ARCHITECTURAL WORLD

DEFINITIONS We have been liberally using the term ‘smart materials’ without precisely defining what we mean. Creating a precise definition, however, is surprisingly difficult. The term is already in wide use, but there is no general agreement about what it actually means. A quick review of the literature indicates that terms like ‘smart’ and ‘intelligent’ are used almost interchangeably by many in relation to materials and systems, while others draw sharp distinctions about which qualities or capabilities are implied. NASA defines smart materials as ‘materials that ‘‘remember’’ configurations and can conform to them when given a specific stimulus’,3 a definition that clearly gives an indication as to how NASA intends to investigate and apply them. A more sweeping definition comes from the Encyclopedia of Chemical Technology: ‘smart materials and structures are those objects that sense environmental events, process that sensory information, and then act on the environment...

Missing from many of these efforts is the understanding of how boundaries physically behave. The definition of boundary that people typically accept is one similar to that offered by the Oxford English Dictionary: a real or notional line marking the limits of an area. As such, the boundary is static and defined, and its requirement for legibility (marking) prescribes that it is a tangible barrier – thus a visual artifact. For physicists, however, the boundary is not a thing, but an action. Environments are understood as energy fields, and the boundary operates as the transitional zone between different states of an energy field. As such, it is a place of change as an environment’s energy field transitions from a high-energy to low-energy state or from one form of energy to another. Boundaries are therefore, by definition, active zones of mediation rather than of delineation. We can’t see them, nor can we draw them as known objects fixed to a location. Breaking the paradigm of the ...

Orthographic projection in architectural representation inherently privileges the surface. When the three-dimensional world is sliced to fit into a two-dimensional representation, the physical objects of a building appear as flatplanes. Regardless of the third dimension of these planes, we recognize that the eventual occupant will rarely see anything other than the surface planes behind which the structure and systems are hidden. While the common mantra is that architects design space the reality is that architects make (draw) surfaces. This privileging of the surface drives the use of materials in two profound ways. First is that the material is identified as the surface: the visual understanding of architecture is determined by the visual qualities of the material. Second is that because architecture is synonymous with surface – and materials are that surface – we essentially think of materials as planar. The result is that we tend to consider materials in large two-dimensio...

The relationship between architecture and materials had been fairly straightforward until the Industrial Revolution. Materials were chosen either pragmatically – for their utility and availability – or they were chosen formally – for their appearance and ornamental qualities. Locally available stone formed foundations and walls, and high-quality marbles often appeared as thin veneers covering the rough construction. Decisions about building and architecture determined the material choice, and as such, we can consider the pre-19th century use of materials in design to have been subordinate to issues in function and form. Furthermore, materials were not standardized, so builders and architects were forced to rely on an extrinsic understanding of their properties and performance. In essence, knowledge of materials was gained through experience and observation. Master builders were those who had acquired that knowledge and the skills necessary for working with available materials, ofte...

Smart planes –  Intelligent houses – Shape memory textiles – Micro machines – self-assembling structures – Color-changing paint – Nano systems.  The vocabulary of the material world has changed dramatically since 1992, when the first ‘smart material’ emerged commercially in, of all things, snow skis. Defined as ‘highly engineered materials that respond intelligently to their environment’, smart materials have become the ‘go-to’ answer for the 21st century’s technological needs. Use of Nano materials in Architecture NASA is counting on smart materials to spearhead the first major change in aeronautic technology since the  development of hypersonic flight, and the US Defense Department envisions smart materials as the linchpin technology behind the ‘soldier of the future’, who will be equipped with everything from smart tourniquets to chameleon-like clothing. At the other end of the application spectrum, toys as basic as ‘Play-Doh’ and equipment as ubiquitous as la...

Seating infront of my drafting table i was just thinking of my past architecure studies and life...submissions,those late night studies , elevanth our model making , runnig for plotting , xeroxing the jurnals , computer failure befor the day of submissions....list will go on.. that was amazing..but whats the different between us and the other students like medical or enggi students? what do u think?? is there an difference??

