Architecture-Building & Construction

Court of the Lions, Alhambra The Court of the Lions is in the center of the Alhambra in Granada, Spain. The rooms surrounding the court are famous for their intricately detailed stucco reliefs. The Islamic palace fortress was built for the Moorish kings during the 13th and 14th centuries.Bridgeman Art Library, London/New York

During Umayyad and early Abbasid times, princes of... the caliphs' families built a number of desert palaces in Syria and Iraq. Some of these had hunting parks—like those of late Sassanian kings—or domed baths, derived from late Roman types of buildings. Thus, these palaces demonstrate the synthesis of the Western and Eastern artistic heritage that characterized early Islamic art, and also demonstrate its relative freedom before the traditional proscriptions against figural art were codified, not in the Qur'an but in the Hadith (Traditions) in the 9th century. The Umayyad palaces featured mosaics, wall paintings, and plaster relief sculpture showing courtiers, animals, and even the caliph himself; much of this ornament was derived from Sassanian tradition.

In the middle period, the Islamic world produced the greatest flowering of urban civilization yet seen. With the coming of the Mongols, however, many such cities were destroyed or reduced to villages, and the water systems on which they depended were also demolished.

Under the Abbasids, an entire administrative city, Samarra’, was started—but never completed—in the desert near Baghdad. Within Samarra’ was an enormous walled building, 175 hectares (432 acres) in extent and containing many gardens, which was a city in itself. It comprised offices, a mosque, baths, and living quarters. Some of the residential buildings had painted figural decorations, but the finest decorative work was of carved plaster in overall geometric patterns based on Turkish (Central Asian) motifs. Planned cities such as Samarra and Al Fustat (near Cairo, and known through excavation) are notable for their efficiently designed aqueducts and sewers; all the houses had baths and latrines.

Another Abbasid city-building project was the construction of the Round City (762) at Baghdad, known primarily from written descriptions because its site lies under the modern city. The Round City contained a series of concentric rings, with the caliph's residence, mosques, and household in the center. The conception of the plan has its roots in Sassanian Iran.

Palace complexes, similar to that of Samarra’, were built in later times at Cairo, at Madinah al-Zahra (Spain), in North Africa, and in Istanbul, where in 1459 the Ottomans began the Topkapi Sarayi, now the Topkapi Palace Museum. The tradition was continued also in the 14th-century Alhambra Palace of the Moorish kings at Granada, Spain. Of particular note here is the Court of the Lions with a fountain surrounded by stone lions spouting water. These Alhambra lions have their counterparts in animal-shaped bronze and pottery vessels; although figural, their function keeps them within the category of decorative art. (See Decorative Art below.)

In Iran, the last great buildings were those erected by the Safavids, whose contributions to secular architecture included bridges, polo grounds, and palaces built with wooden kiosks from which the ever-present fountains could be appreciated or polo matches observed. An art gallery, intended by Shah Abbas I for his collection of Chinese porcelains, was also part of the palace.

The caravansary (or, in Turkish, han) was the particular contribution of the Seljuks. These rest houses for travelers, built along the caravan routes, had an aisled hall and a courtyard for animals. Other types of buildings that were prominent in the history of Islamic architecture were public baths, bazaars (marketplaces), gardens as well as garden pavilions, and ribats, or frontier garrisons, extant examples of which are now found only in Tunisia.

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In spite of threats and a thwarted attack by Basque separatists, the inauguration of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Bilbao, Spain, proceeded in grand style. The following report appeared in the October 1997 Encarta Yearbook.

New Guggenheim Museum Opens in Bilbao

Hailed as a masterpiece by architecture critics for its stunning use of materials, shape, and space, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao was inaugurated in a gala ceremony attended by Spain's King Juan Carlos I on October 18, 1997, in Bilbao, Spain. Designed by American architect Frank Gehry, the 24,000-sq-m (260,000-sq-ft) museum rises from the banks of Bilbao's Nervión River in a series of sculpted curving undulations.

Vanna Venturi House
Robert Venturi’s architectural firm designed many of the most influential buildings of the 1970s and 1980s. Venturi’s theories, which advocate the use of historical allusion and symbolism, thus rejecting the perceived sterility of orthodox modern buildings, led to the development during the 1970s of postmodernism in architecture. Venturi designed the Vanna Venturi House (completed 1964) in Chestnut Hill, Pennsylvania, for his mother.

