Region:  Italy, especially Florence.Period: Fifteenth century.Characteristics:Centralized plan.Emulation of the Antique.Invention.Spatial harmony.Proportional façade.Delicacy.Centralized planThe Early Renaissance saw the fi rst experiments with the Neoplatonic ideal of the centralized plan. Brunelleschi’s S. Maria degli Angeli was begun in 1434, but left incomplete. Michelozzo’s east end of SS. Annunziata, Florence, begun in 1444, is a complete example, but Giuliano da Sangallo the Elder’s S. Maria delle Carceri is...

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   Architect: Diller Scofidio + RenfroLocation :  Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Date: Suspended in 2016 Building Type : MuseumConstruction System: reinforced concreteClimate: temperateContext: UrbanStyle: ModernNotes:The project first took shape in 2014 but was completely suspended in 2016. Although the project has been untouched since then, a recent announcement by Governor Cláudio Castro promised the revival of construction works at the museum, with an expected public opening in early 2023. Located...

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 Architect: Le CorbusierLocation : Hilversum, the NetherlandsDate : 2006 Building Type :Museums / Music schools/Music academiesConstruction System: Glass and reinforced concreteClimate: temperateContext: UrbanStyle: ModernNotes: Light travels from the skylight and the stained-glass facades down through the atrium into the slate-clad archive.This rectilinear volume contains a research institute and national archives for Dutch television and radio. Limited to a height of 82 ft (25 m) above ground, the building...

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 Architect: Herzog & de MeuronLocation : Tokyo, JapanDate:2000 Building Type : RetailConstruction System: Steel and Glass Climate: temperateContext: UrbanStyle: ModernNotes: Within the diagonal frame, convex, concave, and flat glass pillows provide a consistently varied texture to the building envelope.The Prada flagship store in Tokyo combines an overall figural shape with inset stacked floors and nested tubes to create a steel and glass shopping icon. A structural exoskeleton made from...

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 Architect: Gordon BunshaftLocation : New Haven, ConnecticutDate:1963Building Type :Rare Book & Manuscript LibraryConstruction System: Marble, Steel and precast concrete. Climate: temperateContext: urban campusStyle: ModernNotes:at Yale University. light enters interior through thin marble.The rare book and manuscript library at Yale University demonstrates the capa- city of inset nesting to modulate light and climate through a multilayered con- struction. The outer box is composed of four steel Vierendeel truss...

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Luiz Zerbini Happiness Beyond Paradise, 2020Context is an important idea in post-modernist design, and the machine metaphor denies this significance. An engine is an engine is an engine, and it always works the same way no matter where it is. —Stephen Friedman Architecture is an extension; a modification establishing absolute meanings relative to a place. —Steven Holl In its widest sense, the term context refers to...

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In the history of space we have now arrived at deconstructed space as the leading edge spatial paradigm of the moment. To arrive there we have travelled from the spherical, static, geocentric and limited space of the ancient and medieval world, through the constructed perspective space of the Renaissance, and more recently the relativistic space/time of the modern era. Deconstructed space is not space...

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 Oscar-newman-underground-city-7Defensible space A ‘defensible space’ is a living residential environment which can be employed by inhabitants for the enhancement of their lives, while providing security for their families, neighbors, and friends. —Oscar Newman Coined by the architect and urban planner Oscar Newman in 1972 in his influential book Defensible Space: Crime Prevention Through Urban Design (1972), the concept of defensible space stems from his...

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 https://uploads6.wikiart.org/images/le-corbusier/untitled-1932.jpgWhat give our dreams their dreaming is that they can be achieved. —Le Corbusier Design genesis refers to the birth of an idea. This takes place in the mind’s eye when our creative imagination triggers a concept that is imagined (‘seen’) as flashing, dimensionless images; images formed from a creative Leap into the potential solution.These mental images can result from, or be subject to,...

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The cubist canvas was the locus where the painter simultaneously presented several aspects gathered successively with the purpose of suggesting a higher reality. —Marta Braun The solitaireOccurring during 1909–11 and claiming to be a realist movement, Cubism came as the mother of all the radical art movements which coincided with the transformation taking place on the world stage at the turn of the twentieth...

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Design rationale is a term used to focus on the underlying reasoning behind a design intention.It concerns the basic structure of thought that brought the design into being. Sometimes referred to as ‘intellectual underpinning’, the design rationale aims to distinguish between the intuitive and the cerebral, and to represent the bedrock on which concepts are structured. However, it must be added that while...

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"Natural landscapes may exhibit the beauty of rhyme and contrast simply in their static structure. But people who live in the landscape —as men live in cities—the dynamic structure, the diachronic rhymes, add a new dimension to aesthetic pleasure. They see the same landscape in a state of flux. But, through every change, the landscape retains its identity and each transformation gives them...

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Keith_Albarn,_Pattern_and_Belief_at_The_Minories_Galleries,_Installation_view_02 A diagram is a drawing that, stripped of all superfluous and distracting data, shows the general scheme or outline of an idea or object and its parts.It is a reductive graphic representation of the course or results of an action or process. Diagrams are enlisted at the formative moments of design to chart the potential relationship between concept and reality. In functioning as...

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Disjunction is a term associated with the writings of Bernard Tschumi and his call for a radically new architectural approach.He believes that, when used as a theoretical tool for making architecture, disjunction, and its bedfellow ‘disruption’, are entirely relevant to the current and fragmented breakdown of a Western post-modern culture. Bernard Tschumi Parc de la Villette, Paris, France (Exterior perspectives, sketch) 1983Disjunction questions...

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   “True equilibrium is expressed by the straight line,” wrote Piet Mondrian. For him and his modernist allies, that line was inevitably black. Architects like Rietveld, and later the Eameses, gave architectural expression to arrangements of brightly colored planes organized by black.In the same way, today’s architects and designers use black as an essential structural element. Aloof from the vagaries of fashion and trendiness, black...

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