Italian in origin and concept, futurism was first theorized by Filippo Tomaso Marinetti in a manifesto published on 20 February 1909 in the French daily Le Figaro. Futurism soon became a movement central to the process of radical artistic renovation carried out by the European avant-garde. It dealt both with cultural debates specific to Italian art of the first two decades of the 20th century and with crucial discourses of the European artistic Encyclopedia of 20th-century architecture 904 revival in general. While affecting primarily the arts in the more restrictive sense of the term—under the influence of Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Gino Severini, and Mario Chiattone—its most notable representatives in Italian architecture were Giacomo Balla and Antonio Sant’Elia but also, in various degrees, such architects as Adalberto Libera and Angiolo Mazzoni, among others. The close collaboration between futurist artists and architects is evidenced by the fact that the first and...

Architect and philosopher, United States The American Richard Buckminster Fuller has been variously labeled architect, engineer, author, designer-inventor, educator, poet, cartographer, ecologist, philosopher, teacher, and mathematician throughout his career. Although not trained professionally as an architect, Fuller has been accepted within the architectural profession, receiving numerous awards and honorary degrees. He thought of himself as a comprehensive human in the universe, implementing research for the good of humanity. Born in Milton, Massachusetts, on 12 July 1895, he was the son of Richard Buckminster Fuller, Sr., and Caroline Wolcott (Andrews) Fuller. His father, who worked as a leather and tea merchant with offices in Boston, died when Fuller was 15 years of age. Fuller’s first design revelation came to him when, in kindergarten in 1899, he built his first flat-space frame, an octet truss constructed of dried peas and toothpicks. As a boy, vacationing at his family’s s...

Architect, United States Albert Frey holds a unique place in the history of 20th century Californian architecture as an uncompromising modernist of the European school, a pupil of Le Corbusier, and an exponent of high-tech and rationalist architecture who lived out his long life in the hills above Palm Springs, California. Frey spent the early part of his career working for Belgian modernist architects Jules Eggericx and Raphael Verwilghen in Brussels, where he was involved with rebuilding housing following the Great War. He returned to Switzerland in 1927 to work for the firm of Leuenberger, Fluckiger before moving to Paris in 1928 to work for Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret for nine months. In Le Corbusier’s atelier he sat between Charlotte Perriand and Jose Louis Sert, working on the Centrosoyus Administration Building in Moscow (1933) and the Villa Savoye (1931) at Poissy. Here he was introduced to Sweet’s Catalogue and, Entries A–F 897 like Richard Neutra before him, found himse...

Frankfurt am Main was, next to Berlin, perhaps Germany’s most important center of 20th-century architectural developments. Its attempts to initiate an era of “New Building” with innovative social housing programs and extensive public works construction in the 1920s and its impressive post-World War II rebuilding program that culminated with the creation of a publicly funded “Museum Mile” in the 1980s have given Frankfurt an architectural prominence that far outweighs its modest size. The building of dozens of Europe’s tallest skyscrapers has made Frankfurt’s skyline similarly distinctive. Located on the Main River at the edge of western Germany’s densely populated Rhein-Main industrial area, Frankfurt is the capital of the German state of Hesse and one of Europe’s most important banking, commercial, industrial, and transportation centers. It began the 20th century as a province of Prussia under the guidance of Mayor Franz Adickes (1846–1915), who initiated a series of reform-minded urb...

Architect, Austria Josef Frank was among the leading Austrian representatives of the Modern movement. He was a founding member of the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM), and, as vice president of the Austrian Werkbund, he oversaw the planning and construction of the 1932 Vienna Werkbundsiedlung. In the early 1930s, however, Frank emerged as one of the most important and vocal critics of what he saw as the totalitarian orthodoxy within the various strands of modernism. For the remainder of his life, until he stopped practicing in the early 1960s, he sought alternatives to what he perceived as the banality and uniformity of much of the building of his time. Frank studied architecture with Carl König, Max Fabiani, and others at the Vienna Technische Hochschule, graduating in 1910 with a dissertation on the churches of Leon Battista Alberti. While still a student, he flirted briefly with the Art Nouveau (Jugendstil), but he soon abandoned the style in favor of the renewed...

