a day with Zaha Hadid ~

check this movie about Zaha Hadid_

A Day with Zaha Hadid 2004,

52 minutes, colour.

New York: Michael Blackwood Productions.

Zaha Hadid discusses her current work while taking the camera through her retrospective exhibition "Zaha Hadid has Arrived" at Vienna's MAK, a museum for design and contemporary art. The centerpiece is a sculptural work entitled "Ice Storm" especially created for the exhibition.

"Zaha Hadid has Arrived" is a brilliant review of her progress through the last decade and includes: her museums of contemporary art in Rome and Cincinnati, the BMW plant in Leipzig, the Bergisel ski jump in Innsbruck and the Science Center in Wolfsburg, among others.

http://video.yahoo.com/watch/2968770/8515066

[see also the related videos on this page in order to watch all the parts of the movie]

in the mind of the architect [1]

All architecture is great architecture after sunset; perhaps architecture is really a nocturnal art, like the art of fireworks.
Gilbert K. Chesterton

Architecture in general is frozen music.
Friedrich von Schelling

Architecture is the will of an epoch translated into space.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

The legend:Le Corbusier_

“Space and light and order. Those are the things that men need just as much as they need bread or a place to sleep.” *

–Le Corbusier

Le Corbusier was born Charles Edouard Jeannerct on October 6, 1887, in LaChaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland. Le Corbusier was the second son of Edouard Jeanneret, a dial painter in the town's renowned watch industry, and Madame Jeannerct-PLe Corbusier was born Charles Edouard Jeannerct on October 6, 1887, in LaChaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland. Le Corbusier was the second son of Edouard Jeanneret, a dial painter in the town's renowned watch industry, and Madame Jeannerct-Perrct, a musician and piano teacher.
The family proudly traced its ancestry to the Cathars, who fled to the Jura Mountains during the Albigensian Wars of the twelfth century, and the French Huguenots, who migrated to Switzerland following the Edict of Nantes (1598). La Chaux-de-Fonds' tradition of offering refuge includes both Rousseau and Bakunin. His family's Calvinism, love of the arts, and enthusiasm for the Jura Mountains, were all formative influences on the young Le Corbusier; Charles L'Eplattenier, a teacher at the local art school, dominated his education.errct, a musician and piano teacher.

The family proudly traced its ancestry to the Cathars, who fled to the Jura Mountains during the Albigensian Wars of the twelfth century, and the French Huguenots, who migrated to Switzerland following the Edict of Nantes (1598). La Chaux-de-Fonds' tradition of offering refuge includes both Rousseau and Bakunin. His family's Calvinism, love of the arts, and enthusiasm for the Jura Mountains, were all formative influences on the young Le Corbusier; Charles L'Eplattenier, a teacher at the local art school, dominated his education.

L'Eplattenier, whom Le Corbusier called "My Master," combined into a National Romanticism many strains of late-nineteenth-century thought, from Ruskin to Hermann Muthesius. He involved his students in his search for a new kind of ornament expressive of the Jura landscape and able to sustain the local craft industry. Apprenticed at thirteen to a watch engraver, Le Corbusier abandoned matchmaking in part because of his delicate eyesight, and continued his studies in art and decoration, with the intention of becoming a painter. L'Eplattenier insisted that the young man also study architecture and arranged for his first commissions.

After completing his first house, Villa Pallet, in 1907, Le Corbusier set out on a series of travels that lasted until 1912, when Le Corbusier returned to La Chaux-de-Fonds to teach beside L'Eplattenier and to begin his own practice. These travels took him first to Italy, then to Vienna, Munich, and Paris. They included a period of apprenticeship to architects with philosophies at odds with L'Eplattenier's teachings,most significantly the structural rationalism of Auguste Perret, a father of reinforced concrete construction, and the Werkbund perspective of Peter Behrens. They concluded with a "Journey to the East" by way of the Balkans and Eastern Europe, culminating in a visit to the Acropolis.

Back in Switzerland, Le Corbusier designed a series of villas and embarked on a more theoretical study for a structural frame of reinforced concrete Le Corbusier called the Maison Dom-ino (a pun on the Latin word for house, domus, and on the playing pieces from the game). Le Corbusier envisaged it as an affordable, prefabricated system for the construction of new housing in the wake of World War I's destruction. Developed with the help of Max Dubois and Perret, the system differed from the then standard Hennibique frame in its idealization of floors as flat slabs without exposed beams. Its columns were perfectly straight posts without capitals, set in from the edge of the slab. This system freed both exterior and interior walls from all structural constraints.

