Architecture

by Read Listen Learn

“We shape our buildings, then they shape us.” Winston Churchill Architecture, the practice of designing and constructing buildings, has been around since human beings stopped living in caves and needed to put a roof over their heads. For thousands of years, there was no concept of ‘architecture’: people just built what they needed, as best they could, taking into account the materials available and the environment in which the structure or building needed to operate. Put simply, if you live in a cold forest you need to make a warm house and you will almost certainly use wood to build it. If you live in a hot, rocky desert you will want to build a house that keeps you cool and you’ll use stone as the main building material.

As people switched from being nomads living in tents to settled farmers, it made sense to make bigger, more permanent, living spaces than the highly portable but otherwise limited tent. There was also a need to build ‘houses’ for the animals or to store crops – in other words, stables and barns. However, in a short space of time, people learnt to build very well: huge pyramids arose from the Egyptian desert while beautifully proportioned buildings started to appear in Greece and Turkey around three thousand years ago. China and other parts of the Far East also started to create some huge structures.

Many were palaces or assembly buildings, like temples or meeting halls and a surprising number were built to honour dead people. This is true of the pyramids and, much later in history, the Taj Mahal in India. Nonetheless, most buildings are for living in or working in, or both, and as architecture matured, some people started to think and write about its principles. One of the very first was the Roman, Vitruvius, who set down three basic things to remember when designing and constructing a building:

Durability

Utility

Beauty

In short, ‘durability’ means that you should make a building that will last well and not fall down in a couple of years. ‘Utility’ means that the building should be really useful and easy to live or work in. And, ‘beauty’ speaks for itself. If we think of buildings like the Acropolis in Greece or the Coliseum in Rome, it seems that Classical architects often succeeded in meeting all three of Vitruvius’ criteria.

From Roman times, the advances in architecture came in two important areas. First, new materials were invented that allowed far bigger and more complex buildings. The most important of these were cement and concrete which allowed materials as strong as stone to be poured into place or into moulds. Second were the advances in mathematics and especially geometry (a favourite of the Ancient Greeks) which allowed engineers to work out how much stress or weight a given shape could stand and what size it could reach before collapsing. Two examples are the dome and the arch, the one used for roofs and the other for windows or doorways. They were both possible two thousand years ago but, after one thousand five hundred years of maths and engineering, it was possible to build the enormous dome of St Paul’s Cathedral in London and most of Europe’s other cathedrals had very big arched windows and doorways tens of metres high.

Of course, one effect of the changing technology was that more light could be let in through these bigger windows and domes. An important thing in the days before there was electric lighting but also the reason that architects consider natural light coming in, artificial lighting, and reflected interior lighting (reflected off walls and mirrors, for example) as a very important factor in the design and positioning of a building. As the engineering and materials have improved and widened, so have the options for architects. These days, a building can be made almost completely of glass, including the floors. You just need a steel structure to hang it on. Many cities have one or more buildings like this.

Generally, these all-glass buildings are at least interesting to look at, so they try hard to satisfy one of Vitruvius’ criteria: beauty. But what would it be like to live in a glass building? Well, most reports are pretty negative. These buildings tend to be cold in winter and cost a lot to heat but that’s nothing compared to the way they heat up in the summer when the sun hits the glass. Many complain that the glass walls and floors mean that one is watched by others all the time, which makes many of us uncomfortable. Often, people put up lots of posters and calendars on the glass walls to stop the sunlight and unwanted observers, which just makes the whole place look untidy.

Even the idea of ‘durability’ is no longer a rule. These days, many building companies design the new houses they build, and sell people, to last about forty years and then start falling apart rapidly. Then, the same or another company will build a new lot of houses, also designed to last just a few decades. Short life houses are good for the construction industry.

The big breakthrough in architecture towards the end of the 19th century was the result of an improvement in materials, namely new and flexible steel that allowed a tall, thin building to rise to fifty, seventy, a hundred floors. These were the famous skyscrapers, first in New York and other American cities and then all across the world. The classic example is New York’s ‘Empire State Building’ which, for many years, was the world’s tallest building.

It has been surpassed many times now and the prestige of having the world’s tallest building passes from country to country every few years. It is seen as a symbol of national or corporate pride. The new Kingdom Tower in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, will be a kilometre high, for instance, on its completion. Now, skyscrapers are being used as prisons as well. Prisoners are kept on the highest floors which makes escape a lot more difficult.

The future of architecture seems to be in ‘smart’ environmentally friendly buildings. Many offices and similar buildings now include lights that come on and off automatically as you enter or leave rooms or that follow you as you walk along corridors. Of course, these types of buildings incorporate a lot of computer technology but also try to use things like solar energy and the latest domestic recycling technology.

Wherever the future takes us, it seems certain that architecture will become ever more central to our lives. After all, more and more of us live in cities and work indoors, in offices and shops. But we are all architects at heart. After all, which one of us has never spent time thinking what their dream house would be like?