HISTORY OF ARCHITECTURE 1

• Vernacular architecture


  Domestic, native, indigenous architecture
• Characteristics of vernacular architecture

  • Based on local needs and construction materials
  • Reflects local traditions
  • Tends to evolve over time to reflect environmental, cultural, technological, and historical context
  • "Rearranging the environment becomes architecture"
  • Provides protection from animals and natural calamities
• Vernacular architecture


  • The builders or those planning to live in the buildings are non-professional architects or engineers
  • Consonant adaptation, using natural materials, to the geography
  • Constructions are "done by intuitive thinking", without the use of blueprints or construction drawings
  • Balance between social and economic functionality and aesthetic features
  • Architectural patterns and styles are subject to a protracted evolution of traditional styles specific to an ethnic domain
• Primitive man's needs


  Basic yet essential, requiring simple structures such as shelters for living, shrines for worship, defensive stockades, and burial mounds
• Early human dwellings and shelters

  • Strategically selected locations near bodies of water and low hilltops for defense and shelter
  • Evidence of temporary wooden huts constructed as early as 380,000 BC
• Cave (rock shelter)


  Provides shelters and natural protection, used by stone age people
• Cave at Lascaux, France


  • Discovered in 1940
  • Used by several generations of people, entered through one entry to a large hall with other spaces branching out
  • Interior has elaborate paintings of animals and hunting scenes, celebrating the hunting life of early stone age people
• Prehistoric period timeline


  • Paleolithic: Development of most primitive stone tools
  • Mesolithic: Creation of villages with systematically arranged houses
  • Neolithic: Prime phase of agriculture, structures made of timber framing and wattle
  • Megalithic: Gallery of graves
• Paleolithic dwellings


  • Hut: Located in shoreline, made of stakes, posts, and organic flooring
  • Lean-to: Erected against cave wall, covered with animal or organic material
  • Tent: Wooden posts covered with animal skin or organic mats, secured with large wooden pegs
  • Pit house: Shallow ground depression surrounded by posts with rings of mammoth bones and tusks
• Ggantija


  Neolithic megalithic temple complex on the Mediterranean island of Gozo, older than the pyramids of Egypt, erected during the Neolithic age (c 3600-2500 BC), possibly the site of a fertility cult
• Khirokitia


  • No central village religious site, burials took place within the family unit space house, consisted of several circular structures combined around a small open space used for communal activities
• Çatal Hüyük


  • A city of rectangular flat-roofed houses packed together into a single architectural mass, no streets or passageways, inhabitants moved across rooftops and descended into their homes through the roofs via ladders, if a family died out their house was abandoned for a time before being reclaimed, average room size of 5 by 6 meters, plastered walls
• Stonehenge


  Medieval gallows consisting of two uprights with a lintel, originally a lunar monument that was later redesigned by the Beaker people to be a solar monument, with the addition of a ring of sixty large bluestones to the interior
• Megalithic structures


  • Menhir: Upright megalith standing alone or aligned with others
  • Megalith: Large stone used as found or roughly dressed
  • Monolith: Single block of stone of considerable size, like an obelisk or column
  • Cairn: Heap of stones piled up as a monument or tombstone
  • Cromlech: Circular arrangement of megaliths enclosing a dolmen or burial mound
  • Dolmen: Consisting of two or more large upright stones supporting a horizontal stone slab
  • Trilithon: Two upright megaliths supporting a horizontal stone
• Timber-framed house (1000-900 BC)


  • Log built house with 6 rooms, 5 with hearths, main hall 10m x 5m, interlocked logs with notches cut near the extremities
• Circular Bronze Age house


  • Linked group of earthwork enclosures and hut platforms measuring 134m x 55m, principal enclosure surrounded by timber fence, thatched roof
• Bronze Age temples and ritual structures

  • Flimsy by comparison with megalithic examples, henges and open-air shrines continued to be built in Britain
• Fortifications - Los Millares, Spain (2340 BC)