At the end of the war Le Corbusier moved to Paris. There Le Corbusier worked on concrete structures under government contracts and ran a small brick manufacture, but Le Corbusier dedicated most of his efforts to the more influential, and lucrative, discipline of painting. First in a book entitled Apres le cubisme, and subsequently in an art show at Galerie Thomas, Le Corbusier and A. Ozenfant began a movement called Purism, which called for the restoration of the integrity of the object in art. As their style developed, it drew closer to Synthetic Cubism's structure of overlapping planes, but retained a distinct attitude toward the mass-produced "tools" of industrial culture, from laboratory flasks to cafe chairs, which they called objets-types.

The emerging spirit of industrialized culture in all its aspects became the theme of the journal I'Esprit Nouveau, founded in 1919 by Le Corbusier, Ozenfant, and the poet Paul Dermee, and published until 1925. Le Corbusier collected essays from the journal in the book Vers une architecture. In the essays Le Corbusier proposed an architecture that would satisfy both the demands of industry and the timeless concerns of architectural form as defined in antiquity. His proposals included his first city plan, the Contemporary City. Le Corbusier also proposed two housing types, which were the basis for much of his architecture throughout his life: the vaulted Maison Monol and the Maison Citrohan, a "shoebox" volume with a double-height salon (the salon was modeled on, among other sources, the bistro Legendre, rue Godot-de-Mauroy, where the architect lunched daily).

In order to distinguish their work as painters from their work as critics and theorists, Ozenfant and Jeanneret took pseudonyms. Ozenfant adopted his mother's family name, Saugnier. Jean-neret took the name of a cousin, Lecor-bezier. Separating the Le out, the name sounded suitably like an objet-type; it also suggested the architect's profile, which resembled a crow's (corbeau). Le Corbusier 's self-invention continued with the encouragement of the elder, more self-assured Ozenfant. Adopting a costume of bow-tie, starched collar, and bowler hat, and a rhetorical literary style combining discipline, enthusiasm, ironic wit, and moral outrage, Le Corbusier became what he considered to be the perfect standard for the times.

Ozenfant and Le Corbusier parted in 1924, with much acrimony over who deserved credit for their joint efforts. In 1922, Le Corbusier formed an architectural partnership with his cousin Pierre Jeanneret; Jeanneret was to play the quieter role, developing plans and details and dealing with clients. They set up an office in the corridor of a former Jesuit monastery at 35, rue de Sevres. It remained Le Corbusier 's office for the rest of his life.

During the 1920s Le Corbusier realized his first mature architecture in a series of villas for artists, their patrons, and a few industrialists. The absence of a state program for public housing in France contributed to Le Corbusier 's inability to realize his ideas on a larger scale and for a more varied clientele. The one exception was a complex of workers* housing in Pessac, built for an industrialist. For the 1927 Deutsches Werkbund exhibition in Stuttgart, Le Corbusier built the Citrohan prototype in a rather pure form. In a booklet for the exhibition Le Corbusier codified his principles as (he Five Points of Modem Architecture, derived from the potentials of the concrete frame. They are the roof garden on top of the house, the consequence of a flat roof; the pilotis, or columns, that raise the house above the ground; the free plan, unencumbered by structural partitions ; the similarly free facade; and the strip (continuous, horizontal) windows, which provide maximum illumination to the house. Eventually, Le Corbusier categorized the spatial organizations derived from these points as the Four ompositions, illustrating each one with a house built during the 1920s.

By the end of the decade, Le Corbusier and Jeanneret had achieved a status and skill that seemed about to earn them their first public commission: the League of Nations (1927). Their eventual elimination (ostensibly for the illegal use of China ink) after winning numerous rounds of the competition was seen as the triumph in the architectural world of academicism over the modem. It instigated the formation of CIAM (Congres Intemationaux d'Architecture Modeme), whose charter members included S. Giedion, W. Gropius, and Le Corbusier, and whose principal areas of concern were architecture's relation to economic and political spheres. Their 1933 meeting on a boat headed to the Acropolis produced the Athens Charter, a document on urbanism published by Le Corbusier in 1943; it served as bible for much city planning in the following two decades. Eventually, Le Corbusier and Jeanneret did obtain two large public commissions: the Soviet Centrosoyus (begun in 1929) and the Cite de Refuge for the Salvation Army(1930).

