Kategoria BISAC: Architecture >> History - General

As models and paradigms, patterns have been helping to orient architects since the Middle Ages. But patterns are also the basis of the history of ornament, an aesthetic phenomenon that links all times and cultures at a fundamental level. Ornament - and hence pattern as well - was abolished by the avant-garde in the first half of the twentieth century, but the notion of pattern has taken on new meaning and importance since the 1960s.

Complexity research has ultimately shown that even highly complex, dynamic patterns may be based on simple behavioral rules, and that has allowed the...

The title of this issue of the Nexus Network Journal, "Architecture, Mathematics and Structure," is deliberately ambiguous. At first glance, it might seem to indicate the relationship between what buildings look like and how they stand up. This is indeed one aspect of what we are concerned with here. But on a deeper level, the fundamental concept of structure is what connects architecture to mathematics. Both architecture and mathematics are highly structured formal systems expressed through a symbolic language. For architecture, the generating structure might be geometrical, musical,...

A symbolic locus embodying myriad meanings, the political center of the eastern Mediterranean, and one of the old world's largest urban centers, Constantinople was the site of large-scale urban and architectural interventions. Changing visions--the changing political, cultural, and religious orientations of those who lived there and those who ruled from there--inscribed themselves in its spaces, transforming it and lending it new meanings. Constantinopolis/Istanbul is about such a period of change and remaking: following its capture in 1453, the city was host to a grandly...

Thomas Jefferson's design for the University of Virginia is widely hailed as a masterpiece. It is his greatest architectural accomplishment, the summation of his quest for intellectual freedom. The story of the University encompasses the political and architectural worlds, as Jeffeson struggled against great opposition to establish a new type of educational institution. Thomas Jefferson's Academical Village offers a comprehensive look at Jefferson's design for the University, at how it came into being, at the different perecptions of its successes and failures, and at the...

Marion Manley (1893-1984), Miami's first female architect, successfully maintained an independent architectural practice in South Florida over much of the twentieth century. In this first comprehensive, illustrated work on Manley, Catherine Lynn and Carie Penabad explore the relationship of Manley's work to her life and to the broader historical moment of which she was a part, including the overall development of the city of Miami. The book catalogs all of Manley's known work, includes images and plans where available, and provides detailed examinations of what the authors consider to be...

The great majority of the South's plantation homes have been destroyed over time, and many have long been forgotten. In Lost Plantations of the South, Marc R. Matrana weaves together photographs, diaries and letters, architectural renderings, and other rare documents to tell the story of sixty of these vanquished estates and the people who once called them home.

From plantations that were destroyed by natural disaster such as Alabama's Forks of Cypress, to those that were intentionally demolished such as Seven Oaks in Louisiana and Mount Brilliant in Kentucky, Matrana resurrects...

Vitruvius's De architectura is the only major work on architecture to survive from classical antiquity, and until the eighteenth century it was the text to which all other architectural treatises referred. While European classicists have focused on the factual truth of the text itself, English-speaking architects and architectural theorists have viewed it as a timeless source of valuable metaphors. Departing from both perspectives, Indra Kagis McEwen examines the work's meaning and significance in its own time.

Vitruvius dedicated De architectura to his patron Augustus...

Maya architecture is often described as "massive" and "monumental," but experiments at Copan, Honduras, convinced Elliot Abrams that 300 people could have built one of the large palaces there in only 100 days.

In this groundbreaking work, Abrams explicates his theory of architectural energetics, which involves translating structures into volumes of raw and manufactured materials that are then multiplied by the time required for their production and assembly to determine the labor costs of past construction efforts. Applying this method to residential structures of the Late Classic...