Less is More..

Redefining 'green ' buildings and a need to reflect on our urban lifestyles..

Over the last two decades, we have left our ecological footprints everywhere, with little or no environmental accountability. The green development sector seems to only cynically address the different rating systems for energy, land water and waste management, building materials and climatic design to improve their marketability it’s time we looked at our lifestyles, based on compensation and consumption.
do we need to have a 3,000 sq ft home for a family of four because we can afford it? Do we need these humongous foyers with accent lighting in our offices and recreational spaces ? Yes, it does make a huge difference to change our bulbs to CFLs and harvest the roof rainwater runoff, but what about re-evaluating what we really need? Green rating usually evaluate the end-of-the-line product rather than questioning the need for it.
Are ‘green’ points given to an architect, builder or client build-up space ? if you provide your client with an office space that has more multifunctional floor space, with efficient circulation and provisions for an thus leading to a 20 percent reduction in the built-up area, are you rewarded ? No, the fee or profit in this line of work is tied to how much more you build, not the other way around. The net profit in conventional economics tiled to consumption and not to conservation. So, where is the green in all of this ?
The dilemma of the design and planning profession is that we are rewarded for our consumption while trying to inject bits of conservation with band aids as energy- efficient fixtures and a few recycling techniques. We will not achieve any discernible results if we do not change the basic paradigm of what is the meaning of quality of life.

At a recent workshop of green homes, after discussions on what should be the rating system allocated to various aspects of the built environment , there was a jubilant ceremony on the increase in square footage of residential development in the country that was vying for green rating systems. The air in the room was like an auction house, the bigger the project, the more the success of the green rating exercise in the country ! Size is what really matters, and scaling back on how much we need is not part of the green rating.
Is it not time were looked at how the development sector and the connected service providers function ? Should we not reward architects and developers who are innovative in their ability to provide for our needs with less? Instead of a direct correlation between the size of the build up area to the fee charged, rather we should reward efficiency by providing reduced back built areas without compromising on functionally . Before providing for green building materials, energy efficient lights, waste recycling and the rest of the package deal, we need to look at out lifestyle and question what constitutes our quality of like, in real terms.
The media is often responsible in promoting this confusion. You have entire articles in news magazines devoted to global warming, extinction and depletion of natural resources. But then the last pages of the same magazine exult in covering the interiors of billion-dollar celebrity homes, luxury cars, artifacts and fashion accessories that are must- haves for this season, if your life is to be worth living.
The ethics of our choices are in question here in this century , neither has out eight percent GDP in the last three years brought any gifts in terms of the larger development of the country. We still live in cities where garbage piles up every where you look and there is growing angst among the young that doesn’t seem to go away in spite of living in designer homes that have mood-sensitive colour palettes in their interiors.

Seperate Identities..

The client , the Designer and the contractor each has a role to fulfill...

There is a strong triad that controls every design project-namely the client, the designer, and the contractor- each having his or her distinct role to play. The client is, in my opinion the visionary and the prime facilitator for a project, whether he is the end user or not. The designer is the 'visualizer' for this visionary who takes the initial thoughts and articulates them, the contractor is the executor who takes the vision of the client and its articulation by the designer and then proceeds to actually mould the desired edifice in three dimension.
Although it is common today to see the roles of the designer contractor merging in what people like to call a ‘ turnkey’ solution, there are some like myself who don’t subscribe to this school of thought. I like to believe that whenever any two of the above roles are handled by the same individual or group of individuals, a conflict of interest will result in a less-than perfect solution. If the client is the designer, the design will be fraught with aspirations, and often the temptation to create a medley of design schools rather than a purity of design will win. If the client is the contractor then design will always take a backseat to cost-cutting, and if the designer is the contractor then naturally the ability to do quality checks would be tempered with the desire to generate wealth.
Thus I feel that it is critical that each person handle his or her individual role in isolation and then come together as a part of a whole that aims to transform a vision into reality. It is imperative that each person handle his/ her role with sincerity and honesty, minus any desire to take the upper hand in the design and execution process.
Often one finds that the client assumes that since he is the visionary and the financier, he has the right to take control of the project. Unfortunately, if that were the case , he would never have needed the other two parties, Yes he is the final person to be satisfied with the end-result, yet if he has hired the other two he must give them their due and allow them to perform their riles professionally. The client needs to be clear in his vision, that the end- product is only as good as the brief that the client project. If the designer believes that the client project. If the designer believes that the client is just a piggy-bank to withdraw funds from, then he is guilty of arrogance... Yes, the designer does have the ability to articulate a vision into an executable data and he does have an edge in technical and experiential knowledge, but does that mean that he has the holistic knowledge to understand and translate all aspirations ? Does he know about the aspirations and applications of the client ?
The designer must be a good listener and a good translator of all the hints and directional pointers that a client may cast his way to translate and articulate his client’s wishes. The contractor must take his role seriously as well, and bring his knowledge of execution to the table so that while he can suggest improvement, he should not become a hurdle in the design process just because of his experience and his inability to change and experiment.
The designer too must be open to taking these or other suggestions to the client with honesty and openness of course, I can’t stress enough on the importance of honest critique and open communication channels for any project undertaken.
So where does this leave the situation? As long as everyone is fulfilling his or her role and is not trying to step into the other’s space or swindle his of his wealth (be it knowledge of funds), I am confident that the project is in very safe hands. So play your role with responsibility and don’t bring half-baked knowledge to the table and don’t try to cheat anyone. Be honest in what you do and respect the role of the other. Your project will be a success in the end, whether you are the client, the designer or the contractor.

St. Denis Abbey Church

The Abbey of St. Denis is situated in a small municipality (now a suburb) of the same name, about 4 miles (6.4 kilometers) north of Paris. Its thirty-sixth abbot, Suger (1081–1151), commissioned the present church from about 1140. It is a milestone in the history of architecture because, like Durham Cathedral in England, it has in it the seeds of a new way of building for Europe: the highly inventive structural system that we know as the Gothic. In particular, Suger’s choir at St. Denis, the first application of pointed arches in a major building, marks one aspect of the transition from the Romanesque style, which was quite hobbled by the use of round-headed arches; that is, the transition from wall architecture to framed architecture.

Denis, first bishop of Lutetia, and his missionary companions were martyred in 258, and buried at St. Denis. When the persecutions ended in the fourth century, a small chapel was built that became a popular shrine for pilgrims by the end of the sixth century. The Merovingian king Dagobert founded a Benedictine monastery there in 630, replacing the chapel with a large basilica and enriching the new royal abbey. He also bestowed many rights and privileges on the little town, not least the honor of building his tomb. Eventually, the abbey was to house seventy royal sepulchers. Charlemagne, king of the Franks, commissioned a new church in 750 and much of the earlier building was subsumed. Systemic reforms were introduced by Abbot Hilduin (815–830; ca. 831–840) during his second term of office, and the Abbey of St. Denis, because of the relics it held, grew in significance and prosperity. In about 1127 Suger assumed the position of abbot, to which he had been elected in Rome five years earlier.

Between 1123 and 1127, as adviser to Louis VI (reigned 1108–1137), he was engrossed in affairs of state but soon after he set out to thoroughly reform his monastery, first of all establishing a more rigorous discipline for the monks and dealing with its financial problems. Then he turned to the building. The old abbey church had been completed in 775, and by the middle of the twelfth century it had become dilapidated; from 1135 Abbot Suger initiated an extensive renovation program. His motives have been widely discussed by historians; it is clear that he was moved by religious and esthetic sensibilities, but because St. Denis was the royal abbey (and thus a symbol of royal power), its renovation was also a political statement at a time of unrest in France. In fact, the only loyal region to Louis VI was the Ile-de-France, and it was in the king’s interest to patronize the rebuilding of the church.

Suger wrote an account of his renovation program titled A Little Book on the Consecration of the Church of Saint Denis. The first major phase was the reconstruction of the west facade and the narthex: “dismantling a certain addition said to have been built by Charlemagne we … vehemently [enlarged] the body of the church, tripling the entrance and doors, and erecting tall, worthy towers.” Only the northeastern tower survives. The new monumental west front, built in the dour Romanesque style, had a high rose window above the central portal, admitting more light into the church. But the critical part of Suger’s work—his architectural feat—is in the choir at the east end of the church.

The new choir was built over the ninth-century crypt. Its seven chapels, radiating from a semicircular ambulatory and integrated with it, formed the first example of the distinguishing element of French Gothic architecture, the chevet. Supported on slender cylindrical columns standing on square bases, it comprises ribbed stone vaults in which a regular network of pointed—not semicircular—arches carries thin panels. It is likely that the idea of the pointed arch (an Arab invention) was brought back to France by masons who had accompanied the First Crusade (1095). The device made the height of the arch independent of its span and allowed a much more accurate structural frame to be developed, in which loads could be gathered at columns and sideways thrusts resisted by buttresses. The walls, freed from their load-bearing function, could then be thinner and penetrated by more and larger windows. What was first done at St. Denis was developed and refined to produce the luminous interiors of the thirteenth century, like St. Chapelle in Paris (1248).

