Architecture
The earliest surviving text on architectural theories is the 1st century AD treatise De architectura by the Roman architect Vitruvius, according to whom a good building embodies firmitas, utilitas, and venustas (durability, utility, and beauty).
During the Middle Ages, pan-European styles of Romanesque and Gothic cathedrals and abbeys emerged while the Renaissance favored Classical forms implemented by architects known by name.
Modern architecture began after World War I as an avant-garde movement that sought to develop a completely new style appropriate for a new post-war social and economic order focused on meeting the needs of the middle and working classes.
The earliest surviving written work on the subject of architecture is De architectura by the Roman architect Vitruvius in the early 1st century AD.
[14] According to Vitruvius, a good building should satisfy the three principles of firmitas, utilitas, venustas,[15][16] commonly known by the original translation – firmness, commodity and delight.
Leon Battista Alberti, who elaborates on the ideas of Vitruvius in his treatise, De re aedificatoria, saw beauty primarily as a matter of proportion, although ornament also played a part.
In the 16th century, Italian Mannerist architect, painter and theorist Sebastiano Serlio wrote Tutte L'Opere D'Architettura et Prospetiva (Complete Works on Architecture and Perspective).
This treatise exerted immense influence throughout Europe, being the first handbook that emphasized the practical rather than the theoretical aspects of architecture, and it was the first to catalog the five orders.
[21] Le Corbusier's contemporary Ludwig Mies van der Rohe is said to have stated in a 1959 interview that "architecture starts when you carefully put two bricks together.
[27] Léon Krier frames the dominance of traditional styles in private architecture as an "overwhelming democratic reality," contrasting with the prevalence of modernist designs in public commissions.
Neolithic archaeological sites include Göbekli Tepe and Çatalhöyük in Turkey, Jericho in the Levant, Mehrgarh in Pakistan, Skara Brae in Orkney, and Cucuteni-Trypillian culture settlements in Romania, Moldova and Ukraine.
Early Asian writings on architecture include the Kao Gong Ji of China from the 7th–5th centuries BC; the Shilpa Shastras of ancient India; Manjusri Vasthu Vidya Sastra of Sri Lanka and Araniko of Nepal .
Examples can be found throughout the Middle East, Turkey, North Africa, the Indian Sub-continent and in parts of Europe, such as Spain, Albania, and the Balkan States, as the result of the expansion of the Ottoman Empire.
[30][31] In Europe during the Medieval period, guilds were formed by craftsmen to organize their trades and written contracts have survived, particularly in relation to ecclesiastical buildings.
From about 900 onward, the movements of both clerics and tradesmen carried architectural knowledge across Europe, resulting in the pan-European styles Romanesque and Gothic.
There was also the rise of the "gentleman architect" who usually dealt with wealthy clients and concentrated predominantly on visual qualities derived usually from historical prototypes, typified by the many country houses of Great Britain that were created in the Neo Gothic or Scottish baronial styles.
Formal architectural training in the 19th century, for example at École des Beaux-Arts in France, gave much emphasis to the production of beautiful drawings and little to context and feasibility.
Following this lead, the Bauhaus school, founded in Weimar, Germany in 1919, redefined the architectural bounds prior set throughout history, viewing the creation of a building as the ultimate synthesis – the apex – of art, craft, and technology.
Immediately after World War I, pioneering modernist architects sought to develop a completely new style appropriate for a new post-war social and economic order, focused on meeting the needs of the middle and working classes.
The approach of the Modernist architects was to reduce buildings to pure forms, removing historical references and ornament in favor of functional details.
Buildings displayed their functional and structural elements, exposing steel beams and concrete surfaces instead of hiding them behind decorative forms.
Architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright developed organic architecture, in which the form was defined by its environment and purpose, with an aim to promote harmony between human habitation and the natural world with prime examples being Robie House and Fallingwater.
Architects such as Mies van der Rohe, Philip Johnson and Marcel Breuer worked to create beauty based on the inherent qualities of building materials and modern construction techniques, trading traditional historic forms for simplified geometric forms, celebrating the new means and methods made possible by the Industrial Revolution, including steel-frame construction, which gave birth to high-rise superstructures.
By mid-century, Modernism had morphed into the International Style, an aesthetic epitomized in many ways by the Twin Towers of New York's World Trade Center designed by Minoru Yamasaki.
But an even younger postwar generation critiqued modernism and Brutalism for being too austere, standardized, monotone, and not taking into account the richness of human experience offered in historical buildings across time and in different places and cultures.
[34] Beginning in the late 1950s and 1960s, architectural phenomenology emerged as an important movement in the early reaction against modernism, with architects like Charles Moore in the United States, Christian Norberg-Schulz in Norway, and Ernesto Nathan Rogers and Vittorio Gregotti, Michele Valori, Bruno Zevi in Italy, who collectively popularized an interest in a new contemporary architecture aimed at expanding human experience using historical buildings as models and precedents.
[Notes 2] The preparatory processes for the design of any large building have become increasingly complicated,[37] and require preliminary studies of such matters as durability, sustainability, quality, money, and compliance with local laws.
Many developers, those who support the financing of buildings, have become educated to encourage the facilitation of environmentally sustainable design, rather than solutions based primarily on immediate cost.
[45] It involves the systematic investigation of existing social, ecological, and soil conditions and processes in the landscape, and the design of interventions that will produce the desired outcome.
Naval architecture also involves the formulation of safety regulations and damage control rules and the approval and certification of ship designs to meet statutory and non-statutory requirements.
