You are browsing the archives of 2008 January.

The house seems to fly. The Querkraft studio constructed a three- storey villa above a hill with a 25 degree incline on the city limits of Vienna. The building extends up to two thirds over the slope and creates a sheltered open-air space This is made possible by a two-storey construction of a steel space [...]

Throughout the middle decades of the 19th century architects lacked a clear view of their role in the history of architecture. Nevertheless, William Butterfield and G. E. Street in England built magnificent urban churches quite unlike anything previously known; Alexander Thomson in Scotland and Henri Labrouste in France both produced masterworks of genuinely urban architecture [...]

By the mid-1970s a wide dissatisfaction had grown up with “Modern” architecture, which began to be viewed as an arrogant imposition of inadequate environmental ideas upon society. Its basic ideals were seriously questioned and eventually its “death” was recorded. It was soon followed by the growth of a fashionable “Post-Modernism” invented by a number of [...]

As the Roman Empire distintegrated amid war and rebellion, living standards in western Europe declined precipitously, and so did the population ? to a third of what it had been. Poverty and lawlessness were universal. Marauding pirates converged on the West from Africa, Scandinavia and the Russian Steppes, pillaging deep into the European heartland. The [...]

As Greek architecture ran its course from archaic to Classical, and from Classical to Hellenistic, a small community in central Italy grew to great power. While Alexander was conquering the East, Rome was establishing herself as a dominant force in Italy. Before the beginning of the 1st century, her armies had over-run Greece. As a [...]

American architecture in the first four decades of this century, if perceived as having any continuity at all, is held together by the least typical of all its architects, Frank Lloyd Wright. In the closing decades of the previous century, the multi-storey commercial building had not only been invented in technical terms, but also developed [...]

Out of the immediate military reach of the great empires of Egypt, Babylonia, Assyria and Persia lay the Aegean coast (now western Turkey), the Aegean islands and the valleys of the hilly Greek peninsula beyond. The communities here developed their own small economies and benefited from the cultural and technological advances of the big empires [...]

Unlike many other parts of the world, Africa has comparatively little surviving historical architecture. There are exceptions, like the extraordinary Coptic churches of Lalibela, Ethiopia, which were hewn out of the living rock by 13th-century African Christians. Early travellers from Europe gave accounts of African cities, including a 16th-century description of the splendid palace of [...]

Romantic Revolutionaries in the history of architecture is very much at the same time as the “free-style” stream and often linked with it, were others who broke with past historicism. As architects struggled to liberate themselves from the ponderous and overdressed style associated with the period after the Franco-Prussian War a new sensibility began to [...]

Times began to improve in the West after 900. The climate was gradually becoming warmer, lengthening the growing season, and the population began to expand again. The raiders settled down, the Vikings being granted Normandy. The Arab sorties across the Mediterranean were curbed and the Huns turned to agriculture. Very slowly, people began to build [...]