Suger, impressed with fifth-century ideas, was fascinated by the role of light in churches. God is light, and his creation, ordered by his light, praises him by reflecting light back to him. That applied to inanimate things, such as precious stones and stained glass, as much as to people. Therefore his additions to St. Denis were lit by glorious stained-glass windows and “worthily painted with gold and costly colors.” The choir was a repository for the relics and remains of St. Denis and was afforded the most extravagant treatment, provided with the help of Abbot Suger’s close friend Louis VII, who came to the French throne in 1137. The pulpit was made of sculptured ivory tablets decorated with figures wrought from copper. The morning altar was of black marble, with sculptures of the martyrdom of St. Denis in white marble, and the high altar was surrounded by gold sides enriched with precious stones, with figures in relief. Suger declared himself so overcome by the sight of it that he thought he was no longer on Earth, but near Paradise. He insisted that “we must do homage also through outward ornaments … with all inner purity and with all outward splendor.” Not all his contemporaries agreed, and there was a protracted debate between Suger and Bernard of Clairvaux, Abbot of Cluny, about the propriety of opulence in the house of God. The choir was completed in 1144, having taken three years and three months. To achieve it, masons and other craftsmen had been gathered from all over France. But none was acknowledged in Suger’s report of the project; he claimed all the credit for himself, having a memorial stone inscribed “Bright is the noble work enlarged in our time, I, who was Suger, having been leader while it was accomplished.”

Although he was “eager … to follow up on [his] successes,” by the time the choir was built the abbey’s funds had been depleted. The nave and transepts were not rebuilt until the fourteenth century, under the supervision of the mason-architect Pierre of Montreuil. After the Council of Trent (1545–1563), the abbey was placed at the head of a body of ten other monasteries; these were joined in 1633 to the Benedictine Congregation of Saint-Marui. Although its monastic buildings were reconstructed, the great church remained intact. About sixty years later, Louis XVI suppressed the abbot’s office. The abbey was eventually dissolved during the French Revolution, when the church was vandalized. In the nineteenth century it was restored by the architect E. E. Viollet-le-Duc and is now a national monument. Today its greatest threat comes from air pollution.

St. Chapelle

St. Chapelle, at 6 boulevard du Palais, is now surrounded by the Palace of Justice on the Ile de la Cité, Paris, near Notre Dame. It was built as a palatine chapel for King Louis IX of France (known as St. Louis, reigned 1226–1270) between 1242 and 1247, and consecrated on 26 April 1248. During Louis IX’s reign, Gothic architecture in France entered the rayonnant phase, its name derived from the radiating spokes of the large rose windows that characterized the style. Refining the stone-framed architecture of the age, architects further reduced the amount of solid wall in favor of expansive traceried stained-glass windows. The masonry that remained was in the form of narrow but very thick buttresses that dealt with the thrusts imposed by vaulted stone ceilings. St. Chapelle, with its luminous glass curtains, represents the highest degree of this structural refinement and is probably the most beautiful surviving example of the French Gothic of any phase.

In 1239 Louis IX purchased (at extravagant cost) a number of relics of the crucifixion of Christ from his bankrupt cousin, Jean de Brienne, the Emperor of Constantinople. The most important of them was the crown of thorns; there was also a piece of iron from the lance used by the soldiers and the sponge on which Jesus was offered sour wine. From de Brienne’s successor, Baudouin II, Louis bought a piece of the true cross. To purchase them and fashion a reliquary—a bejeweled chest that was destroyed during the French Revolution—it is said that Louis spent two and a half times what it cost to build St. Chapelle. Soon after acquiring the relics, he commissioned a private chapel within the royal palace on the Ile de la Cité to hold them. There is some debate about the identity of the architect; many sources identify Pierre de Montreuil, who had worked on Notre Dame, Paris, and St. Denis, but St. Chapelle may have been the work of Robert de Luzarches or Thomas de Cormont.
The building in fact houses two chapels. The lower, entered from the courtyard, was dedicated to the Virgin Mary and was for the use of servants of the royal household. It is relatively low—its vaults are 22 feet (6.6 meters) high—and rather dimly lit. Two small spiral staircases within the walls connect it to the upper chapel, for which it may have been designed as a foil; certainly, there is a breathtaking contrast in the quality of the respective spaces. The official access to the upper chapel, which was dedicated to the Holy Crown and the Holy Cross and reserved for the use of the sovereign, was by a gallery directly linking it with the royal apartments. Entering through a sculpture-enriched double portal, the visitor is greeted by an explosion of color and light. Fifteen lofty stained-glass windows, rising 65 feet (20 meters) from just above floor level to the gilded arches of the vaults, fill the entire area between the buttresses—in total, 6,600 square feet (620 square meters)—to create a space that has been described as “Gothic architecture at its most daring and successful” and “a cage of Light.” The windows were restored in the nineteenth century after the depredations of the French Revolution. About 65 percent of them date from the thirteenth century; together, they depict more than 1,130 scenes from the Old Testament and the life of Jesus.

St. Chapelle was burned in 1630 and was rebuilt. During the Revolution it stood in danger of demolition but was saved, though damaged. It was then used as an archives store until 1837, but in 1846 a twenty-year restoration program, “almost amounting to renewal,” was initiated. The architects Félix Duban, Jean-Baptiste Lassus, Émile Boeswillwald, and E. E. Viollet-le-Duc replaced the roof and the stair and redecorated the interiors. The building is now a museum.

Sagrada Familia (Church of the Holy Family)

The 328-foot-tall (100-meter) spires of the Church of the Sagrada Familia dominate the skyline of Barcelona, the chief city of Catalonia, in northeastern Spain. This unique church, which, in the tradition of the medieval cathedrals of Europe, remains unfinished more than a century after it was started, is one of the great pieces of world architecture. Its fantastic forms defy our vocabulary and confound any attempt at stylistic classification. It marks the fin de siècle rejection of historical revivalism—perhaps it is the last true Gothic church—but unlike the willful forms of the contemporary Art Nouveau (a category to which some historians have consigned it), it is respectful of the past in its local context and the broader sphere. To repeat, it is unique.

Around 1874, José María Bocabella y Verdaguer (1815–1892), the proprietor of a religious bookshop and cofounder of the reformist Society of Devotees of Saint Joseph, initiated a proposal to build a votive church, the replica of the basilica at Loreto, Italy. Members of the society were solicited for funds, but the money raised was not even enough to buy land in Barcelona. At the end of 1881, 5 acres (2 hectares) of land were bought in the city’s outlying “new town” on the Muntanya Pelada, near the Gran Via Diagonal. Changing his mind, Bocabella commissioned the diocesan architect Francisco del Villar y Lozano, who produced a church of neo-Gothic design. The foundation stone was laid about a year later, but the building had not progressed far when del Villar fell out with the administration and resigned. Bocabella’s son-in-law offered the lapsed commission to Juan Martorell, technical supervisor of the project. He declined, recommending his 31-year-old erstwhile assistant, Antoni Gaudí y Cornet (1852–1926), a fiercely nationalistic Catalan, who took over in November 1883.

The son of a coppersmith, Gaudí studied at Barcelona’s Escola Superior d’Arquitectura, graduating in 1878. Not a particularly good student, he nevertheless established a busy practice. His early work, particularly the Casa Vicens (1878–1880) in Barcelona, attracted the attention of the wealthy industrialist Count Eusebio Güell, who became his patron. For Güell he designed, amongst other works, the Palacio Güell (1885–1889) and Park Güell (1900–1914). Both are fine examples of the sensuous, free-curving, and richly decorated architecture for which Gaudí became admired by his European contemporaries. Of course, he brought the same celebration of form to the Sagrada Familia.

Francisco del Villar had quit the project when the walls of the crypt, the chapels, and part of the pillars of his prosaic church were built. The crypt is therefore neo-Gothic, structurally and esthetically, but Gaudí modified it as much as he could and surrounded it with a moat. Completing its vaulting in 1887, he turned to the apse (he preferred to finish one section of the church before addressing the next). Although he was constrained by the completed foundations, Gaudí otherwise abandoned del Villar’s design and replaced the neo-Gothic buttresses with sloping columns. In 1893, with the apse still incomplete, and in the face of criticism (because others believed that the west front, facing the city, was more important), he turned his attention to the east front, where he wanted to celebrate Christ’s nativity. Gaudí proposed four 330-foot-high (100-meter) towers for each front of the Sagrada Familia. The towers of the evangelists on the east facade are the last built under his supervision; their tips, glorious with glazed color ceramic, were finished after his death. The huge Portal of the Nativity, enriched by sculpture, is the only one of the four planned portals completed in his lifetime. All these elements eloquently express the spirit of Gothic architecture while celebrating their own ebullient originality. In 1917 Gaudí completed designs for the west front with its Portal of the Passion of Christ. The south front was to have the Portal of the Last Judgment. Space does not permit a description of the church; in any case, words would fail to create an image. The building that one of Gaudí’s friends called “a marvelous, budding flower” must be personally experienced.
Because the project was privately financed, building work was intermittent. After 1908, Gaudí committed himself exclusively to the church as designer, construction supervisor, and fund-raiser. Becoming increasingly reclusive, he eventually moved to accommodations on the building site. He became obsessed with the idea that his church could redeem Barcelona from what he saw as the evils of secularism. In 1922, the architect Teodoro de Anasagasti Asensio proposed that the church become a public work, to be financed by the state. On the afternoon of 7 June 1926, Gaudí was struck by a trolley car while crossing a street near his beloved Sagrada Familia. He died in the hospital three days later without having regained consciousness. He left only sketches of the overall project, as well as drawings and scale models of various parts. Supervision was taken over by his associate Sugañes, who completed the east portals in 1935; he was working on the vestries when the Spanish civil war broke out, and he died in the conflict. In 1936 an anticlerical mob overran the Sagrada Familia, burning the plans and destroying the models. Further building activity was halted until 1952, when architect Lluis Bonet rebuilt the models.

In the face of debate over whether the church should remain uncompleted as a monument to Gaudí, construction began again in 1979, closely following his plan. Funded by private donations and the sale of tickets to increasing numbers of visitors—there were 1.2 million in 1999—the work proceeds. The main nave has been under construction since 1986 under the supervision of architect Jordi Bonet. It is expected that the church will be covered with its very complicated irregular vaults by 2010, although the exterior of the roof will still be unfinished. The construction council is optimistic that the Sagrada Familia will be completed in only fifty years.