Even as Le Corbusier completed the ultimate purist house. Villa Savoye (1931), and implemented his first glass curtain walls at the Centrosoyus and City de Refuge, a shift in the direction of his work and life became apparent. The female figure and other natural forms emerged in his painting as objects "a reaction poetique" (objects of poetic reaction) to be distinguished from the objets-types of his earlier compositions. Natural materials in a rough state appeared in his rural dwellings, then, coupled with more sophisticated technology, in his urban works, such as the Pavilion Suisse (1932).

This revived interest in the natural, from a new perspective. was a consequence of his experience with the real limits of modem construction technology and also of a set of inspiring travels to tropical landscapes: Brazil (1928) and Algiers (1929). His nights with Antoine de Saint-Exupery over the coast of Rio instigated a series of plans for sinuous viaduct cities. Similarly, his journey to the Soviet Union was in part responsible for the revision of his first Contemporary City as the Radiant City (1931).Besides this second bout of travel, the event most significant to Le Col-busier's life in this period was his marriage in 1930 to Yvonne Gallis, a model and couturier from Monaco. Le Corbusier subsequently adopted French citizenship.

With the worsening economic situation throughout Europe and the strenuous opposition to his ideas evident in some circles, Le Corbusier failed to secure any further large commissions and turned increasingly to urban planning and writing. Le Corbusier produced plans for almost every city in which Le Corbusier lectured or built: Geneva, Antwerp, and Stockholm in 1933, Hellocourt, Zlin, and Paris in 1935. This ongoing investigation of urban form produced plans for a "linear city." In 1935. at the invitation of the Museum of Modem Art, Le Corbusier traveled to the United States for the first time. America, especially New York City, aroused both his enthusiasm and his disgust. There the skyscraper existed, but without the guidance of a plan, thus, witout satisfyingthe "fundamental needs of the human heart."

Many of Le Corbusier 's writings of the period stemmed from his involvement with the Syndicalists, a politically ambiguous group who held that the means of production should be owned and managed by independent groups of workers (syndicats). Le Corbusier became an active contributor to the syndicalist journals Plan and Prelude. Through the membership of its editorial board. Prelude had a connection to the Italian fascist movement. Le Corbusier 's own connection with Italian fascism was fleeting, lasting only as long as Mussolini was interested in his ideas of the Radiant City.

Despite his varying fortune, in the thirties Le Corbusier established a fulfilling pattern of life and work. Mornings Le Corbusier would paint in his studio at Porte Molitor. His wife, a gourmet cook, would prepare lunch for them. Afternoons Le Corbusier would spend in his office on rue de Sevres, working with tits young, international employees on architectural projects. At least one evening a week, Le Corbusier and Jeanneret would join a fierce game of basketball in the dance studio/gym of his brother Albert. Periodically Le Corbusier vacationed on the Mediterranean, near Cap Martin, where Le Corbusier would take olympian swims.

With the onset of World War II, Le Corbusier left with Jeanneret for Ozon, in the Pyrenees. Their partnership ended in 1940, when Jeanneret left for Switzerland and joined the Resistance, while Le Corbusier approached his Syndicalist friends in power at Vichy in hopes of finding there an authority to implement his ideas for reconstruction. For eighteen months Le Corbusier attempted to make his way in Vichy circles, first as part of a commission to study housing, and then as an increasingly annoying advocate of his own plan for Algiers. Le Corbusier left Vichy in 1943, after Algerian authorities had denounced him as a Bolshevik.

After Liberation, Le Corbusier was able to take part in the reconstruction of France. Under the auspices of the Ministry of Reconstruction, Le Corbusier began plans for the port of Marseille, which culminated in the construction of his first Unite d'habitation. Le Corbusier prepared plans for the towns of St-Die and La Rochelle. Le Corbusier was selected as French delegate to the architectural commission of the United Nations. For a moment it seemed that many years of somewhat self-imposed martyrdom had borne fruit. Le Corbusier told an interviewer in New York, "For thirty years Fd been a consultant talking in a desert. Since 1945, I've led the architectural movement in France. I have arrived at a stage where things in my life flower, like a tree in season."