Architect, historian and critic, United States Kenneth Frampton is an architect, historian, and theorist based in New York. As an architect with Douglas Stephen and Partners from 1961 to 1966, when he designed an eight-story (48-unit) apartment block, Craven Hill Gardens (1964), in Bayswater, London. It received a Ministry of Housing award and is now a Grade Four historic monument. In 1962, Frampton also became a technical editor for Architectural Des ign and improved the depth and quality of the magazine’s coverage of new work, such as the Smithsons’ Economist Building in London. In 1965, he accepted a teaching position at Princeton University through the efforts of Peter Eisenman, then a young professor there who had studied at Cambridge University with Colin Rowe. While at Princeton, he became a member of the Institute for Architecture and Advanced Studies (IAUS) in New York and eventually one of the editors of its influential historical and theoretical journal, Oppositions (1972—82...

Architect, England Together with architects Richard Rogers, Nicholas Grimshaw, and Michael Hopkins, Norman Foster is credited with pioneering the design style known as High-Tech in Britain in the early 1970s. Although in the United States the term refers principally to an architectural style, in Britain High-Tech points to a more rigorous approach in which advanced technology is acknowledged as representing the “spirit of the age.” The aesthetics of industrial production and machine technology are celebrated and embodied Entries A–F 883 in the methodology of design production. Industry is a source for both technology and imagery. After working in the city treasurer’s office in Manchester Town Hall and serving for two years in the Royal Air Force, Foster studied at the University of Manchester (1956–61) and at Yale University (1961–62). In 1963, he formed Team 4 in London, collaborating with his wife, Wendy, and Su and Richard Rogers, whom he had met at Yale. An early commission was for...

Designed by D.H.Burnham and Company; completed 1903 New York, New York With its striking shape, prominent location, and exceptional height, the Flatiron Building was one of New York’s most discussed and distinctive skyscrapers at the beginning of the 20th century. It was originally named the Fuller Building after the George A.Fuller Company, which had served as the building’s developer and builder and was one of its original occupants until moving to a new building in 1929. From its lofty quarters, the New York office of the Fuller Company oversaw as general contractors the construction of several of the city’s most prominent buildings. However, few called this skyscraper the Fuller Building; the triangular lot from which this tower rises quickly led to the building’s popular moniker, the Flatiron. The architect of the building was D.H.Burnham and Company of Chicago. Daniel H.Burnham (1846–1912) had established himself as one of America’s most prominent architects and planners. By the ...

Architect, Denmark Kay Fisker was one of the early proponents of functionalism in Danish architecture. Taking his point of departure from the early 20th-century Danish Neoclassicism so prevalent in the 1910s and 1920s, he developed a type of functional building design specific to the Danish language of materials. In this way, Fisker took his inspiration first from functional theorist and practitioner Louis Sullivan and only later from his contemporaries among the European architects, such as Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius, and Le Corbusier. Fisker’s successful bridging of these two styles in his practice Encyclopedia of 20th-century architecture 876 (with partner C.F.Møller from 1930 to 1941), along with his steadfast promotion of functionalist ideals in his teaching at the Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen and abroad and as a writer for architectural publications (including the Danish journal Arkitekten), proves his place as one of the most influential figures in modern architectu...

Twentieth-century Finnish architecture, with few exceptions, has moved within the flow of contemporaneous international developments. Within this larger construct, Finnish architects have simultaneously developed qualities that are particular to the cultural and natural condition of the country. Over the past half-century, the Finns have not forsaken modernism but have continued to examine and inspect its potential, creating a legacy of superb works in architecture and planning. Toward the end of the 19th century, a growth in national self-awareness occurred in Finland as well as in other European countries. Although this nationalism was partially based on an interest in seeking national cultural origins, it was also fostered by the establishment and growth of democratic institutions that accompanied industrial development. In response to the repression of the regime of Czar Nicholas II during the 1890s, Finland sought political independence through national self-assertion. Within the ...