Since 1992 there has been a movement among Barcelona’s Catholic hierarchy to effect Gaudí’s eventual canonization; it was given fresh impetus in 1998, and in April 2000 the Diocesan Beatification Process was officially opened. The city of Barcelona has declared 2002 the International Year of Gaudí to commemorate the 150th anniversary of his birth.

Architects

On Tender Hooks

French-US Sculptor Bourgeois's famous 30 feet tall spider installation in bronze titled Maman ( mother),stands at the entrance of the Guggenheim Museum,Bilbao,Spain.

The Royal Pavilion

The Royal Pavilion, Brighton (1817–1822), “a grand oriental fantasy” with Indian domes and minarets and Chinese interiors, is a fascinating example of the diverse architectural styles allowed in the Regency period, which was otherwise dominated by refined neoclassical architecture. Two elements were necessary for its realization: an esthetically adaptable architect—in this case, John Nash (1752–1835)—and a client powerful enough to get what he wanted—the Prince Regent (later King George IV, 1762–1830), More importantly, it is probably the first attempt by any architect, freed from classical and Gothic precedents, to use cast iron to make legitimate architecture.

George, Prince of Wales, first visited the coastal resort of Brighton (then Brighthelmstone) in 1783. He was already deep in gambling debts, a heavy drinker, and a notorious womanizer. In 1784 he again visited Brighton and in the same year fell in love with the twice-widowed Maria Fitzherbert. When she refused to become his mistress he agreed to marry her, but secretly, because English law prohibited royalty from marrying Catholics. Two years later his comptroller, Louis Weltje, obtained from Thomas Kemp, Member of Parliament for Lewes, a three-year lease with an option to purchase on a timber house facing the sea at Brighton. He relet it to the prince, undertaking to rebuild it. Between May and July 1787 the architect Henry Holland enlarged and converted the modest but “respectable” farmhouse to the Marine Pavilion, a double-fronted Palladian affair with a domed Ionic rotunda. Maria was provided with a nearby villa.

In 1795, attempting to persuade Parliament to pay his accrued debts of £650,000, the prince entered a political marriage to his cousin, Caroline of Brunswick. After a daughter was born in January 1796 the royal couple lived apart. Caroline returned to Germany and George to the arms of Mrs. Fitzherbert. He moved his court to Brighton, where he planned the next stage of his evolving seaside house. Henry Holland was engaged on the other side of the country, so his assistant P. F. Robinson supervised the mutation of the Marine Pavilion’s interiors into a Chinese palace. The prince bought imported Chinese furniture and porcelain and even costumes, and from about 1802 chinoiserie interiors were executed by the firm of John Grace and Sons.
A year earlier George had directed Holland to design Chinese exteriors for the house, and in 1805 Holland’s successor William Porden made similar plans. The prince’s imagination was then seized by a new house, Sezincote in Gloucestershire (architect Samuel Cockerell), in the “Moghul” style. In 1807 Humphrey Repton, the landscape architect for Sezincote, was commissioned to design an Indian exterior for the Marine Pavilion. Although George liked the result, he could not afford to build it. But he had Porden construct a huge circular stables and riding house west of the house; crowned with a central cupola, it was in the Indian style.

In February 1811 King George III again retreated into madness, and the prince was appointed Regent. Breaking his promises to the Whigs, he supported the incumbent Tory government. He also disappointed Repton, who expected to complete the pavilion when his client had sufficient funds. Instead, in 1812 the commission was passed to James Wyatt. But he died in September 1813, and there was another hiatus until January 1815, when George capriciously engaged Repton’s sometime partner John Nash, who had designed London’s Regent Street and Carlton House Terrace (both 1813) for him.

The eclectic Nash swathed the exterior of Holland’s building in a mixture of pseudo-Moghul and neo-Gothic detail; internally, he changed it beyond recognition. The house is symmetrical about a long north-south axis. A central porte cochere on the west front enters through a vestibule, across a long gallery into a domed salon, flanked with drawing rooms at the “back” of the house. The prince’s apartments are in the northwestern wing of the first floor; visitors’ apartments occupy the southwestern wing. Above are “small but elegant” bedrooms. The banqueting hall, its opulent decor designed by Robert Jones and Frederick Grace, is in the southeastern corner. From a cluster of plantain leaves at the center of its 45-foot-high (14-meter) blue saucer dome hangs a gigantic gilded dragon gasolier. The walls are decorated with Chinese motifs in brilliant colors. The music room, also by Jones and Grace, is at the other end of the first floor. Its domed ceiling is formed by gilded scallop shells above an octagonal cornice, supported by dragon brackets; the walls and drapes are gold and crimson. It is possible to describe the disposition of spaces, but their scale and extravagant splendor must be experienced.

The roof is a fantastic agglomeration of domes, tentlike roofs (over the banqueting hall and music room), chimneys disguised as minarets, and “oriental” finials. Nash adventurously used cast iron in the structure and the interior and exterior details. The huge central ogee dome over the salon, and the other roofs, as well as the bases of the chimneys and pinnacles, are framed in the new material. The extremely ornate palm-tree columns supporting the roofs of the drawing rooms are also cast iron, as are the four simple, slender columns with copper palm-leaf capitals that carry the central roof lantern in the kitchen. The double staircases at either end of the long gallery are cast iron, too, but their balustrades and other details (like the wall mirrors throughout the house) are disguised with paint as bamboo, befitting the Chinese mood. Outside, iron was used for the elegant lattice tracery on the east front of the music room.

The diarist John Wilson Croker visited the Royal Pavilion before it was finished and declared it an “absurd waste of money,” accurately prophesying, “[it] will be a ruin in half a century or more.” The affairs of state limited George IV’s visits to his extravagant “pleasure dome.” His dissolute lifestyle eventually overtook him; addicted to alcohol and laudanum, he began showing signs of insanity, and shortly before his death he became increasingly reclusive. His successor, William IV (reigned 1830–1837), used the pavilion, but Queen Victoria acquired a summer home on the Isle of Wight. She sold the pavilion to the people of Brighton in 1850 after moving its furnishings to Buckingham Palace. It was put to various uses until, following World War II, interest in it was revived. Beginning in 1980 the storm-and fire-ravaged building was refurbished by the Brighton Borough Council, and Queen Elizabeth II returned most of the original furnishings. The Royal Pavilion, its splendor restored, was reopened to the public in 1990.

Royal Albert Bridge

The Royal Albert Bridge at Saltash, completed in 1859, was Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s last bridge and probably his finest work. Certainly, it was one of the great engineering feats of the nineteenth century, because (it is widely agreed) of its size, its economy of design, its revolutionary superstructure, and not least because of the way in which Brunel solved difficult logistical problems. It was one of the first bridge projects on which compressed air was used to allow underwater foundation work to proceed.

Dividing Cornwall from the rest of England, the tidal reaches of the River Tamar were once a major maritime thoroughfare. The twelfth-century port of Saltash lies on the west shore of the Tamar Estuary near the English Channel coast, nearly facing Plymouth on the opposite side. A railroad into Cornwall, the county in the extreme southwest of England, was first proposed in 1844. The Cornwall Railway Company was formed in 1845, and it successfully applied for the necessary act of Parliament to provide either a steam ferry to transport trains across the 1,100-foot-wide (336-meter) 85-foot-deep (26-meter) river or to build a bridge. The project was delayed because the Admiralty was concerned about restricted access to the Devonport naval base, close to Saltash. Finally, in 1852 Brunel’s proposal for a bridge with two main spans was adopted because a single pier in the river would offer least hindrance to water traffic. During the construction the plans were changed for financial reasons; Brunel designed the bridge for a single-track railroad. The authorities demanded a clearance of 100 feet (31 meters) under the bridge at high tide.
The Royal Albert Bridge is 2,240 feet (683 meters) long. Each of the two main spans is 455 feet (140 meters), and the 17 side spans of the long, curving approach viaducts vary between 70 and 90 feet (21 and 28 meters). Brunel first proposed a single-span bridge but because of difficult ground conditions changed the design.

Brunel found a firm base on rock in the middle of the river for the center pier, at a depth of more than 87 feet (27 meters) below high-water mark. Debris had to be cleared to expose a good foundation. To that end, a. 95-foot-tall (29-meter) iron cylinder, 35 feet (11 meters) in diameter, was fabricated onshore. A dome was constructed about 20 feet (6 meters) above its lower end, and a 4-foot-wide (1.2-meter) gallery, divided into 11 compartments, was built around the cylinder below the dome. The cylinder was floated into position and sunk to the riverbed in June 1854. Compressed air was fed into only those compartments where men were working, obviating the need to supply it to the whole space under the dome all the time. The foundation was cleared, and the rock was leveled with a 16-foot-thick (5-meter) base layer. By the end of 1856 the circular granite center pier was completed to a height of 12 feet (3.7 meters) above river level.

Four hollow octagonal cast-iron columns, 10 feet (3 meters) in diameter and stiffened by cross-bracing, rise from the center pier to the same height as the tapering masonry piers at the ends of the approach viaducts. Two columns support each of the huge main trusses. Those trusses were fabricated on the riverbank. Each comprises a curved, wrought-iron elliptical tube 16.75 feet (5.1 meters) wide—constrained by the single-track railroad—and 12.25 feet (3.7 meters) high, forming a flat arch that carries the weight of the superstructure. The arch is connected to massive catenary iron chains at eleven equidistant points by pairs of vertical standards, braced by diagonal bars; the chains support the girders under the railroad deck, 110 feet (34 meters) above high-water mark.