  • Bastioned wall with semi-circular bastions, timber-palisaded fort with exterior coated in clay to prevent burning, interior supported by massive revetments
• Iron Age defensive structures


  • Timber-framed houses, drystone houses, hill forts like Maiden Castle with single rampart and ditch, faced with timbers, and gates at the east and west ends
• Regions covered in the Ancient Near East

  • Mesopotamia
  • Sumer
  • Babylon
  • Assyria
  • Persia

  
• Geographical influence on the Ancient Near East

  • Tigris and Euphrates rivers
  • Land between the rivers

  
• Geological influence and architectural building technology in Mesopotamia, Assyria and Babylonia

  • No good natural stone deposits, hence use of sun-dried bricks
  • Lack of timber, hence limited use
  • Burned bricks covered by bitumen as outer layer (floods and heavy rains)
  • Persia had good stone and much wood, hence use of timber and limestone
• Architectural theory and character of the Ancient Near East

  • Massiveness
  • Monumentality
  • Grandeur

  
• Sequence of civilizations in the Ancient Near East

  • Sumerian Civilization (4500 BC to 2000 BC)
  • Sargon's rule over Sumerians (Akkadian Empire) (2350 BC to 2200 BC)
  • Old Babylonian Empire (1792 BC to 1570 BC)
  • Assyrian Empire (1350 BC to 612 BC)
  • Neo-Babylonian Empire (625 BC to 539 BC)
  • Persian Empire (560 BC to 275 BC)
• Sumer


  • Earliest known civilization
  • Started around 4000 BCE
  • Located in the Eastern part of Mesopotamia
• City states of Sumer

  • Ur
  • Uruk
  • Umma
  • Kish
  • Lagash
• City states all had separate rulers and kings until Sargon, leader of Akkad, invaded and conquered all states and built an empire (2350 BC)
• Sumerians' advanced technologies


  • Invention of wheel
  • Possibly earliest writing system
  • First to use maps
  • Invented sails for navigation
  • First Literature- Epic of Gilgamesh (written in cuneiform)
  • Mathematical systems based on 60 (e.g. 60 mins., 60 seconds)

  
• Cuneiform


  One of the earliest writing systems ever developed (Syllabary, contra Alphabet and Pictograms)

  
• Sumerians worshipped many gods (polytheism). Their life was centered around religion.
• Sumerians experienced flood but when the sun comes, the land becomes dry. Due to this, the Sumerians established an irrigation system to save their food production.
• Sumerian architectural elements and character

  • Mud was their main building material
  • Walls were built for protection
  • Walls were thick to compensate the weakness of mud
  • Walls were reinforced with buttresses
  • Buttresses and recesses were used to relieve the monotony of the plastered wall surfaces
• Sumerian houses


  • Punctuated by narrow openings that serve as entrance
  • Narrow streets between them
  • Irregular and "chaotic" street layout, no canalisation
• Temples were the principal architectural monuments of Sumerian cities.
• Oval Temple at Khafaje

  • Constructed around 2600 BC
  • Named Oval because of its massive oval walls surrounding the temple
  • The temple is raised on a simple platform
• Ziggurat

  • Built of mud-bricks
  • Major building and centerpiece of each Sumerian city
  • A temple tower, built in several diminishing storeys, culminating in a summit shrine reached by a series of stairways
  • Also called: Step temple
• Ziggurat architectural elements


  • Walls are ornamented on the outside with alternating buttresses and recesses
  • Interior wall ornament often consist of patterned mosaics of terra cotta panels, painted in bright colors
• Three types of Ziggurat

  • Archaic Ziggurat
  • Two or more storey Ziggurat
  • Seven storey Ziggurat
• Archaic Ziggurat

  • Usually one flat top rectangular mound carrying the temple
  • Example: The White Temple and the Great Ziggurat, Uruk, 3200-3000 BC
  • Believed to have been dedicated to the sky god, Anu
• Two or more storey Ziggurat


  • Rectangular in plan, design with several tiers
  • Example: Ziggurat of Ur