By 1950, this moment had passed; no city had accepted his plans. The U.N. disappointed him by making Wallace Harrison chief architect in the execution of a design Le Corbusier considered his own. The United States delegation to UNESCO refused to accept him on the design team. Despite this litany of official rejection and the bitterness it engendered, Le Corbusier entered on a productive period marked by the emergence of a well-defined aesthetic based on the plastic use of exposed concrete. Projects for several Unites, the chapel at Ronchamp (1954), the convent at LaTourette (1957), and the city plan and state architecture for Chandigarh, India, filled the decade.

Le Corbusier brought to bear on the Unite and all his subsequent architecture the research Le Corbusier had conducted during the war on the Modulor, a rule of proportion that applies the geometric properties of quadrature and the Golden Section to the measure of the human body. Le Corbusier had previously used these geometric properties, in the spirit of Auguste Choisy, as traces regulcueurs (regulating lines) for proportioning designs. Now Le Corbusier developed a system of measure in relation to man. Through the ladder of Golden Sections called the Fibonacci Series, Le Corbusier extended his intial Modulor to infinitely large and small dimensions. Le Corbusier asserted both its aesthetic value and utility as a standardized scale. Le Corbusier understood the Modulor as part of a great tradition extending back to Renaissance anthropometries, to Vitruvius and Pythagoras.

In his "Poem to the Right Angle" (1947-1953). Le Corbusier engaged in another exploration of man's relation to the cosmos, one belonging less to the rational humanist tradition of the Modulor and more to a personal spiritualism rooted in his attachment to nature and, perhaps, to the dualistic conceptions of spirit and matter from his Catharist heritage. The poem's images, such as the open hand and the bull, appear in the form of emblemata painted or engraved on his late buildings and in his dramatic use of natural elements, such as light, shadow, and water.

Toward the end of the 1950s, Le Corbusier withdrew more from social life and spent increasing periods of time at his cabin in Cap Martin. His wife had died in 1957, a blow from which some say Le Corbusier never totally recovered. Despite this partial retirement, Le Corbusier had as many architectural commissions as ever. Although these late works do not fall easily into a single category, many retreat from the primitivism of his Indian architecture toward a refined handling of materials, including steel; in them Le Corbusier reexamined his earlier vocabulary. Le Corbusier was at work on a project that promised to be of major significance in terms of his own development, the Venice Hospital, when, in 1965, Le Corbusier died of a heart attack while swimming in the Mediterranean.

“A hundred times have I thought New York is a catastrophe and 50 times: It is a beautiful catastrophe.”

“Architecture is the learned game, correct and magnificent, of forms assembled in the light.”

“A house is a machine for living in.”

“I prefer drawing to talking. Drawing is faster, and leaves less room for lies.”

“The home should be the treasure chest of living.”

“To create architecture is to put in order. Put what in order? Function and objects.”

see also:

http://www.fondationlecorbusier.fr/corbuweb/morpheus.aspx?sysName=home&sysLanguage=fr-fr

http://www.centerlecorbusier.com/

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0810934949/architectureb-20

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1580930778/architectureb-20

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/3764359994/architectureb-20

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4pz5gGhdaw

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HI2U13ejFiU&feature

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Corbusier

http://architect.architecture.sk/

http://42ndblackwatch1881.wordpress.com/2009/04/25/le-corbusier-the-father-of-international-style-design/

Classical orders.

Classical orders:A classical order is one of the ancient styles of classical architecture, each distinguished by its proportions and characteristic profiles and details, and most readily recognizable by the type of column employed. From the sixteenth century onwards, architectural theorists recognized five orders. Each style has its proper entablature, consisting of architrave, frieze and cornice.
Ranged in the engraving (illustration, right), from the stockiest and most primitive to the richest and most slender, they are: Tuscan (Roman) and Doric (Greek and Roman, illustrated here in its Roman version); Ionic (Greek version) and Ionic (Roman version); Corinthian (Greek and Roman) and composite (Roman). There are just three ancient and original orders of architecture, the Doric, Ionic and Corinthian, which were invented by the Greeks. To these the Romans added the Tuscan, which they made simpler than the Doric, and the Composite, which was more ornamental than the Corinthian.
The order of a classical building is like the mode or key of classical music, or the grammar and rhetoric of a written composition. It is established by certain modules like the intervals of music, and it raises certain expectations in an audience attuned to its language.