Lloyd’s Building
Lloyd’s Building in London, England, was designed by Sir Richard George Rogers and completed in 1986. Rogers, a founder of what is known as the “high-tech” style of architecture, left the building’s structural elements highly visible.

Variously described as resembling a ship or a metallic flower, the building—with its base of Spanish limestone and titanium-covered exterior—was designed with the use of an advanced computer-modeling system. The museum houses 19 galleries, including one that is 140 m (450 ft) long. Spanish painter and... sculptor Pablo Picasso, American pop artist Roy Lichtenstein, and Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky were among the artists featured in the museum's inaugural exhibition.

Funded almost entirely by the local government, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao will be directed by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, which also maintains the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Guggenheim Museum Soho in New York City, and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, Italy. Exhibits and works will rotate among the museums.

The inauguration was nearly disrupted by the Basque Homeland and Liberty Party (ETA), a Basque separatist group that has killed about 800 people since 1968. Police foiled an ETA plot to stage a terrorist attack during the October 18 ceremony on October 13. One policeman was killed.

Between about 1965 and 1980 architects and critics began to espouse tendencies for which there is as yet no better designation than postmodern. Although postmodernism is not a cohesive movement based on a distinct set of principles, as was modernism, in general it can be said that the postmodernists value individuality, intimacy, complexity, and occasionally even humor.

Postmodern tendencies were given early expression in Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966; revised ed. 1977) by the American architect Robert Venturi. In this provocative work he defended vernacular architecture—for example, gas stations and fast-food restaurants—and attacked the modernist establishment with such satiric comments as “Less is a bore” (a play on Mies’s well-known dictum “Less is more”). By the early 1980s, postmodernism had become the dominant trend in American architecture and an important phenomenon in Europe as well. Its success in the United States owed much to the influence of Philip C. Johnson, who had performed the same service for modernism 50 years earlier. His AT&T Building (1984) in New York City, with its Renaissance allusions and its pediment evoking Chippendale furniture, immediately became a landmark of postmodern design.

By the early 1980s, postmodernism had become the dominant trend in American architecture…

Other postmodern office towers built during the 1980s aspired to a similar high stylistic profile, recalling the great art deco skyscrapers of the 1920s and 1930s or striving for an eccentric flamboyance of their own. Vivid color and other decorative elements were effectively used by Michael Graves in several notable buildings, while Richard Meier developed a more austere version of postmodernism, influenced by Le Corbusier, in his designs for museums and private houses. Outstanding American practitioners of postmodernism, in addition to Venturi, Johnson, Graves, and Meier, are Helmut Jahn, Charles Gwathmey, Charles Willard Moore, and Robert A. M. Stern.

Skyscraper, New York City American architect Philip Johnson strongly influenced the rise of the postmodern style of architecture. His design for the AT&T Building (now the Sony Building), constructed in New York City in 1984, had a particularly strong impact. The building’s architectural devices, such as the use of allusion in its Renaissance detail and Chippendale-style pediment, make it a symbol of postmodern architecture.Guy Gillette/Photo Researchers, Inc.


Rem Koolhaas House in Bordeaux Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas designed this house in Bordeaux, France, on three levels. The lower level is carved from the hillside as a series of caverns, and serves for communal family life. The middle level of glass is designed to accommodate the husband, who is confined to a wheelchair; the central part is an elevator platform that moves between levels. The third level is divided into sections for the husband, wife, and children. Koolhaas was awarded the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 2000 for his innovative work.Courtesy of OMA/Rem Koolhaas

Closely related to the postmodernist interest in historical styles was the historic preservation movement, which during the last decades of the 20th century led to the renovation of many landmark older buildings and to a tendency to resist new architecture that seemed to threaten the scale or stylistic integrity of existing structures. The stark, confrontational approach of modernism has been replaced by a more inclusive sense of the architectural heritage that acknowledges and seeks to preserve the very finest achievements of every period.

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The ideas of the German Bauhaus school of architecture and applied arts have greatly influenced the development of architecture and design in the 20th century. Founder Walter Gropius designed the unadorned, functional buildings for its quarters in Dessau in 1925.

