Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Architecture is a fluid art. Architectural styles do not start and stop at precise times, but are often associated with general time periods spanning decades highlighting their rise to prominence and popular appeal and their fall from popularity. After a style has gone out of fashion, there are often revivals and re-interpretations.
Movement
Idea
Ideology / Philosophy
Ancient Egypt
3,050 BC to 900 BC In ancient Egypt, powerful rulers constructed monumental pyramids, temples, and shrines.
Romanesque
500 to 1200 AD As Rome spread across Europe, heavier, stocky Romanesque architecture with rounded arches emerged.
Gothic Architecture
1100 to 1450 AD Innovative builders created the great cathedrals of Europe.
Renaissance Architecture
1400 to 1600 AD A return to classical ideas ushered an "age of "awakening" in Italy, France, and England.
Baroque Architecture
1600 to 1830 AD In Italy, the Baroque style is reflected in opulent and dramatic churches with irregular shapes and extravagant ornamentation. In France, the highly ornamented Baroque style combines with Classical restraint. Russian aristorcrats were impressed by Versailles in France, and incorporated Baroque ideas in the building of St. Petersburg. Elements of the elaborate Baroque style are found throughout Europe.
Rococo Architecture
1650 to 1790 AD During the last phase of the Baroque period, builders constructed graceful white buildings with sweeping curves.
Georgian Architecture
1720 to 1800 AD Georgian was a stately, symmetrical style that dominated in Great Britain and Ireland and influenced building styles in the American colonies.
Victorian Architecture
1840 to 1900 AD Industrialization brought many innovations in architecture. Victorian styles include Gothic Revival, Italianate, Stick, Eastlake, Queen Anne, Romanesque and Second Empire.
Victorian Architecture
1840 to 1900 AD Industrialization brought many innovations in architecture. Victorian styles include Gothic Revival, Italianate, Stick, Eastlake, Queen Anne, Romanesque and Second Empire.
Pre-Modernism
Industrial Architecture
Industrial architecture is the design and construction of buildings serving industry. Such buildings rose in importance with the industrial revolution, and were some of the pioneering structure of modern architecture. The AEG turbine factory was built around 1909, in the Berlin district of Moabit, the best known work of architect Peter Behrens. It is an influential and well-known example of industrial architecture. Its revolutionary design features 100m long and 15m tall glass and Steel walls on either sides. A bold move and world first that would have a durable impact on Architecture as a whole.
Modernism
Ornament is Crime
Every period had its style: why was it that our period was the only one to be denied a style? By style was meant ornament. I said, weep not. Behold! What makes our period so important is that it is incapable of producing new ornament. We have out-grown ornament, we have struggled through to a state without ornament. Behold, the time is at hand, fulfilment awaits us. Soon the streets of the cities will glow like white walls! ~ Adolf Loos
Art Deco
Adolf Loos
Bauhaus
Bauhaus
- founded by Walter Gropius in Weimar, Germany - The Bauhaus style became one of the most influential currents in Modernist architecture and modern design. - The Bauhaus had a profound influence upon subsequent developments in art, architecture, graphic design, interior design, industrial design, and typography. - white, colors, geometrical compositions &
- Ludwig Mies van der Rohe - Le Corbusier - Alvar Aalto - Frank Lloyd Wright
Le Corbusier
- worked near Berlin for the renowned architect Peter Behrens, - where he may have met Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius. - Le Corbusier felt that all men have the same needs, and that a house should be a machine for living.
Brutalism
Brutalist architecture is a style of architecture that flourished from the 1950s to the mid-1970s, spawned from the modernist architectural movement. Examples are typically very linear, fortresslike and blockish, often with a predominance of concrete construction. Initially the style came about for government buildings, low-rent housing and shopping centres to create functional structures at a low cost, but eventually designers adopted the look for other uses such as college buildings. The English architects Alison and Peter Smithson coined the term in 1953, from the French bton brut, or "raw concrete", a phrase used by Le Corbusier to describe the poured board-marked concrete with which he constructed many of his post-World War II buildings. Brutalism as an architectural philosophy, rather than a style, was often also associated with a socialist utopian ideology, which tended to be supported by its designers, especially Alison and Peter Smithson, near the height of the style.
The best known early Brutalist architecture is the work of the French architect Le Corbusier, in particular his Unit d'Habitation (1952) and the 1953 Secretariat Building in Chandigarh,
Aalvar Aalto
Aalto's career spans the changes in style from (Nordic Classicism) to purist International Style Modernism to a more personal, synthetic and idiosyncratic Modernism. Aalto's wide field of design activity ranges from the large scale of city planning and architecture to interior design, furniture and glassware design and painting.
Early Work
Organic Architecture
Organic architecture is a philosophy of architecture which promotes harmony between human habitation and the natural world through design approaches so sympathetic and well integrated with its site, that buildings, furnishings, and surroundings become part of a unified, interrelated composition.
Post Modernism
Postmodern Architecture
Postmodern architecture has also been described as neo-eclectic, where reference and ornament have returned to the facade, replacing the aggressively unornamented modern styles. Postmodern architects may regard many modern buildings as soulless and bland, overly simplistic and abstract. This contrast was exemplified in the juxtaposition of the "whites" against the "grays," in which the "whites" were seeking to continue (or revive) the modernist tradition of purism and clarity, while the "grays" were embracing a more multifaceted cultural vision, seen in Robert Venturi's statement rejecting the "black or white" world view of modernism in favor of "black and white and sometimes gray." Postmodernism is a rejection of strict rules set by the early modernists and seeks meaning and expression in the use of building techniques, forms, and stylistic references.
Postmodern Buildings
traditional gable roof, in place of the iconic flat roof of modernism diverse aesthetics which gives emphasis on unique forms. - Return of "wit, ornament and reference - breaking away from convention - Neo-eclectic - where reference and ornament meet
Deconstructivism
Deconstructivism is a development of postmodern architecture that began in the late 1980s. It is influenced by the theory of "Deconstruction", which is a form of semiotic analysis. It is characterized by fragmentation, an interest in manipulating a structure's surface or skin, non-rectilinear shapes which appear to distort and dislocate elements of architecture, such as structure and envelope. The finished visual appearance of buildings that exhibit deconstructivist "styles" is characterized by unpredictability and controlled chaos.