Beginning on 1 September 1857, the first 1,200-ton (1,016-tonne) truss was floated into position on four pontoons. Through the combined efforts of 500 men on shore and on five vessels at strategic points in the river, it was put into place with great accuracy. As the masonry pier progressed, the truss was raised a little at a time by hydraulic jacks. By July 1858 it had reached its full height, and the second was ready for floating into position. The process was repeated for the second truss. At their landward ends, the trusses are carried by piers, with arched openings through which the railroad passes.

The bridge was opened by Queen Victoria’s consort, Prince Albert—hence the name—on 3 May 1859, just a few months before its creator, Brunel, died. Its construction made possible a continuous rail journey between London and Truro. A branch line to Falmouth opened in 1863 and was later extended to the new docks then being built. A neighboring suspension bridge carrying the A38 road over the Tamar was completed in 1961. Early in 1998 the Royal Albert Bridge was refurbished. The £1.2 million (U.S.$1.75 million) project involved cleaning back the paintwork to bare metal and repainting and replacing much of the timber deck, all without unduly disrupting the rail services.

Roman concrete construction

Concrete is made by mixing broken stone or gravel and sand (aggregate), a bonding agent, and water, and allowing the mixture to harden through chemical process into a solid mass. So-called cementitious materials had been used in ancient Egypt about 3,000 years earlier and later by the Chinese, Minoans, and Mycenaeans, but this synthetic stone—a new building material—was developed and exploited by the Romans from about the third centuryb.c.

Ambrose advised his protégé Augustine: “When in Rome, live as the Romans do; when elsewhere, live as they do elsewhere.” Throughout the Roman Empire, the architecture they built was a weighty presence imposed upon the subject peoples—a consistency probably more to serve the colonizers, isolated from the familiar things of home, rather than for the colonized. Throughout history architecture has provided a social anchor for migrant peoples. The Roman way was to come, to see, to build, and there was, especially in the days of imperial expansion, a need to build quickly and in a familiar way. That was made possible by the use of concrete.

The Romans used concrete (opus caementicium) for all parts of their structures: foundations, walls, and roofs. It was made by combining pozzolana (a volcanic earth found in many places in southern Europe) with lime, broken stones, bricks, tufa, and sometimes pumice. Such a mixture could set even underwater. Lime was obtained by crushing limestone or seashells, or sometimes replaced by gypsum as a binding agent. The Romans placed a very dry mix of pozzolana and wet lime, layer for layer, over rock fragments, and carefully tamped it into place. Its structural strength depended upon what is now called the water-cement ratio: the higher the proportion of bonding agent to water, the stronger the concrete. The combination of a dry mix and thorough consolidation made the material extremely durable.

At first, concrete was limited to places where it would not be seen. For foundations, it was placed between wooden form boards that were stripped once the mixture had hardened. For building above the ground, its brutal appearance, once the formwork was removed, presented an esthetic problem. Because the many advantages—strength, versatility, economy, availability, and speed of erection—more than offset that single disadvantage, the Romans simply used more presentable materials to face the concrete, usually as a “lost” formwork. For example, as late as 20 b.c. the architectural theorist Vitruvius recommended building two face walls of squared stone (opus quadratum), 2 feet (0.6 meter) thick, tying them together with iron cramps, and filling the cavity with tamped concrete. But that was for prestigious buildings, and a number of alternative wall constructions had already been developed.

From around 200 b.c., slabs of volcanic tufa were used as permanent facings; far more common was the technique known as opus incertum, which employed small, random pieces of tufa, carefully packed together. Over time the shapes were made increasingly regular, and by about 50 b.c. 4-inch-square (10-centimeter) pyramidal tufa blocks were employed. Set diagonally, their sharp apexes penetrated about 10 inches (25 centimeters) into the concrete infill, providing an excellent bond. Because of its netlike appearance, the method was called opus reticulatum. By then, fired clay bricks were also being used for facing. Over the next two centuries the predominant technique was opus testaceum, flat slice-of-pie-shaped bricks, tied at intervals with bonding courses through the wall. The late empire saw a further variation, called opus mixtum, consisting of alternate courses of brickwork and small squared stones. It is stressed that these systems provided only a presentable surface: the real work of the wall was done by the immensely strong concrete mass, which normally supported innovative superstructures, also made of concrete.

Unfinished concrete was not only unattractive to the eye but it also presented an architecture that was, to the Roman mind, inappropriate in appearance. They therefore covered it, whether brick faced or not, with a variety of decorative surfaces: stucco (a mixture of marble dust and lime) perhaps 3 inches (7.5 centimeters) thick in up to five layers, and molded, patterned, painted, and sometimes veneered with mosaics of marble and even glass tesserae. The most important buildings had marble veneers, held in place by bronze pins and nonstructural architectural orders applied as pilasters or half-columns that masked the concrete structure and reduced the visual scale.

Roman public architecture existed to move in and through, rather than around. Such urban buildings as the thermae (bathhouses) and basilicas (law courts) demanded interior spaces uncluttered by columns that could accommodate huge gatherings of people. In order to achieve vast interior spaces, the Romans exploited the semicircular arch, a technology inherited from their Etruscan forebears. The arch and its three-dimensional extensions, the vault (a prismatically extended arch) and the dome (a rotated arch), could span large distances without intermediate supports. With characteristic directness, Roman engineers found expedient solutions. A small rectangular room could be covered by a semicircular barrel vault carried on continuous parallel side walls. A square room could be roofed by a cross vault (two barrel vaults placed at right angles), supported by piers at the corners and allowing the space to be lit from all sides. Larger rectangular spaces could be enclosed by a procession of such vaults built side by side. A polygonal space received a hemispherical dome and an apse a half-dome, carried on drums above the base walls. By using concrete for these roof structures, the Romans enclosed volumes that would not be equaled for over 1,000 years.

The simplest barrel vaults consisted of a series of parallel brick arches cross-tied as in opus testaceum and filled between with concrete; that is, the concrete was packed into brick compartments. The whole structure was supported by wooden centering until the mortar had set. Other vaults and domes were directly formed in mass concrete. The technique had two main advantages: once the centering was designed and placed, it employed unskilled labor, and it enabled complex plan forms to be roofed without the cost of dressed stone construction. Often, the weight was reduced by using hollow clay boxes or even wine jars, especially in the groins of cross vaults; alternatively, vaults were lightened by forming recesses or coffers in their undersides. Domes were generally much thicker toward their base and therefore appeared externally as inverted saucers, while inside they were hemispherical. As they rose, lighter materials, such as pumice—a stone that floats—were used for aggregate.

In order to underline the achievement of the Roman engineers and architects, it is helpful to consider the size of some concrete structures; a couple of examples may suffice. The concrete barrel vaults that spanned the 76-foot-wide (23-meter) side aisles of the fourth-century-a.d. Basilica of Maxentius in Rome were 8 feet (2.45 meters) thick. The 142-foot (43-meter) concrete dome of the Pantheon, also in Rome, is 4 feet thick (1.3 meters) at its apex and 20 feet at its base. The massive loads of these roofs were carried to the ground through huge piers or thick walls, and their horizontal thrusts resisted by buttressing elements integrated with the architectural design.

Retractable roofs

The Houston Astrodome in Texas, opened in 1966, was the first stadium with a roof over the playing area. It set a trend for sports fields for the next twenty years. Its roof, designed to resist 135-mph (216-kph) winds, has a clear span of 642 feet (196 meters); it is 208 feet (64 meters) high at the apex. It was not, however, the first arena to have a roof. It was predated by almost 2,000 years by the Flavian Amphitheater in Rome, better known as the Colosseum. The Colosseum measured 620 by 510 feet (189 by 156 meters), and the perimeter of the fourth story had stone brackets supporting wooden masts from which an awning (velarium) was suspended across the interior to shield spectators from the sun. The velarium, was not fixed; teams of sailors handled the rope-and-pulley system that allowed it to be opened and closed depending on the weather.

The Toronto SkyDome, designed by architects Rod Robbie and Michael Allen and inaugurated in June 1989, was the first modern stadium with a fully retractable roof. SkyDome provides 2 million square feet (186,000 square meters) of usable floor space for up to 30,000 spectators. The 8-acre (3.24-hectare), 11,000-ton (10,000-tonne) roof rises 282 feet (86 meters) above the field level. It consists of a fixed panel and three movable panels, framed with steel trusses and covered with a polyvinyl chloride (PVC) membrane laminated to an insulated steel sheet, moving on a system of tracks and bogies. The roof can open in twenty minutes to uncover the entire field area and over 90 percent of the seating. Since SkyDome, many similar structures have developed the new technology that enables very large buildings, once considered static, to become (at least in part) flexible—an architectural feat.

Amsterdam Arena, the Netherlands, was opened in September 1996, the first retractable roof stadium in Europe. The stadium is 540 feet (165 meters) wide and 770 feet (235 meters) long; the roof, soaring 255 feet (78 meters) above the playing field, consists of two movable panels that retract across the short span. The designer was Rob Schuurman. Bank One Ballpark in Phoenix, Arizona, designed by Ellerbe Becket, was completed in early 1998. Two 200-horsepower motors open or close the retractable roof over the 48,000-seat stadium in under five minutes. Each half of the roof consists of three movable trusses that telescope over a fixed end truss. Either side can be opened to any position, independently of the other. The 52,000-seat Colonial Stadium in Melbourne, Australia, was opened in 2000. Its 540-foot-span (165-meter) retractable roof, employing a lightweight space-truss structure, opens or closes in less than eight minutes. Other arenas, such as the Sports Park Main Stadium of the Oita Prefecture, Japan, and Miller Park, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, were completed in 2001. The former, designed by Kurokawa Kisho Architectural Urban Design and the Takenaka Corporation, has a retractable 895-foot-diameter (274-meter) hemispherical steel-framed shell roof; Miller Park has a seven-panel roof.