Bauhaus Archive
The Bauhaus was a school of design founded in Germany by architect Walter Gropius in 1919. Many outstanding artists and architects served on its faculty. In 1933 the school was shut down by Germany's Nazi government, and many of its faculty members, including Gropius, immigrated to the United States. The Bauhaus Archive, shown here, was built in Berlin, Germany, in the late 1970s. This museum, which is based on a 1964 Gropius design for another site, is devoted to the accomplishments of the Bauhaus school.

Notre-Dame-du-Haut Swiss-born French architect Le Corbusier incorporated Bauhaus influences into his design of the pilgrimage church of Notre-Dame-du-Haut (1950-1955), located in Ronchamp, France. Le Corbusier’s patron for the building, Father Courturier, believed that an architect could best design an effective expression of spiritual consciousness if given the utmost in creative freedom. Le Corbusier’s unique creation at... Ronchamp reflects Courturier’s artistic latitude, exhibiting an unconventional synthesis of iconography, architecture, and sculpture. Shaped like a great ship, the church incorporates the ideas of Noah’s ark, Saint Peter’s ship, and the architect’s own love of the sea.© 2001 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris. Photo: Giraudon/Art Resource, NY

When the Bauhaus opened, the modern movement in architecture began to coalesce. The Bauhaus school (Weimar, 1919-1925; Dessau, 1926-1933) brought together architects, painters, and designers from several countries, all determined to formulate goals for the visual arts in the modern age. Its first director was Walter Gropius, who designed the innovative buildings for the move to Dessau; its second was Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. The new architecture demonstrated its virtues in new Siedlungen (low-cost housing) in Berlin and Frankfurt. An exhibition of housing types, the Weissenhof Siedlung (1927) in Stuttgart, brought together works by Mies, Gropius, the Dutch J. J. P. Oud, and the Swiss-French Le Corbusier; this milestone identified the movement with a better life for the common man. The chastely elegant German Pavilion (1929) by Mies for the Barcelona Exhibition, executed in such lavish materials as travertine, marble, onyx, and chrome-plated steel, asserted a strong, formal argument independent of any social goals. Gropius, his disciple Marcel Breuer, and Mies eventually established themselves in the U.S., where they enjoyed productive and influential decades—extending through the 1970s for Breuer—as architects and teachers.

First Skyscraper Built

American architect and engineer William Le Baron Jenney completes the Home Insurance Building in Chicago, a ten-story structure featuring a unique all-metal frame designed to support the high walls. Jenny’s unprecedented design initiates a wave of tall buildings—soon known as skyscrapers—built by the so-called Chicago School of architects.

Jenney, William Le Baron (1832-1907), American architect and engineer, whose innovative construction methods earned him the title father of the skyscraper. After completing his architectural and engineering education in Paris, Jenney returned to the U.S. and served as an engineer in the Union army during the American Civil War. After the war Jenney settled in Chicago, where he opened his own architectural office. In later years many members of the Chicago School served their architectural apprenticeships on his staff, including Louis Sullivan and Daniel Burnham. Jenney's great contribution to architecture was his pioneering use of metal-frame construction for large buildings, first used in his Home Insurance Company Building (1885, demolished 1931) in Chicago. Cast-iron columns, encased in masonry, were used to support the steel beams bearing floor weights. The outside walls, freed from their load-bearing function, were filled with windows. Jenny's revolutionary method of building, termed curtain-wall construction, remains basic for the design of tall buildings, now known as skyscrapers.

Le Corbusier, over a long career, exerted immense influence. His early publications championed a machine aesthetic and urged the replacement of traditional cities in favor of life and work in skyscrapers arranged regimentally in vast parks. His Villa Savoye (1928-1931) in the French countryside downplays a sense of structure and materials in order to dramatize complexity of spacial organization and allow a subtle ambiguity between interior and exterior space. In the 1950s, with Jawaharlal Nehru as client, he laid out the new capital city of the Punjab, Chandigarh, and designed for it three monumental concrete government edifices standing in a vast plaza. In France he produced two unique religious buildings, the pilgrimage chapel at Ronchamp (1950-1955) and the Dominican monastery of La Tourette (1957-1961), both in concrete. Having abandoned the extreme rationalism of his early career, he manipulated form and light in these extraordinary structures for emotional response and dramatic effect.

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