Composite order:The composite order is a mixed order, combining the volutes of the Ionic order capital with the acanthus leaves of the Corinthian order. The composite order volutes are larger, however, and the composite order also has echinus molding with egg-and-dart ornamentation between the volutes. The column of the composite order is ten diameters high.
Until the Renaissance, the composite was not ranked as a separate order. Instead it was considered as a late Roman form of the Corinthian order. The Arch of Titus, in the forum in Rome, built in 82 AD, is considered the first example of a Composite order.
The Composite order, due to its delicate appearance, was deemed by the Renaissance to be suitable for the building of churches dedicated to The Virgin Mary or other female saints.


Corinthian order:The Corinthian order is one of the three principal classical orders of ancient Greek and Roman architecture. The other two are the Doric and Ionic. When classical architecture was revived during the Renaissance, two more orders were added to the canon, the Tuscan order and the Composite order. The Corinthian, with its offshoot the Composite, is the most ornate of the orders, characterized by slender fluted columns and an elaborate capitals decorated with acanthus leaves and scrolls.
The name "Corinthian" is derived from the Greek city of Corinth, although the order first appeared used externally at Athens. Although of Greek origin, the Corinthian order was actually seldom used in Greek architecture. It came into its own in Roman practice, following precedents set by the Temple of Mars Ultor in the Forum of Augustus (ca. 2 AD).


Doric order:The Doric order (or in Greek Δωρικός ρυθμός) was one of the three orders or organizational systems of Ancient Greek or classical architecture; the other two canonical orders were the Ionic and the Corinthian.
In their original Greek version, Doric columns stood directly on the flat pavement (the stylobate) of a temple without a base; their vertical shafts were fluted with 20 parallel concave grooves; and they were topped by a smooth capital that flared from the column to meet a square abacus at the intersection with the horizontal beam (entablature) that they carried.
Temple of the Delians, Delos; 19th century pen-and-wash restoration.
Pronounced features of both Greek and Roman versions of the Doric order are the alternating triglyphs and metopes. The triglyphs are decoratively grooved with three vertical grooves (tri-glyph) and represent the original wooden end-beams, which rest on the plain architrave that occupies the lower half of the entablature. Under each triglyph are peglike stagons or guttae (literally: drops) that appear as if they were hammered in from below to stabilize the post-and-beam (trabeated) construction. They also served to "organize" rainwater runoff from above. A triglyph is centered above every column, with another (or sometimes two) between columns, though the Greeks felt that the corner triglyph should form the corner of the entablature, creating an inharmonious mismatch with the supporting column. The spaces between the triglyphs are the metopes. They may be left plain, or they may be carved in low relief.
The architecture followed rules of harmony. Since the original design came from wooden temples and the triglyphs were real heads of wooden beams, every column had to bear a beam which lay in the middle of the column. Triglyphs were arranged regularly; the last triglyph met the mid of the last column (illustration, right: I.). This was regarded as the ideal solution which had to be reached.


Ionic order:The Ionic order ( Greek ιωνικός ρυθμός ) forms one of the three orders or organizational systems of classical architecture, the other two canonic orders being the Doric and the Corinthian. (There are two lesser orders, the stocky Tuscan order and the rich variant of Corinthian, the Composite order, added by 16th century Italian architectural theory and practice.)
The Ionic order originated in the mid-6th century BC in Ionia, the southwestern coastland and islands of Asia Minor settled by Ionian Greeks, where an Ionian dialect was spoken. The Ionic order column was being practiced in mainland Greece in the 5th century BC. The first of the great Ionic temples was the Temple of Hera on Samos, built about 570 BC–560 BC by the architect Rhoikos. It stood for only a decade before it was leveled by an earthquake. It was in the great sanctuary of the goddess: it could scarcely have been in a more prominent location for its brief lifetime. A longer-lasting 6th century Ionic temple was the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.
The Ionic columns normally stand on a base which separates the shaft of the column from the stylobate or platform; The cap is usually enriched with egg-and-dart. Originally the volutes lay in a single plane (illustration at right); then it was seen that they could be angled out on the corners. This feature of the Ionic order made it more pliant and satisfactory than the Doric to critical eyes in the 4th century BC: angling the volutes on the corner columns, ensured that they "read" equally when seen from either front or side facade. The 16th-century Renaissance architect and theorist Vincenzo Scamozzi designed a version of such a perfectly four-sided Ionic capital; Scamozzi's version became so much the standard, that when a Greek Ionic order was eventually reintroduced, in the later 18th century Greek Revival, it conveyed an air of archaic freshness and primitive, perhaps even republican, vitality