Renault Distribution Center

High-technology (usually contracted to “high-tech”) architecture was a movement born in the 1960s and sustained through the 1980s. It sought to express zeitgeist—the spirit of the age—defined by its followers as resting in the technological advances of industry, communications, and travel, including aerospace developments. These advances offered an alternative building approach. “High-tech” architects produced machinelike structures of flexible plan, applying lightweight materials such as sheet metal, glass, and plastic to innovative structural techniques; they employed easily assembled, sometimes mass-produced, building components. Usually, the structure was made explicit (often reinforced by colorful paintwork). Sometimes the services were exposed. Constructed between 1980 and 1983, the Renault Distribution Center at Swindon, about 100 miles (160 kilometers) southwest of London, was and continues to be regarded as the archetypal high-tech building.

The brief called for a building that established a progressive corporate identity and stood out from the featureless industrial shed typical of the area. It was to suit multiple functions, be quickly constructed, and capable of later extension. Architect Norman Foster of Foster Associates, together with the engineering firm of Ove Arup and Partners, responded with a design for a visually arresting, structurally self-explicit building that dominated what has been described as an otherwise bleak landscape.

Foster was born in 1935 in Manchester, England. He trained as an architect and town planner at the University of Manchester (1956–1961) before undertaking a master’s degree in architecture at Yale University (1961–1962). Soon after, following a brief period with Richard Buckminster Fuller, he returned to England to set up practice with his wife Wendy and Richard and-Su Rogers. They worked as Team 4 between 1964 and 1967 until the partnership was superseded by Foster Associates, now Foster and Partners. In the late 1960s Foster and Richard Rogers made a significant architectural statement at Swindon with the Reliance Controls Factory (1967), one of the last Team 4 projects. Its elegance, use of off-the-shelf components, exposed steel structural bracing, metal cladding, wall-high glazing, flexible plan, and focus on improved employee working conditions all challenged the conventional wisdom about industrial buildings. Reliance Controls was an early example of high tech.

Almost two decades later the Swindon landscape was again confronted—this time by the unconventional form of the Renault Center. Brilliant yellow (Renault’s corporate color) cable-stayed tubular steel masts supported a reinforced polyvinyl chloride (PVC) membrane roof that covered spaces for spare parts warehousing, visitor reception, distribution and regional offices, vehicle showroom, after-sales maintenance training, and staff dining. Its expressive, detailed outline and functional, worker-friendly spatial arrangements were characteristically Fosteresque, balancing the high-tech approach with client and social needs. In its marketing literature, Renault enthusiastically reproduced images of its marqueelike center, regarding it as the quintessence of its corporate image.

When presented with plans for the sloping 16-acre (6.5-hectare) site, the local authority consented enthusiastically to the unexpected design and to the proposed 67 percent land coverage (the usual limit was 50 percent). The prefabricated rectangular building was formed as a series of suspended modules—forty-two in total—comprising 52-foot-high (16-meter) masts, connected to pin-jointed portal frames. Each module measured 91 feet (24 meters) square and was 25 feet (7.5 meters) high at the edge and 31 feet (9.5 meters) in the center. As extensions were required, modules could be unbolted and new ones added. Initially, thirty-six modules were devoted to warehousing, the rest located at the narrower end of the site where the building tapered to a generous entry and porte cochere.

The fully exposed, repetitive mast arrangement flowed graciously beyond the external walls, glazed for showroom and dining but sealed elsewhere with steel skins. Ample natural lighting was achieved by clear glass panels inserted where the mast pierced the roof membrane and by a louvered roof light at the apex of each module; the louvers could be opened for ventilation. The building was centrally heated and lit according to the function of the space. Foster Associates designed the furniture.

The Renault Distribution Center has been described as ushering in the firm’s Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank headquarters (1979–1986) in Hong Kong, also noted for its extrinsic structural expression. However, unlike the sprawling Renault building, the bank headquarters is a soaring triple-layered tower (the tallest forty-one stories) with immense tubular steel trusses from which the floors are suspended. Many consider tins Foster’s magnum opus.

Reinforced concrete

Concrete is a combination of small aggregate (sand), large aggregate (gravel), a binding agent or matrix, and water. Historically, lime was used as a matrix, mostly for mortars that had no large aggregate. In 1774 the British engineer John Smeaton added crushed iron-slag to the usual quicklime-sand-water mix, making the first modern concrete for the foundations of the Eddystone Lighthouse off the English coast. Fifty years later, a new matrix was discovered. Portland cement, a calcium silicate cement made with a combination of calcium, silicon, aluminum, and iron, is the basis of modern concrete. In 1824, the English stonemason Joseph Aspdin made it by burning (on his kitchen stove) finely ground limestone and clay, then grinding the combined material to a fine powder. It was named for its original use in a stucco that imitated Portland stone. However, the burnt clay yielded silicon compounds that combined with water to form a much stronger bond than lime. It was to revolutionize the architectural and engineering world.

For the next thirty years or so, plain concrete, because of its tremendous compressive strength (resistance to crushing), was used for walls. Sometimes it replaced brick as fire-resistant covering for iron-framed structures. Reinforced concrete, developed first by the French, combines concrete’s compressive strength with the tensile strength (resistance to stretching) of metal—at first, iron and later steel—reinforcing bars or wire. The first person to employ such construction was the Parisian builder François Coignet, for drainage and building works throughout the 1850s. His own all-concrete house in Paris (1862) survives.

The new material was also investigated by the Parisian market gardener Joseph Monier, who was granted a patent in 1867 for garden pots made of cement mortar reinforced with a cage of iron wire. Over the next decade, he built concrete water-storage tanks, patented several ideas for bridges, and promoted reinforced concrete for floors, arches, railroad ties, and bridges. Not being an engineer, he was not permitted to build bridges in France, so he sold his patents to German and Austrian contractors Wayss, Freitag and Schuster, who built the first reinforced concrete bridges in Europe.

Monier exhibited his plant pots at the 1867 Paris Exposition, where they caught the attention of the builder François Hennebique (1842–1921), who then looked for applications in the building industry. Beginning with reinforced concrete floor slabs in 1879, by 1892 he had developed a complete building system of columns, beams, and floors, which he applied to an apartment building in Paris. Having patented the system, he wound up his contracting firm to become a consulting engineer. The structural and esthetic implications of monolithic reinforced structures were staggering. Because concrete is in effect a liquid, the only limitations placed upon the plasticity of architectural shapes lay in the buildability of the formwork (known as shuttering) that held it in place while it set. The remaining major technological step was taken by yet another Frenchman, Marie Eugène Léon Freyssinet (1879–1962), who perfected pre-stressed concrete, allowing the construction of even greater spans.

It was left to Auguste Perret (1874–1954) to address the problem of a suitable esthetic for the new material, because (of course) there was no historical precedent. Although he never became an architect in the strictest academic sense, Perret was one of the pioneers of French modern architecture, in whose work we see the first rational expression of reinforced concrete. Perret developed Hennebique’s structural system, but while the latter had disguised his buildings’ reinforced concrete skeletons with masonry, from as early as 1903 Perret—he called himself a “builder in reinforced concrete”—began frankly expressing them as part of the architecture. That approach reached its pinnacle in his war memorial church of Notre Dame du Raincy, Paris, of 1922–1923, claimed by architectural historian Peter Collins to be the most revolutionary building of the first quarter of the twentieth century. Raincy was a model for other churches by Perret, including St. Therese, Montmagny (1925); a chapel at Arcueil (1925); and St. Joseph, Le Havre (begun in 1950). Perret’s carefully designed shuttering, producing “off-form” surfaces that needed no further finishing work, inspired the so-called Brutalist architecture movement, mostly British, of the late 1950s, as well as Japanese architecture right to the end of the twentieth century.

Beyond what may now be described as orthodox reinforced concrete construction, a number of engineers—the German Ulrich Finsterwalder, the Italian Pier Luigi Nervi, and the Spaniards Eduardo Torrojay Miret and Felix Candela—pushed the versatile material to its technological limits, developing the cantilever and the thin shells that may be regarded as the ultimate concrete form.

Reichstag Berlin, Germany

The restored Reichstag in Berlin, designed by the London architectural firm of Foster and Partners, epitomizes a new kind of architecture—one that respects the physical and cultural environment and takes account of the past while assuming responsibility for the future.

The institution known as the Reichstag was set up in 1867 by the German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck to allow the bourgeoisie to have a role in the politics of the new empire, a confederation of princely states under the King of Prussia. From 1871 the Reichstag met in a disused factory until a neo-Renaissance building (1882–1894) was created for it by the Frankfurt architect Paul Wallot. After the reunification in 1990, the new Germany’s Parliament, comprising the two houses known as the Bundestag and Bundestat, made Berlin the capital of the Federal Republic of Germany in June 1991. It also voted, by a small majority, to move its own seat from Bonn to Berlin, locating it in the historic building.

The monument was in a sorry state and held memories of the failure of the Weimar Republic and the disastrous Third Reich. Before the notorious Berlin Wall came down, it was cut off from the old center, just outside the boundary; now it is in the middle of the city. The Reichstag building had been patched up in the cold war years, and the facades and the interior underwent desultory restoration in the 1960s. It was used as a historical museum between 1958 and 1972, and spasmodically for meetings of the West German Parliament. In June 1992 an international architectural competition was held to restore the Reichstag, and eighty architects submitted proposals.

