the intentions of the mighty.

To cast this mental experience in stone as an explicit sensation across the board might be considered to be nothing
short of supernatural. So in order to maximize the results and thus achieve a greater level of shared
comprehension the artisan must utilize every tool in his/her bag.

There are innumerable ways one may view the question - what is the meaning of architecture? You can look at
architecture as purely structural solely to constitute functional space, with no ability to communicate. As in form
follows function .... Convincing yourself that the apple isn't sweet it merely fills your stomach. You may also choose
the opposing approach, to view architecture as a fine art with an emphasis on aesthetic qualities rather than as
functional facilities.

So - what - you ask is the meaning of architecture? Is it universal or is it in the mind of the experiencee? One
things for certain - it's up for debate here on Archpedia.

Were currently in the process of uploading several in depth theoretical essays for your enjoyment. Essay's by the
likes of Peter Eisenman, Bernard Tschumi, Daniel Libeskind, Plato, Leon Krier, Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius,
Aristotle, Louis Kahn, Rem Koolhaas, Vitruvious, James Stirling, Robert AM Stern, Michael Graves, and Charles
Jencks to name just a few.

Plato
- The Republic -

And isn't it necessary for the young to be influenced by these qualities everywhere, if they are to do what is truly
theirs to do? And these qualities may be seen in everything, in painting, and in ornament, in the making of
everything, cloths, buildings, pots ... And in the forms of living things. In all of these, order or good form and its
opposite have their place. Things without order, rhythm and harmony go with ill words and ill feelings, but good
order goes with courage and self-control.

Aristotle
- The Poetics -
As tragedy is an imitation of personages better than the ordinary man, we should follow the example of good
portrait-painters, who reproduce the distinctive features of man, and at the same time, without losing the likeness,
make him handsomer than he is.

Vitruvius
- On Architecture -

Therefore it is agreed that number is found from the articulation of the body, and that there is a correspondence
of the fixed ratio of the separate members to the general form of the body. It remains that we take up those
writers who in planning the temples of the immortal gods so ordained the parts of the work, that buy the help of
proportion and symmetry, their several and general distribution its rendered congruous.

Robert Ventrui
- Learning from Las Vegas -

By limiting itself to strident articulations of the pure architectural elements of space, structure and program,
modern architecture's expression has become a dry expressionism, empty and boring - and in that end
irresponsible. Ironically, the modern architecture of today, while rejecting explicit symbolism and frivolous
applique ornament, has distorted the whole building into one big ornament. In substituting 'articulation' for
decoration, it has become a duck.

Louis Kahn
- The Message of Louis Kahn -

Schools began with a man under a tree who did not know he was a teacher, discussing his realization with a few who
did not know they were students. The students reflected on what was exchanged and how good it was to be in the
presence of this man. They aspired that their sons listened to such a man. Soon spaces were erected and the first
schools became.

Bernard Tschumi
- Architecture and Disjunction -

Exceeding functionalist dogmas, semiotic systems, historical precedents, or formalized products of past social or
economic constraints is not necessarily a matter of subversion but a matter of preserving the erotic capacity of
architecture by disrupting the form that most conservative societies expect of it.

Michael Graves
- A case of figurative architecture -

When applying this distinction of language to architecture, it could be said that the standard form of building is its
common or internal language - determined by pragmatic, constructional and technical requirements. In contrast, the
poetic form of architecture is responsive to issues external to the building, and incorporates the three-dimensional
expression of the myths and rituals of a society.