As a process, architecture is the activity of designing and constructing buildings and other physical structures primarily to provide shelter. A wider definition often includes the design of the total built environment, from the macro level of how a building integrates with its surrounding landscape (see town planning, urban design, and landscape architecture) to the micro level of architectural or construction details and, sometimes, furniture. Wider still, architecture is the activity of designing any kind of system.

As a profession, architecture is the role of those persons or machines providing architectural services.

As documentation, usually based on drawings, architecture defines the structure and/or behavior of a building or any other kind of system that is to be or has been constructed.

Building architects have as their primary object providing for the spatial and shelter needs of people in groups of some kind (families, schools, churches, businesses, etc.) by the creative organization of materials and components in a land- or city-scape, dealing with mass, space, form, volume, texture, structure, light, shadow, materials, program, and pragmatic elements such as cost, construction limitations and technology, to achieve an end which is functional, economical, practical and often with artistic and aesthetic aspects. This distinguishes architecture from engineering design, which has as its primary object the creative manipulation of materials and forms using mathematical and scientific principles.

Architectural works are perceived as cultural and political symbols and works of art. Historical civilizations are often known primarily through their architectural achievements. Such buildings as the pyramids of Egypt and the Roman Colosseum are cultural symbols, and are an important link in public consciousness, even when scholars have discovered much about a past civilization through other means. Cities, regions and cultures continue to identify themselves with (and are known by) their architectural monuments.

Source: Wikipedia

The Vienna Secession was founded on 3 April 1897 by artists Gustav Klimt, Koloman Moser, Josef Hoffmann, Joseph Maria Olbrich, Max Kurzweil, and others. Although Otto Wagner is widely recognised as a fundamental member of the Vienna Secession he was not a founding member. The Secession artists objected to the prevailing conservatism of the Vienna Künstlerhaus with its traditional orientation toward Historicism.The Berlin and Munich Secession movements preceded the Vienna Secession, which held its first exhibition in 1898.

The group earned considerable credit for its exhibition policy, which made the French Impressionists somewhat familiar to the Viennese public. The 14th Secession exhibition, designed by Josef Hoffmann and dedicated to Ludwig van Beethoven, was especially famous. A statue of Beethoven by Max Klinger stood at the center, with Klimt’s Beethoven frieze mounted around it.

Other Secession artists

• Rudolph Bacher
• Richard Gerstl
• Max Fabiani
• Albert Paris von Gütersloh
• Oskar Kokoschka
• Jože Plečnik
• Max Kurzweil
• Carl Moll
• Koloman Moser
• Egon Schiele
• Malva Schalek
• Othmar Schimkowitz
• Oskar Laske
• Joseph Maria Olbrich

Links

• Vienna Secession – Wikipedia
• Austrian artistic movement

Notable Victorian era cities include London, Toronto, Boston, Richmond, Saint Paul, St. Louis, Louisville, Galena, IL, Galveston, San Francisco, Chicago, Detroit, Glasgow, Nelson, Sydney, Melbourne, Manchester, Kolkata, Mumbai, Pittsburgh, Philidelphia, Grand Rapids, and New Orleans.

Varieties of Victorian architecture

• British Arts and Crafts movement
• Gothic Revival
• Italianate
• Jacobethan (the precursor to the Queen Anne style)
• Neoclassicism
• Neo-Grec
• Painted ladies
• Queen Anne
  Renaissance Revival
• Romanesque Revival (includes Richardsonian Romanesque)
• Second Empire
• Stick-Eastlake
• Industrial architecture

Links

• Victorian architecture – Wikipedia

Although rarely used in the sense of “U.S. citizen”, Usonian is more common than the alternatives. Variants of the Jacobs House design are still in existence today and do not look overly dated. The Usonian design is considered among the aesthetic origins of the popular “ranch” tract home popular in the American west of the 1950s.

‘Usonian’ is a term usually referring to a group of approximately fifty middle-income family homes designed by Frank Lloyd Wright beginning in 1936 with the Jacobs House. The “Usonian Homes” were typically small, single-story dwellings without a garage or much storage, L-shaped to fit around a garden terrace on odd (and cheap) lots, and environmentally conscious with native materials, flat roofs and large cantilevered overhangs for passive solar heating and natural cooling, natural lighting with clerestory windows, and radiant-floor heating. A strong visual connection between the interior and exterior spaces is an important characteristic of all Usonian homes. The word carport was coined by Wright to describe an overhang for a vehicle to park under.

Noted Usonian houses

• Arthur Pieper residence, Paradise Valley, Arizona
• Dorothy H. Turkel House, Detroit, Michigan
• Herbert and Katherine Jacobs First House, Madison, Wisconsin
• Kentuck Knob, Western Pennsylvania
• Muirhead Farmhouse, Hampshire, Illinois
• Pope-Leighey House, Alexandria, Virginia
• Rosenbaum House, Florence, Alabama
• Weltzheimer/Johnson House, Oberlin, Ohio
• Zimmerman House, Manchester, New Hampshire
• Duncan House, Donegal, Pennsylvania (Dismantled and relocated from its original location in Lisle, IL)
• Louis Penfield House, Willoughby, Ohio
• Robert Levin House, Kalamazoo, Michigan
• Bernard Schwartz House, Two Rivers, Wisconsin
• Usonia Homes, Pleasantville, New York
  o Sol Friedman House
  o Edward Serlin House
  o Roland Reisley House
• Frank S. Sander House, Stamford, Connecticut

Links

• Usonian – Wikipedia
• List of Usonian houses

Ukrainian Baroque is distinct from the Western European Baroque in having more moderate ornamentation and simpler forms, and as such was considered more constructivist. Many Ukrainian Baroque buildings have been preserved, including several buildings in Kiev Pechersk Lavra and the Vydubychi Monastery in Kiev.