Following some debate and a second stage of the competition among the three shortlisted entries, Foster and Partners were awarded the commission in July 1993. The consulting engineers were Leonhardt Andra and Partner, the Ove Arup Partnership, and Schlaich Bergermann and Partner. The Foster partnership originally proposed a huge mesh canopy supported on columns to enclose Wallot’s building and extend it into the Platz der Republik. Axel Schultes and Charlotte Frank’s urban plan for the Spreebogen district of Berlin, the result of a contemporary competition, set the framework for new buildings and called for a rebriefing and consequent changes to the design. Building work began in July 1995 and the new Reichstag was opened in April 1999; it cost DM 600 million (approximately U.S.$330 million).

According to the architects, their final design was constrained by four factors: the history of the Reichstag, which in its earliest days had symbolized liberty; the day-to-day processes of the Parliament; questions of ecology and energy: and (naturally) the economics of the project. Because Wallot’s building was to be preserved as far as possible, the Reichstag is a living historical museum that frankly shows the scars of its past—pockmarks caused by shells, charred timber, and Russian graffiti from the post–World War II occupation are all left visible. Because it was believed that the processes of democracy should be transparent, Wallot’s formal west entrance was reopened to serve for all users of the building, politicians and public alike. The great steps lead to a tall, top-lit narthex; on entering, the visitor is confronted by a glass wall that defines the lobby; beyond that, another transparent partition gives a view into the parliamentary chamber. Members of the public may occupy public balconies or follow interlocking spiral ramps to a viewing deck that looks down into the chamber from within the cupola. The functional needs of the Parliament required the demolition of many of the accretions of the earlier refurbishment.
Visually and structurally, the design is dominated by a new glass-and-steel hemispherical cupola at the center of the restored building, which replaces and evokes the war-damaged original dome, removed in 1954. But the cupola is more than an esthetic or symbolic choice. At its center a curving, inverted cone of mirrors reflects daylight into the plenary chamber. The cupola is fitted with a movable sunscreen: in summer it tracks and blocks the sun to prevent overheating of the interior; in winter it is set aside to allow warming sunshine to penetrate into the building. The cone also acts as a convection chimney; fresh air enters the building through air shafts and rises through the floor of the chamber. As it heats up it is drawn into the cone, and an extractor expels it from the building. An aquifer at a depth of 100 feet (30 meters) stores cold water that is circulated through pipes in the Reichstag’s floors and ceilings in the summer. Warmed in the process, the water is then pumped into another subterranean lake, 1,000 feet (300 meters) beneath Berlin. At that depth it retains its heat, and in winter the process is reversed to heat the building. The Reichstag power plant that drives the pumps is fueled by renewable grape seed oil. In the 1960s the restored Reichstag emitted 7,700 tons (7,000 tonnes) of carbon dioxide a year; the new building emits 440 tons. Germany has been a world leader in energy conservation, and the building that now symbolizes national unity fittingly exemplifies that mind-set.

Bexley Heath, England

Designed for William Morris in 1859 by his friend and coworker Philip Webb, the Red House in the London suburb of Bexley Heath has been called “a cornerstone in the history of English domestic architecture.” Much more than that, although in one sense a piece of eclectic architecture, it was a milestone in the way that architects designed houses, making the house to fit the occupant, rather than (as had been the case) forcing the occupants to fit the house: the earliest glimpse of functionally constrained design. Early in the twentieth century the German critic Hermann Muthesius recognized it as “the first house to be conceived as a whole inside and out, the very first example in the history of the modern house.” At that moment, the ideas behind it were taken up and developed by the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright and fed back into the European Modern Movement.

The now-famous English social reformer, designer, novelist, and poet William Morris (1834–1896) originally intended to become a Church of England priest. While at university he decided to devote himself to art. He then worked briefly for the Gothic Revival architect G. E. Street, but influenced by the Pre-Raphaelite painters Edward Burne-Jones and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, soon turned, also briefly, to painting. In 1857 he met Jane Burden, one of Rossetti’s models, and two years later they were married in Oxford. Morris was financially independent—his annual income of £900 was substantial—and in summer 1858, while on a rowing holiday in France, he decided to build a house at Upton in Kent, southeast of London. He commissioned the architect Philip Webb (1831–1915), with whom he had worked in Street’s office, to design a house “very medieval in spirit” and “in the style of the thirteenth century.” Webb resigned his position and commenced work on his first building as an independent architect.

Named for its brick walls and clay tile roofs, the Red House was indeed medieval in spirit. It rejected the formal aspects of the fashionable Gothic and the exotic Italianate for the familiar vernacular—“homegrown” English domestic architecture, emphasizing the spirit, not the letter, of a medieval past that Morris and his friends viewed with wistful longing. The house was simple and (remarkably for its day) free from architectural ornament. One writer has commented, “Form was more important than decoration. Outside it [had] steeply tiled roofs, long ridge-lines, tall chimney-stacks and steeply recessed porches. Inside it had plain tiled floors, a simple open staircase and large wooden dressers” (Bradley 1978, 26). The house was begun in 1859 and completed within a year.

Rossetti thought it “more of a poem than a house … but an admirable place to live in too.” That livability was because Webb designed the Red House to suit the Morrises’ needs. At that time, houses were planned according to usually symmetrical, formal geometries, and their occupants were obliged to tailor their daily lifestyle to the limits imposed by the architecture. The Red House’s L-shaped plan, partly enclosing a courtyard, was unconventional and informal, and rooms were disposed according to the way in which the Morrises intended to use them. The east wing of the first floor contained the kitchen and service rooms; its north wing had a waiting room and a bedroom. The dining room was at the northeast corner, off the large central hall. The main entrance was at the north end of the hall; at the other, an open oak staircase led to the second floor, which housed bedrooms, servants’ quarters, and a drawing room at the northeast corner, over the dining room. There was a large L-shaped study at the western end. Morris’s biographer Fiona MacCarthy asserts that the house was the symbolic point of departure for his crusade against the Industrial Age.
Much later in life Morris reflected that, because he could not find appropriate furniture and furnishings in English shops, he decided “with all the conceit of youth” (he was twenty-five) that he would design and make them for himself. With Webb, Jane Morris, and his Pre-Raphaelite friends he decorated the house; they painted medieval-style murals, constructed furniture, sewed embroideries, wove tapestries, and designed wallpapers and stained-glass windows. In fact, the Red House and its contents—“a temple to art and craft”—were at the very foundation of the English Arts and crafts Movement, both literally and philosophically.

Morris then realized that his interest lay in the decorative arts, and the success of the Red House collaboration provoked the formation of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Co. in 1861; the firm’s brochure described it as “Fine Art Workmen in Painting, Carving, Furniture and the Metals.” The partners were Morris, Burne-Jones, Rossetti, the painter Ford Madox Brown, Philip Webb, Charles James Faulkner, and Peter Paul Marshall, a surveyor. The Red House housed the firm’s workshops, and they continued to design and manufacture all the types of artifacts that had been produced for it. In November 1865 Morris, because of lack of money (the firm was mismanaged), moved his family to new Queen Square, Bloomsbury, London, to share premises with the firm. The Red House was sold.

It was owned as of 2001 by Mrs. Doris Hollamby. She and her architect husband Edward (died 1999) bought it in 1952, after it had been used for offices of the National Assistance Board during World War II. The Hollambys undertook to accurately restore the house, which is now open to the public. An association known as the Friends of Red House has been formed to support the Red House Trust, in order to physically maintain the house, its garden, and orchard, and secure its “long-term future.”

Queen’s House

The Queen’s House on the edge of the Royal Park at Greenwich near London was designed by Inigo Jones—probably the greatest of all English architects—early in the seventeenth century. It was a major architectural feat because it represented, all at once and in a single building, the introduction of a new kind of architecture in the face of a well-established and reactionary building industry.

Before Jones (1573–1652) stepped on her architectural stage, England had been trying for almost a century to come to terms with the new forms of the Italian Renaissance. Henry VIII’s attempts to bring Italian craftsmen to England had been resisted by his subjects, and his later breach with most of Catholic Europe had stemmed the inflow of artistic ideas. The cultural standoff was maintained through Elizabeth I’s long reign and well into the seventeenth century. Anything of the Renaissance that did reach England came, often in clumsy caricature, through northern European pattern books, and attempts to use supposedly Italian details in English architecture generated the epigram. “The Englishman Italianate is the devil Inkarnate.” Single-handedly, Jones changed that.
His early life is obscure, but in 1603 he was working for the Earl of Rutland. Two years later Anne of Denmark, James I’s queen, asked him to design scenery and costumes for a royal masque at the Palace of Whitehall. In 1611–1612 he briefly held the office of Surveyor to the Crown Prince, Henry, and shortly after his master’s death, he was promised the position of Surveyor of the King’s Works. The following year Jones traveled in Italy with the Earl of Arundel and visited Venice, Vicenza, Bologna, Florence, Siena, Rome, and Genoa. He was impressed with modern Italian architecture and especially the country houses designed by Andrea Palladio (died 1580). He bought a copy of Palladio’s The Four Books of Architecture, published in Italian in 1570. Soon after returning to England Jones succeeded Simon Basil as Surveyor.

His first royal architectural commission was for the Queen’s House for Anne of Denmark. James I often went down from London to Greenwich (perhaps for fear of the plague) where Pleasaunce Palace stood on the site of the present Royal Naval College. Anne wanted a villa linking the palace garden and the Royal Park, which were divided by the main road between Deptford and Woolwich. Jones built the house with a two-story wing on each side of the road, joined at the upper level by a bridge, making it possible to pass from the palace gardens into the park without crossing the thoroughfare. When Anne died in 1619 work was halted. The basement and unfinished ground floor walls were covered with straw to protect them from frost, and a decade passed before work resumed.

