Sancta Sophia is the most interesting building on the world's surface. Like Karnak in Egypt, or the Athenian Parthenon, it is one of the four great pinnacles of architecture, but unlike them this is no ruin, nor does it belong to a past world of constructive ideas although it precedes by seven hundred years the fourth culmination of the building art in Chartres, Amiens or Bourges, and thus must ever stand as the supreme monument of the Christian cycle. Far from being a ruin the church is one of the best preserved of so ancient monuments, and in regard to its treatment by the Turks we can only...
Sancta Sophia is the most interesting building on the world's surface. Like Karnak in Egypt, or the Athenian Parthenon, it is one of the four great pi...
The history of architecture, as usually written, with its theory of utilitarian origins from the hut and the tumulus, and further developments in that way -the adjustment of forms to the conditions of local circumstance; the clay of Mesopotamia, the granite of Egypt, and marble of Greece-is rather the history of building: of 'Architecture' it may be, in the sense we so often use the word, but not the Architecture which is the synthesis of the fine arts, the commune of all the crafts. Behind every style of architecture there is an earlier style, in which the germ of every form is to be found;...
The history of architecture, as usually written, with its theory of utilitarian origins from the hut and the tumulus, and further developments in that...