Tuscan order: the Tuscan order's place is due to the influence of the Italian Sebastiano Serlio, who meticulously described the five orders including a "Tuscan order", "the solidest and least ornate", in his fourth book of Regole generalii di Architettura... sopra le cinque maniere degli edifici... (1537). Though Fra Giocondo had attempted a first illustration of a Tuscan capital in his printed edition of Vitruvius (1511), he showed the capital with an egg and dart enrichment that belonged to the Roman Doric order. The "most rustic" Tuscan order of Serlio was later carefully delineated by Andrea Palladio. From the perspective of these writers, the Tuscan order was an older primitive Italic architectural form, predating the Greek Doric and Ionic,[citation needed] associated by Serlio with the practice of rustication and the architectural practice of Tuscany. Giorgio Vasari made a valid argument for this claim by reference to il Cronaca's graduated rustication on the facade of Palazzo Strozzi, Florence. Like all architectural theory of the Renaissance, precedents for a Tuscan order were sought for in Vitruvius, who does not include it among the three canonic orders, but peripherally, in his discussion of the Etruscan temple (book iv, 7.2-3). Later Roman practice ignored the Tuscan order,and so did Leon Battista Alberti in De re aedificatoria (shortly before 1452).

The terms. [part 2]

(Building elements...)

Gutta- a small water-repelling, cone-shaped projection used in the architrave of the Doric order in classical architecture

Imbrex and tegula - interlocking roof tiles used in ancient Greek and Roman architecture

Keystone-the architectural piece at the crown of a vault or arch which marks its apex, locking the other pieces into position

Metope-a rectangular architectural element that fills the space between two triglyphs in a Doric frieze

Naos - see Cella

Nave-the central approach to the high altar, the main body of the church

Opisthodomos-(opithodomos/opthodomos from Greek ὀπισθόδομος) was the room present at the rear of some ancient Greek temples

Ornament- a decoration used to embellish parts of a building or objec

Orthostates-squared stone blocks much greater in height than depth that are usually built into the lower portion of a wall

Pediment-a classical architectural element consisting of the triangular section found above the horizontal structure (entablature), typically supported by columns

Peristyle-a columned porch or open colonnade in a building surrounding a court that may contain an internal garden

Pilaster-a slightly-projecting column built into or applied to the face of a wall

Plinth-the base or platform upon which a column, pedestal, statue, monument or structure rests

Portico- a porch leading to the entrance of a building, or extended as a colonnade, with a roof structure over a walkway, supported by columns or enclosed by walls

Portico types - tetrastyle, hexastyle, octostyle, decastyle

Prostyle-an architectural term defining free standing columns that are widely spaced apart in a row.

Quoin- the cornerstones of brick or stone walls

Rustication-an architectural feature that contrasts in texture with the smoothly finished, squared block masonry surfaces called ashlar

Stoa-in Ancient Greek architecture; covered walkways or porticos, commonly for public usage

Suspensura- the architectural term given by Vitruvius[1] to piers of square bricks (about 20 cm X 20 cm) that supported a suspended floor of a Roman bath covering a hypocaust cavity through which the hot air would flow.

Term-or terminal figure is a human head and bust that continues as a square tapering pillarlike form

Tracery-an architectural term used primarily to describe the stonework elements that support the glass in a Gothic window

Triglyph-an architectural term for the vertically channeled tablets of the Doric frieze, so called because of the angular channels in them, two perfect and one divided, the two chamfered angles or hemiglyphs being reckoned as one

Sima- the upturned edge of a roof which acts as a gutter. Sima comes from the Greek simos, meaning bent upwards.