In 1629 James’s son Charles I gave the house to his queen, Henrietta Maria, and Jones completed it for her. By 1635 the outside was almost finished. Apart from its ingenious siting, the house was un-English in a number of ways, most notably for its carefully proportioned H-shaped plan, that contrasted with the rambling layout of contemporary English houses. Spatial organization within the Queen’s House was symmetrical, geometrically laid out in keeping with the principles of visual harmony set down by Palladio. The Great Hall at the building’s core was a 40-foot (12-meter) cube, the pattern of its marble floor matching the geometrical composition of the ceiling panels. From one corner of the hall, the so-called Tulip Stair—the first cantilevered staircase in England and of the kind recommended by Palladio—led to the king’s and queen’s separate apartments on the upper floor. Each suite comprised rooms planned to fit the court routine: a presence chamber, anteroom, privy chamber, antechamber, bedchamber, inner closet, and outer closet. A loggia on the south side of the house looked out across the Royal Park.

Another major departure from convention was the outside appearance of the house. The park front had a loggia in the center of the second story, and the proportions of solids and voids can be related to Palladio’s Palazzo Chiericati at Vicenza (1550–1580). The riverfront had a central full-height projection to relieve its flatness; a horseshoe stair led from the palace garden to the podium on which the Queen’s House stood. The building was crowned with a balustrade. The plain upper walls were set above a ground floor with regular, deep recessed joints. The stories also had windows of different heights, but in the eighteenth, century the ground floor windows were lengthened. All is not what it appears, because the house is built of brick covered with white stucco in imitation of stone and prompting the alternative name “the White House.” Although Jones believed that the outside of buildings should be “solid, proportionable to the rules, masculine and unaffected,” the interiors were a different matter, and the Queen’s House was lavishly decorated and fitted out.

The ceiling panels of the Great Hall, showing Peace surrounded by the Muses and Liberal Arts, were painted in 1635 by the Italian father-daughter team Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi. Henrietta Maria furnished the rest of her house so opulently that an impressed visitor exclaimed that it “far surpasseth any other of that kind in England.” But the fact was there was no other of that kind in England.

The interior was possibly incomplete when civil war erupted in 1642. When the king’s houses were seized by Parliament in the following year, Jones’s surveyorship was terminated. In 1645 he was arrested and his property confiscated; that was put right a year later. The king was executed in 1649, and Jones died (some say of grief) in 1652. Anti-Catholic feelings compelled the queen to flee the country. Following the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, Charles II intended to live in the Queen’s House while building a new palace, but Henrietta Maria (now Queen Mother) moved in and remained until her death in 1689.

Jones’s student and nephew John Webb undertook the restoration of the house in 1662, following his uncle’s meticulous documentation and adding two bridges to make the plan of the upper floor into a perfect square. In 1690 the Queen’s House became the residence of the Ranger of Greenwich Park, and in 1708 the ground floor windows and original casements were altered, spoiling Jones’s careful design. The house was painstakingly restored in the 1980s.

It is difficult for us to grasp how innovative, even alien, the white, classical Queen’s House would have appeared in Stuart England. Inigo Jones had categorically departed from every English precedent, and his design was regarded by one critic as “some curious device,” because no one understood the theory upon which his architecture was based. His lead would not be followed for a hundred years. His architectural feat was achieved for a number of reasons: first, he was a new kind of architect, with royal patronage; second, he was no slave to fashion but had a thorough commitment to the principles that underlay Italian Renaissance architecture; and third, he was a practical man with consummate drafting skills that allowed him to communicate exactly what he required of the craftsmen, although they were unfamiliar with his kind of architecture.

Qosqo, Peru

Qosqo (“navel” or “center”) in southern central Peru was once the ancient capital of the Inkan Empire. Continuously occupied for three millennia, the oldest living city in the Americas perches 11,150 feet (3,400 meters) above sea level in the Andes Mountains. Strategically located, Qosqo reached out to the entire Tahuantinsuyu (Land of the Four Quarters) by means of an extensive road network. In the days of its glory, the city boasted about 100,000 houses and somewhere between 225,000 and 300,000 citizens, many of whom lived in the neighboring farmland. The population compares with modern Rochester. Jersey City, or Anaheim. It was remarkable for its physical planning, its social organization, and the gold-festooned buildings of massive masonry that adorned it.

Farmers and herdsmen of the Marcavalle culture established permanent settlements in the Qosqo Valley around 1000 b.c. The Chanapata followed 200 years later, and successive groups—Qotakallis, Sawasias, Antasayas, and Wallas—also occupied the site for about six centuries from a.d. 600. There is a tradition that Inkan Qosqo was founded some time in the eleventh or twelfth century by the legendary king Manco Cápac. What is clear is that under the ninth ruler, Pachacútec (reigned 1438–1463), it became a thriving urban center and the hub of the far-flung empire’s religious and administrative life.

Its ascendancy lasted until 1533, when Pizarro’s conquistadors entered the city. The invaders corrupted its name to Cuzco—meaning “hypocrite” or “humpback.” To further diminish its power, within two years the Spanish established Lima as the new capital of Peru. In 1536 Manko Inka led his armies against them, and a protracted bloody war followed. But within forty years, the last emperor, Tupaq Amaru I, was defeated, captured, and beheaded in Qosqo.

The plan of Qosqo, like that of all Inkan cities, had several determinants. First was the cosmology of the builders, who framed it within imaginary lines governed by Pachamama (Mother Earth) and the Apus and Aukis (spirits of the mountains and valleys). Second, creating a balance, was the pragmatism of an agrarian people who had a habit of optimum land use (so that even city streets were narrow). Third, formal rules of “symmetry, opposition, repetition and subordination” constrained relationships between elements of the urban design. Basically, Qosqo comprised two parts: the hawan (upper sector) to the north and the less important uran (lower sector) to the south. The second division, into four, reflected the Tahuantinsuyu, and twelve neighborhoods were created by dividing each of the four into thirds. Each neighborhood was again divided into three. Tradition attributes the city plan to Pachacútec, and there is some evidence to support a second tradition that the central part of his capital was based upon the shape of a puma (considered sacred by the Inka) crouching over the Saphi River. That stream was diverted through a paved canal crossing Qosqo’s central plaza—in every way the city’s heart.

Urban life was focused on the plaza. The great open space, paved with flagstones, was divided into two by the Saphi Canal, one part providing the setting for the Inkas’ principal, rituals and ceremonies. That was surrounded by the most Important buildings, including the sprawling, low palaces of the rulers and their extended families. Built of dressed stone, or at least stone faced, many were brightly painted; some had marble gates. The other part of the square was for public gatherings and celebrations. Near its center stood a platform (Usnu) from which the emperor and other dignitaries could speak to the people. Among Pachacútec’s improvements to city center were the Coricancha (a courtyard once covered in gold) and the Temple of the Sun, also encrusted, with gold plates and flanked by the trappings of the priesthood: cloisters, dormitories, gardens, and terraces, all “sparkling with gold.” What was beauty to the Inkas was merely wealth to the rapacious Spaniards and therefore quickly plundered after 1533.

Within the context of public buildings, something must be said of the Inkas’ superlative stonemasonry skills. Like the Spaniards, we marvel at the enormous granite or andesite boulders—some were almost 30 feet (9 meters) high—weighing hundreds of tons, that were transported great distances from quarries and without the benefit of the wheel. They were carved and dressed, for the most part, with stone chisels, although there is evidence of some bronze tools being used. Whatever the case, the bond known as Imperial Inkan masonry—medium-size stones laid in regular horizontal rows on very thin clay beds—was dressed with such accuracy that it was difficult to see the joints or slip even a knife blade between them.

From Qosqo’s central plaza, four main streets led to the high roads to the Four Quarters and formed the base of the divisional structure already described. Long, narrow, straight streets, all paved with cobbles of Rumiqolqa basalt, followed a regular, right-angled grid. Along the streets, covered channels carried a clean water supply. In contrast to the carefully dressed stone of the palaces, houses on the perimeter of Qosqo were built of random rubble or mud brick (adobe) and lined with painted clay stucco. Their steeply pitched, timber-framed roofs were skillfully thatched with ichu, the local wild grass.

Following a series of abortive uprisings between 1780 and 1815, Peru was finally emancipated from Spanish colonial rule in 1821. In the meantime, because of the local dialect, the Spanish name for the city had been changed to Cusco. The Inkan metropolis had been overlaid by three centuries of colonial architecture. Nevertheless, in 1933 Cusco was recognized as the “Archaeological Capital of South America,” and fifty years later it was inscribed on UNESCO’s World Heritage List. By the late twentieth century, a strong nationalistic movement pressed for reversion to the original name, and in 1990 the municipality officially adopted “Qosqo” and the 1993 Peruvian Constitution declared it to be the Historic Capital of the country.

Potala Palace

The thirteen-story, 380-foot-high (117-meter) Potala Palace rises from sheer walls on a cliff named Marpo Ri (Red Hill), 130 meters above Lhasa, the capital city of what is now the Tibet Autonomous Region of the People’s Republic of China. The 1,200-foot-wide (360-meter) complex of stone and timber buildings contains literally thousands of rooms with a total floor area of 154,000 square yards (130,000 square meters). Its shrines and the tombs of eight Dalai Lamas make it a focus of pilgrimage for Tibetan Buddhists. The walls, some up to 16 feet (5 meters) thick, were reinforced against earthquakes by backfilling with molten copper; their building stones were carried to the site by pack animals and slaves to construct a skyscraper on the roof of the world, nearly 12,000 feet (3,600 meters) above sea level. Wide stone stairways climb steeply from the city below. As one writer has commented, the Potala Palace was an achievement comparable to building the pyramids.

