Category: learn about architecture

AHA! for Zaha Hadid

A series of buildings of circles that are piled on top of each other and all rounded structures and curves and white and swirly – that is what the Galaxy Soho building in Beijing is all about. Architect Zaha Hadid, one of the most famous living architects – is probably the most famous female architect. […]

Taller by a Needle

Since 1974, Chicago was the home of the “Tallest Building in America.” The Sears Tower, (named that because it was paid for by the Sears Company – not because Sears employees worked in all 100 floors) was crowned the tallest building at 442 meters tall. By the way, the Sears Tower is now called the […]

Sticks and Stonehenge

If you look back in the farthest history of architecture, you might discover Stonehenge. What is this collection of rocks? Well, it is not a random pile of stones that happened upon the countryside in England. Nope. Located in Wiltshire, these are a series of ancient stones that were placed in a semicircular pattern around […]

Why a Purple Hotel?

Outside of Chicago, a hotel was built in 1962. Everyone who ever saw it remembers it. It was purple. Bright, shocking, and no-doubt-about-it-PURPLE. The original architect, John Macsai, never planned on it being that color. So how did it happen? How does a building end up not being what the architect designed? As the Purple […]

PreFab-ulous

Prefab is fab-ulous, right? Why? Because it allows for buildings to be built more cheaply and quickly than traditional construction. Walls can be built in factories and the wiring and plumbing pipes can be installed inside of the walls and then these walls can be shipped to the building site and then assembled into a […]

A Great Architecture Book

[amazon_link id=”0547238924″ target=”_blank” ][/amazon_link]This book, titled “If you Lived Here: Houses of the World” [amazon_link id=”0547238924″ target=”_blank” ]”If You Lived Here: Houses of the World”[/amazon_link] has fantastic illustrations. They are collages that are intricate, accurate and colorful, and in real life they are 3-D. Houses of the world includes structures from Spain, South Africa, Canada […]

Watch a City Grow

The folks at a company called Cube Cities have made some interesting videos that illustrate the growth of some big cities – so you can watch a flat city without structures “grow” buildings and become a metropolis. With bold colored boxes representing the heights of buildings that sprang up over time, you can see the […]