world architecture

Merritt Island, Florida
The U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) was founded in 1958 with a brief to plan and conduct nonmilitary aeronautical and space activities and to develop international space programs. The 140,000-acre (56,658-hectare) John F. Kennedy Space Center on Merritt Island near Cape Canaveral, Florida, was originally established to support the Apollo lunar landing project. It is now operated by NASA as the main U.S. launching site for satellites and spaceflights. In terms of volume, the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) at the Space Center is the second largest building in the world, exceeded only by Boeings 747 aircraft factory in Seattle, Washington. Originally used to assemble Apollo and Saturn space vehicles, it was later modified to serve space-shuttle operations. It is an architectural feat because of its overwhelming size, but more because it was a building type without historic precedent. The new and difficult architectural design problems it presented (and addressed) have been clearly stated: The design of the assembly building had to allow for stacking the (110-meter) Apollo-Saturn space vehicle on top of its 14-meter-high movable launch platform

Venice is one of the worlds densest urban places a compression of churches, great and small houses, and other buildings crowded around hundreds of piazzi and campi, little relieved with planting and having only two public gardens. Floating on a cluster of more than 100 low islands about 2.5 miles (4 kilometers) off the Veneto region of the Italian mainland, the historical center of this remarkable city is surrounded by the shallow, crescent-shaped Laguna Veneta (Venetian Lagoon) and permeated by a network of over 150 canals, 400 bridges, and countless narrow streets known as calli. It is protected from the Adriatic Sea by the Pallestrina, Lido, and Cavallino littorals, a total of 30 miles (48 kilometers) of narrow strips of sand with seaward entrances to the lagoon. In fact, Venice is built in the sea, hardly a suitable place for a city, and it therefore provides a remarkable example of how humanity rises to meet a challenge. Why did the citys founders choose such a location? When he became sole ruler of the Huns in a.d. 446, Attila set out to extend his domain from the River Rhine across the north of the Black Sea to the Caspian Sea. With the Franks and Vandals, five years later he attacked western Europe, only to be driven back by Roman and Visigoth armies. In 452 he invaded Italy, displacing entire communities, many of which fled to islands along the Adriatic coast, then inhabited only by hunters and fishermen. When Attila withdrew a year later the refugees returned to the mainland but not all. Some historians identify this relocation as the key to the eventual foundation of Venice. After Attilas death in 453, the Lombards rose to dominate what is now Hungary. Around 568 their king Alboin led an army of Lombards, Gepids, Sarmatians, and others into Italy, overrunning much of the Veneto. He would soon conquer Milan and the Po Valley; Tuscany would follow and, by 575, Rome. The people of the Veneto had again retreated to the lagoons. Because the Lombards remained in Italy, the refugees no longer had homes to which they could return and they remained on the islands. Late in the seventh century their numbers were augmented by more exiles from the harsh Lombard rule. In the lagoon, a loose confederation of communities emerged, owing allegiance to Byzantium. Each had its economic, religious, and organizational distinctives because it governed islands whose population originated in a specific part of the Veneto. By 726 the Iconoclastic movement a religious phenomenon demanding the destruction of holy images reached the Byzantine outposts in Italy. Although the rest of the Eastern Empire was loyal to the Orthodox Church, these Italian communities were bound to Rome. Prompted by the pope, they briefly asserted independence from Byzantium, only to think better of it later except Venice. The Venetians elected Orso Ipato as doge (leader) in 727, the first head of a polity that would last almost 1,100 years, the most enduring republic in history. When Orsos son Teodato succeeded him in 742, the seat of government was moved to Malamocco on the Lido, and Venice was recognized as an independent city within the Byzantine Empire. In 755 the pope urged the Frankish king Pepin the Short to invade Italy, ending Lombard rule; they were finally defeated in 773 by his successor Charlemagne. Charlemagnes son Pepin II sent a force against the islands of the lagoon in 810. It overran Chioggia and Pallestrina, the southernmost littoral island, before turning on Malamocco. Although the Franks were repelled with heavy losses, the confederation moved its capital to islands near the center of the lagoon that were protected from naval attack by sandbars. Formed by sediment from the Brenta River (the Grand Canal marks its former course), those islands were known as Rivo Alto or RiAlto (high bank). After the Franks withdrew, the capital remained there, and 828 saw the establishment of the city that has been known for eight centuries as Venice, with its famous Rialto bridge. Venice was built on its unlikely clutch of islands by gradually reclaiming land from the lagoon or by forming new land behind seawalls and dikes, backfilled with soil brought by boat from the mainland. Timber oak and pine for piles and larch for the boards was cut in the northern Veneto forests and floated across the lagoon. Multiple rows of piles were driven into the hard clay substrata under the muddy islands. In this way the natural waterways between them were turned into defined canals, and new ones were formed by blocking the ends, excavating the waterway, forming a bed of sand-clay mixture and then flooding it. Typically, since space has always been at a premium, the buildings of Venice stand literally on the edge of the canals, creating the citys unique appearance. Platforms of larch boards were laid on the tops of piles, supporting foundation courses of water-resistant Istrian stone. The superstructure of the buildings was usually brick, sometimes stuccoed or (for greater prestige) faced with decorative marbles and architectural moldings. Each island had its campo (field), an open space too small to be dignified with piazza. The campo had a communal reservoir, fed with rainwater from the surrounding buildings, and (usually) a church, sometimes with a freestanding bell tower called a campanile. These open spaces were the center of community life, the location for markets, shops, and warehouses in the ground floors of the surrounding larger houses. The parts of the island remote from the campo were reached through unpaved streets and alleys. From the beginning of the twelfth century, narrow thoroughfares and the corners of canals and bridges were provided with street lighting the first in any European city. Venice was divided into siestieri, or sixths, one of which the labyrinthine Santa Croce was eventually merged with two others, Dorsoduro and San Polo, the citys commercial core since the eleventh century. The others were Cannaregio, Castello, and San Marco, which has been the seat of political power since the age of La Serrenissima the Serene Republic of Venice. The glorious and sometimes bloody history of that republic is beyond our present scope. Suffice it to say that mostly through canny business skills and judicious conflicts, by the end of the first millennium a.d., Venice had secured the northern end of the Adriatic and soon after that established herself as a key maritime trade center, not only in the Mediterranean but also across the world to distant China. During the Crusades and after 1204, her territories were extended to the Aegean islands, Crete, southern Greece, and even part of Constantinople. Competition with other Italian seafaring states, especially Genoa, simply served to increase her commercial dominance, and in the fifteenth century she expanded on the Italian Peninsula, claiming (among other cities) Treviso, Padua, Vicenza, and Verona. The fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453, and the discovery of the New World in 1492, heralded her commercial and political demise. At Sapienza in 1499 the Venetian navy was defeated by the Turks, who took control of the Adriatic. At that moment, Vasco da Gama returned to Lisbon with news of a faster route to the Orient. Venice was forced to relinquish her long-held trade supremacy to the Portuguese, Dutch, and English. In 1797 the Treaty of Campoformio gave Venice to Austria; she next came under Napoleonic rule (1805 1814), and after several revolutions and wars of independence, in 1866 she was absorbed into the kingdom of Italy. Venice is again in danger. The enemies are both natural and man-induced: eustacy (variation in sea levels due to global climate changes); seasonal high tides and water surges as well as subsidence, caused largely by mismanagement of subterranean water sources; and pollution. The combined result of the three means that, in effect, the city in the sea is drowning. In the twentieth century it sank about 10 inches (25 centimeters), about twice the average rate of the previous fourteen centuries. Only half of that was due to uncontrollable changes in sea level. Pollution is of several kinds: Venice has no drains; vast quantities of human and industrial waste of all sorts flow into the lagoon, and its self-cleansing capacity has long been overtaxed. Although authorities recognize the need to address these problems, there is a paradox: the resident population has been displaced by millions of tourists, changing the citys economic profile. Although a series of defensive measures has been planned since 1994, the municipality of Venice finds it increasingly difficult to meet the cost of maintaining its precious monuments. That is despite an April 1973 resolution of the Italian central government, which declared