Legend has it that the craggy Marpo Ri was the site of a cave used as a religious retreat by the first emperor of a unified. Tibet, Songtsan Gampo (a.d. 617–665), who also introduced Buddhism to the country. He ascended the throne when he was just thirteen, and in a twenty-year reign lie established a powerful empire, with his armies ranging from northern India eastward to China and westward to Turkey. He moved his capital from Yarlung to Lhasa, and in 637 he built a palace, Kukhar Potrang, on Marpo Ri for his Chinese bride, Wen-Ch’eng. During his successor’s reign, much of that building was destroyed by Chinese invaders, and its size and character are unknown. However, what little remained was subsumed into a new structure when the existing Potala Palace was initiated. There are two chapels in the palace, the Chogyal Drubphuk and the Phakpa Lhakhang, said to date from Songtsan Gampo’s time.

By the end of the seventeenth, century the ridge of Marpo Ri was crowned by a line of towering buildings that seem to be at one with the outcrop. The Potrang Karpo (White Palace) was the first phase of the new palace, commissioned in 1645 by the “Great Fifth” Dalai Lama, Ngawaag Lobsang Gyatso (1617–1682). He moved his official residence from the Ganden Palace at Drepung (then the largest monastery in the world) to the Potala. The White Palace was completed by 1653. The central pavilion, known as the Potrang Marpo (Red Palace) and flanked on both sides by the White Palace, had not been started when he died, so the monks kept his death a secret for fourteen years while the work was finished! The Red Palace, and it is indeed dark red, was added between 1690 and 1694 by a workforce reputed to have consisted of 7,000 workers and 1.500 skilled artisans. The massive building in the so-called City of the Sun thus became the official winter seat of the Dalai Lamas and their extensive entourage. It was also the seat of government of the theocracy of Tibet. The name Potala, probably after the South Indian mountain sacred to Siva, dates from the eleventh century.

The Red Palace housed four meditation halls, thirty-five chapels, shrines, assembly halls, and the gem-encrusted golden stupas marking the tombs of the fifth to the thirteenth Dalai Lamas (except the sixth). In the western wing of the White Palace was the private cloister of the Dalai Lamas, the Namgyal Monastery, home to more than 150 monks, while its eastern wing contained government offices, a school for officials, and the National Assembly’s meeting halls. There were also repositories for ancient religious books and manuscripts, arms and armor, and the treasures accumulated by the monastery over centuries. The lower levels were a maze of storerooms. In 1922 many of the major rooms in the White Palace were renovated, and two whole stories were added to the Red Palace. The agglomeration of buildings at the foot of the Red Hill, once a village named Sho, was the location of government offices and the headquarters of the Tibetan army.

A Communist Chinese army of 84,000 invaded Tibet in October 1950, unchallenged by the rest of the world. The troubled decade ended with a March 1959 uprising, the consequent toppling of the Tibetan government, and the voluntary exile of the Dalai Lama and 100,000 of his compatriots. In the suppression that has followed, it is claimed that more than 1 million people have been killed. The conqueror’s policy of resettling Chinese in Tibet means that the Tibetans have become a minority in their own land, where Chinese has been made the official language. The Potala Palace, although its south and north sides were targeted by Liberation Army artillery in 1959, suffered minimal damage. Unlike many monasteries and shrines—about 6,000 have been destroyed—it was left untouched by the Red Guards during Mao Tse-tung’s infamous cultural revolution. Nevertheless, many of its treasures were removed to China, and some later appeared on foreign markets.
Paradoxically, in 1990 the Chinese government sanctioned a 35 million yuan (then U.S.$4.2 million) restoration and renovation of and Potala Palace as a five-year plan. The budget subsequently blew out to 53 million yuan (U.S.$6.4 million), but it seems that Beijing considered it money well spent if it could mollify the resentment of the Tibetan religious hierarchy and attract tourists to Lhasa. The whole project, worthy in itself and praised by international conservation bodies, was swathed in propaganda. The Chinese government has also trebled the annual maintenance budget since the restoration was completed in August 1994. The following December the Potala Palace was inscribed on UNESCO’s World Heritage List.

Postmodern architecture

Simplistically, postmodern architecture emerged in the 1960s as a reaction to the Modern Movement that had commanded world architecture since the mid-1920s. Its theories were first expounded by the American architect Robert Venturi and realized in his Chestnut Hill Villa of 1962. Within less than a decade, designers were willfully denying the pervasive geometrical glass boxes that Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson had dubbed the International Style. Ornament (which the modernists had once equated with crime), color, and texture were again accepted, rather embraced, by architects. Historical precedents were revisited and often transposed into the language of twentieth-century technology to become a new visual language, an architectural patois. Eclecticism, for years a pejorative term, became a basis for design. And at first it was just design, because architects made more drawings and models than buildings. Although it is difficult to choose from a plethora of examples, among the icons of this new way of making architecture were Philip Johnson and John Burgee’s AT&T Building in New York (1978–1984) and Michael Graves’s “flamboyantly decorative” Portland Public Service Building in Oregon (1930–1983). As one commentator has observed, postmodernism became “the style of choice for developers of commercial buildings” everywhere. It has the same kind of stylistic anonymity of “globalness” as the Modernism it replaced.

Johnson (b. 1906) received a degree in architectural history from Harvard in 1930 and immediately became and first director of the Department of Design at the New York Museum of Modern Art. In 1940, inspired by the work of the Dutch modernist J. J. P. Oud, he returned to Harvard and emerged with an architectural qualification four years later. He worked alone and with others and became widely known from the early 1950s for his puritanically modernist buildings—some consider him a clone of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe—such as the Seagram Building in New York (with Mies, 1958) and the Glass House (1962) in New Canaan, Connecticut, until he formed a partnership with Burgee in 1967. Johnson then renounced Modernism (he had castigated Oud for doing that in 1946) and converted to postmodernism. His final artistic position was as an anti-postmodernist, leading the English architectural historian Dennis Sharp to opine that Johnson was philosophically fickle, with “more interest in [architectural] style than in substance.”

Be that as it may, the AT&T Corporate Headquarters at 550 Madison Avenue, New York City, is a milestone in the development of twentieth-century architecture, the first postmodern skyscraper and a key building in the popularization of postmodernism. The 600-foot-high (184-meter), bland rectangular prism covers its site. Perhaps in reference to nineteenth-century skyscrapers, perhaps to a classical column, the main facade is divided into three parts: an entrance at the base, a tall shaft of identical floors, and a wide band of windows near the building’s crown. The base, which originally enclosed a public open space, includes portals of epic proportion. A central 110-foot-high (33-meter) arch, surmounted by oculi is flanked by three 60-foot-high (18-meter) rectangular doorways. Some critics suggest it borrows from Alberti’s Sant’ Andrea in Mantua, of 1472–1494. Unlike the featureless window-walls of modernist office towers, the shaft, is sheathed in pink granite, and the fenestration is designed (like the early skyscrapers) to express the steel structural frame beneath.

The most controversial feature of the AT&T Building was the 30-foot pediment, ostensibly to mask mechanical equipment on the roof. Many regarded it as kitsch, and critics immediately dubbed it “Chippendale” because it evoked the work of the eighteenth-century English cabinetmaker. Indeed, the epithet was applied to the entire building, and Johnson interpreted the bestowal of a nickname as complimentary; otherwise he described his building as a “neo-Renaissance essay on the use of stone.” In January 1992 the building was leased to the Sony Corporation.

Graves (b. 1934), one of the most honored twentieth-century architects, trained at the University of Cincinnati and Harvard. His early practice was limited to mostly domestic buildings. Among the notable examples are the Hanselmann house at Fort Wayne, Indiana (1967); additions to the Alexander house at Princeton, New Jersey (1971–1973); and the Crooks house, also at Fort Wayne (1976).

The Portland Public Service Building was the first of his large-scale projects to be realized. With subsequent commissions including the Humana Building at North Carolina State University (1982–1985), the San Juan Capistrano Public Library (1981–1983), and extensions to the Newark Museum (completed 1989), it placed him beside Venturi and Denise Scott-Brown, Frank Gehry, and Charles Gwathmey in the hall of champions of American postmodern architecture and design.

The freestanding fifteen-story municipal office building on Southwest Fifth Avenue, Portland, Oregon, houses the municipal Building, Planning and Design Review departments. It was the winning entry in a design-and-build competition sponsored by the city fathers. Johnson, as adviser to the jury and the client, was influential in securing the commission for Graves over the other shortlisted designs by Arthur Erickson and the Mitchell-Giurgola partnership.

Built on an entire 200-foot-square (61-meter-square) city block in the urban precinct, it is flanked by the city hall and county courthouse buildings on two sides, and a transit mall and a park on the others. To emphasize the association with other local government functions, Graves deliberately organized the facades in what he described as a “classical three-part division of base, middle or body, and attic or head,” an approach that Johnson adopted for the AT&T Building. Described as a “wildly innovative and controversial postmodern landmark,” the hefty building, rising from a heavy four-story base, has facades of diverse designs, clad with strongly colored tiles—brown, blues, and terra-cotta—against an ivory background. The square windows are relatively small, and they puncture the walls at regular intervals, another denial of the glass curtains of a decade or so before. The symmetrical park front has two huge seven-story pseudocolumns with boxy, floor-height capitals and flutes evoked by vertical bands of windows. Above the central main entrance there is a 40-foot (12-meter) hammered-copper sculpture of “Portlandia” (the female figure on the city seal) by sculptor Raymond Kaskey; it was added in 1985 at Graves’s initiative. Around the corners, the facade is adorned at the tenth-floor level with a stylized swag of blue ribbons, made of concrete: on one, they hang sedately in place; on the other they appear to be blowing in the wind. Inside the building, Graves used the same colors as the exterior (a decision that provoked some criticism); he also designed the furnishing textiles and other details for the offices. Since 1995, the building’s structural problems have become evident and are worsening. Despite costly repairs, the building may soon become unsafe to use.