The best examples of Baroque painting are the church paintings in the Holy Trinity Church of the Kiev Pechersk Lavra. Rapid development in engraving techniques occurred during the Ukrainian Baroque period. Advances utilized a complex system of symbolism, allegories, heraldic signs, and sumptuous ornamentation.

Certain features of the Ukrainian baroque, such as bud and pear-shaped domes, were borrowed by the similar Naryshkin baroque movement in 17th-18th century Moscow.

Links

• Ukrainian Baroque – Wikipedia
• Baroque in Encyclopedia of Ukraine

The four-centred arch, now known as the Tudor arch, was a defining feature; some of the most remarkable oriel windows belong to this period; the mouldings are more spread out and the foliage becomes more naturalistic. Nevertheless, "Tudor style" is an awkward style-designation, with its implied suggestions of continuity through the period of the Tudor dynasty and the misleading impression that there was a style break at the accession of Stuart James I in 1603. In the domestic architecture one would find the walls made of wattle and daub.

As a modern residential style, what is usually referred to as Tudor (or sometimes Mock Tudor) is more akin to the rustic Tudorbethan architecture.

Tudor style buildings have six distinctive features

1. Decorative half-timbering
2. Steeply pitched roof
3. Prominent cross gables
4. Tall, narrow doors and windows
5. Small window panes
6. Large chimneys, often topped with decorative chimney pots

Links

• Tudor style architecture – Wikipedia

The Sumerians were aware of ‘the craft of building’ as a divine gift taught to men by the gods as listed in me 28. Sumerian Architecture is the foundation of later Hebrew, Phoenician, Anatolian, Hittite, Hurrian, Ugaritic, Babylonian, Assyrian, Persian, Islamic, and to a certain extent Grecoroman and therefore Western Architectures.

The Frankie of Sumerian architecture is overwhelmingly one of clay masonry and of increasingly complex forms of stacked bricks. Because these brick were unbaked Sumerian buildings eventually deteriorated. They were periodically destroyed, leveled, and rebuilt on the same spot. This planned structural lifecycle gradually raised the level of cities, so that they came to be elevated above the surrounding plain. The resulting hills are known as tells, and are found throughout the ancient Near East. Civic buildings slowed decay by using cones of colored stone, terracotta panels, and clay nails driven into the adobe-brick to create a protective sheath that decorated the facade.

Links

• Sumerian architecture – Wikipedia

This serves as a bridge between modernism and post-modernism, however there remain gray areas as to where one category ends and the other begins. In the 1980s, high-tech architecture became more difficult to distinguish from post-modern architecture. Many of its themes and ideas were absorbed into the language of the post-modern architectural schools.

Like Brutalism, Structural Expressionist buildings reveal their structure on the outside as well as the inside, but with visual emphasis placed on the internal steel and/or concrete skeletal structure as opposed to exterior concrete walls.

The style’s premier practitioners include the British architect Norman Foster, whose work has since earned him knighthood, and Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava, known for his organic, skeleton-like designs.

Buildings designed in this style usually consist of a clear glass facade, with the building’s network of support beams exposed behind it. Perhaps the most famous and easily recognized building built in this style is I.M. Pei’s Bank of China Tower in Hong Kong. The World Trade Center in New York City, although generally considered to be an International Style building, was technically a Structural Expressionist design due to its load-bearing steel exoskeleton.

Links

• Structural Expressionism – Wikipedia

The style was the first to incorporate electric light into architectural structure. In the First Class dining room of the SS Normandie, fitted out 1933 – 35, twelve tall pillars of Lalique glass and 38 columns lit from within illuminated the room. The Strand Palace Hotel foyer (1930), preserved from demolition by the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1969, marked one of the first uses of internally-lit architectural glass, and coincidentally was the first Moderne interior preserved in a museum.

The Normandie Hotel, which opened in 1942, is built in the stylized shape of Normandie the ship, and it includes the ship’s original sign.

Although Streamline Moderne houses are less common than streamline commercial buildings, residences do exist. The Lydecker House in Los Angeles, built by Howard Lydecker, is an example of Streamline Moderne design in residential architecture.

The style was applied to appliances such as electric clocks, sewing machines, small radio receivers and vacuum cleaners. These also employed developments in materials science including aluminum and bakelite.

Links

• Streamline Moderne – Wikipedia

Portuguese Suave was the result of the ideas of several Portuguese architects who, from the beginning of the 20th century, looked to create "genuine Portuguese Architecture". One of the mentors of this style was the architect Raul Lino, creator of the theory of the "Portuguese house". The result of this current was the creation of a style of architecture that used the modernist engineering characteristics, masked by a mixture of exterior aesthetic elements borrowed from the ancient and traditional architecture of Portugal.

Typical buildings of the Portuguese Suave style used modern engineering techniques, making use of concrete structures with a high build quality. However, in contrast to modernist buildings, modern techniques and lines were hidden using ornamental elements. The ornamental elements in the style were borrowed from the architecture of the 17th and 18th centuries and from regional Portuguese architectural styles. Typically, decorative elements such as rough rock, peaked tiled roofs, pinnacles, pilasters, balconies, etc were used. Many, especially larger building, also had arches and towers topped with nationalistic symbols such as armillary spheres.

Links

• Soft Portuguese style – Wikipedia