Stylobate- (Greek: στυλοβάτης) is the top step of the crepidoma, the stepped platform on which colonnades of temple columns are placed (it is the floor of the temple)

Volute- a spiral scroll-like ornament that forms the basis of the Ionic order, found in the capital of the Ionic column

see also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Architectural_elements

The terms. [part 1]

Building elements

Acroterion - ornament mounted at the apex of the pediment of a building

Aedicule- an opening framed by two columns an entablature

Aegis-a large collar or cape worn in ancient times to display the protection provided by a high religious authority or, it is the holder of a protective shield signifying the same

Apse-a semicircular recess covered with a hemispherical vault or semi-dome

Arch-a structure that spans a space while supporting weight

Architrave-the lintel or beam that rests on the capitals of the columns.

Archivolt-an ornamental molding or band following the curve on the underside of an arch

Ante-Fixae-a vertical block which terminates the covering tiles of the roof of an tiled roof

Amphiprostyle-a temple with a portico both at the front and the rear

Bracket (architecture)-an architectural member made of wood, stone, or metal that overhangs a wall to support or carry weight

Capital-forms the crowning member of a column or a pilaster

Caryatid-(Greek: Καρυάτις, plural: Καρυάτιδες) is a sculpted female figure serving as an architectural support taking the place of a column or a pillar supporting an entablature on her head.

Cella-or naos (from the Greek Ναός meaning temple), is the inner chamber of a temple

Coffer-a sunken panel in the shape of a square, rectangle, or octagon in a ceiling, soffit or vault

Colonnade-denotes a long sequence of columns joined by their entablature, often free-standing, or part of a building

Column-a vertical structural element that transmits, through compression, the weight of the structure above to other structural elements below

Cornice-horizontal molded projection that completes a building or wall; or the upper slanting part of an entablature located above the frieze.

Crepidoma-the platform of, usually, three levels upon which the superstructure of the building is erected.

Crocket-a hook-shaped decorative element common in Gothic architecture

Cupola-a small, most-often dome-like structure, on top of a building

Diocletian (thermal) window-large semicircular windows characteristic of the enormous public baths (thermae) of Ancient Rome

Dome- a structural element of architecture that resembles the hollow upper half of a sphere

Eisodos- a term used for Ancient Greek Plays in order to describe any of two passageways leading into the orchestra, between theatron and skenê (also known as the parodos)

Entablature-refers to the superstructure of moldings and bands which lie horizontally above columns, resting on their capitals

Epistyle - see Architrave

Euthynteria-the ancient Greek term for the uppermost course of a building's foundations, partly emerging from groundline.

Exedra- a semicircular recess, often crowned by a semi-dome, which is usually set into a building's facade

Finial-an architectural device, typically carved in stone and employed decoratively to emphasize the apex of a gable or any of various distinctive ornaments at the top, end, or corner of a building or structure

Frieze-the wide central section part of an entablature and may be plain in the Ionic or Corinthian order—decorated with bas-reliefs.

(to be continued...)

Back to basics.

Architecture
(Latin architectura, from the Greek ἀρχιτέκτων – arkhitekton, from ἀρχι- "chief" and τέκτων "builder, carpenter") can mean:
The art and science of designing and erecting buildings and other physical structures.
The practice of an architect, where architecture means to offer or render professional services in connection with the design and construction of a building, or group of buildings and the space within the site surrounding the buildings, that have as their principal purpose human occupancy or use.
A general term to describe buildings and other structures.
A style and method of design and construction of buildings and other physical structures.
A wider definition may comprise all design activity, from the macro-level (urban design, landscape architecture) to the micro-level (construction details and furniture). Architecture is both the process and product of planning, designing and constructing form, space and ambience that reflect functional, technical, social, and aesthetic considerations. It requires the creative manipulation and coordination of material, technology, light and shadow. Architecture also encompasses the pragmatic aspects of realising buildings and structures, including scheduling, cost estimating and construction administration. As documentation produced by architects, typically drawings, plans and technical specifications, architecture defines the structure and/or behavior of a building or any other kind of system that is to be or has been constructed.
Architectural works are often perceived as cultural and political symbols and as works of art. Historical civilizations are often identified with their surviving architectural achievements.
Architecture sometimes refers to the activity of designing any kind of system and the term is common in the information technology world.


The earliest surviving written work on the subject of architecture is De architectura, by the Roman architect Vitruvius in the early 1st century CE.According to Vitruvius, a good building should satisfy the three principles of firmitatis,utilitatis venustatis,
which translates roughly as -
Durability - it should stand up robustly and remain in good condition.
Utility - it should be useful and function well for the people using it.
Beauty - it should delight people and raise their spirits.


see also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Architecture