Architecture-Building & Construction

In the 1800s innovations in technology and the spread of railroads made possible the rapid growth of the Midwest and West. Mass-produced building parts, manufactured in the East, could be ordered from catalogs and shipped West by rail. A major fire in 1871 destroyed downtown Chicago, Illinois, and offered building opportunities for American architects, who over the next 25 years developed the first skyscrapers. This brand-new building type, devised in the United States, influenced architecture around the world from the late 1800s into the 2000s. During the 20th century architects and entrepreneurs vied to build the tallest skyscraper—a contest that continues today. Another unique building type developed in America was the single-family suburban house—a detached or stand-alone building, as opposed to the attached or semiattached suburban house popular elsewhere. It, too, influenced architecture outside the United States.

The emigration of European architects in the 1930s and 1940s brought European modernism to the United States, and in the second half of the 20th century America became a major architectural force. By the late 1900s and early 2000s American architects worked around the globe, while architects from Japan and Spain, to mention only two examples, received commissions for major public buildings in the United States.

NATIVE AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE

Tepee Housing The tepee, a portable, tentlike structure, was popular with nomadic Native American tribes because it was easy to assemble and to dismantle. Animal hides were stretched around a framework of poles to create a cone-shaped enclosure with a chimney opening at the top. A flap served as the door, and animal skins were used for insulation on the floor.Paul Vandevelder/Liaison Agency

Conservative estimates suggest that at least 24 million indigenous people lived in North America, the Caribbean, and what is now Mexico when navigator Christopher Columbus stumbled into the New World in 1492. The native peoples can be classified in large cultural groups that together spoke as many as 600 languages. Over thousands of years they had developed unique methods of building adapted to the prevailing cultural and climatic conditions of their respective regions. In nearly all areas except the arid high plains and the Great Basin of the West and Southwest, individuals lived as part of family groups in extended communal houses. The arrival of Spanish explorers in the 1500s brought the horse to North America. The plains tribes adopted a nomadic way of life as a result, following on horseback enormous herds of bison (also called buffalo) and basing their culture on coexistence with the bison.

Kwakiutl Plank House The indigenous peoples who lived along the Pacific Northwest coast constructed rectangular houses covered with cedar planks. Many of these plank houses had brightly painted decorations and featured totem poles in front that served as family crests. Although this building is in British Columbia, similar plank houses were built in what became the United States.Gary Braasch/Corbis

In the Northeast woodlands, Native Americans built dwellings with light wooden frames made of saplings and covered with large slabs of bark,.. or sometimes with hides. They could easily remove these coverings for better ventilation in the summer months. West of Lake Ontario, the indigenous peoples made similar although slightly smaller dwellings. On the plains they built portable cone-shaped dwellings called tepees (also spelled tipis), which they covered with tanned buffalo hides. In the Pacific Northwest, peoples who based their existence on salmon fishing fashioned large communal houses from broad split planks of cedar or redwood. In the arid Southwest, villages of clustered, stacked houses were built of stone in higher elevations and of sun-dried adobe brick along major rivers such as the Rio Grande.

Adobe Building Adobe, a sun-dried clay brick, has been an important construction material in the southwestern United States. The Taos Pueblo shown here is typical of the apartment-style housing made from adobe by Tewa-speaking Native Americans. Inhabited since at least the 13th century, the Taos Pueblo currently houses 200 people.Kathleen Campbell/Liaison Agency

Nearly all of these house forms, intimately connected with the pattern of life of indigenous groups, were rejected by the new European arrivals. Such forms were retained only in the American Southwest and in Mexico, where indigenous structures tended to resemble buildings of rural Spain. In those regions, Spanish arrivals used Native American labor to build presidios (military forts), haciendas (large estates), and mission churches on a scale larger than the natives used for their own buildings. But Europeans favored their own building forms and practices in virtually every other area they controlled in America. European settlers thus gradually forgot the ways in which native building traditions responded to the local environment.

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