Poissy, France
The Villa Savoye at 82 rue de Villiers, Poissy, has been described as a house so important that architects travel from all over the world to experience its presence

Washington, D.C.
The largest freestanding stone structure in the world is the obelisk built in honor of George Washington that stands about halfway between the Capitol and the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. By legislation, it will remain the tallest structure in the U.S. capital The 91,000-ton (82,700-tonne) monument is 555 feet, 5 inches (166.7 meters) high and 55 feet, 5 inches (16.67 meters) square at the base. Its load-bearing granite walls are 15 feet (4.5 meters) thick at the bottom and 18 inches (45 centimeters) thick at the top, reflecting the 10:1 proportion of the overall dimensions. The granite structure is faced with white marble; because it came from different quarries first from Maryland and later Massachusetts there is a perceptible variation in color at about one-third of the height. Around the internal stair, 200 memorial stone plaques are set, presented by individuals, societies, cities, states, and foreign countries. At first, Washington acceded to the Congresss 1783 proposal to erect an equestrian statue of him in the planned federal capital. Faced with the problem of raising funds to build the city, he soon changed his mind. He died in 1799 and the following year, by agreement with his widow, Martha, Congress contemplated interring his remains in a marble pyramid beneath the dome of the Capitol Building, started six years earlier. Without money, the project was postponed until 1832, the centenary year of Washingtons birth. When his executors decided that his body should remain on his Mount Vernon property, the idea was abandoned. Possibly reacting to official indecision, a group of influential Washington citizens established the Washington National Monument Society in 1833; Chief Justice John Maxwell was its president. Publicizing its intention in the press and by direct appeal to churches, societies, and individuals, the society set about fund-raising. All U.S. citizens were invited to contribute $1, for which a certificate would be issued, but it was not until 1836 that enough money had been collected to finance a design competition for American architects. That resulted in a stylistic potpourri of ideas, including a (larger) variation on the pyramid theme and at least a couple of Gothic Revival proposals. Meanwhile, the fund was growing while the society waited for the government to fix a location, which it did in 1848. Robert Mills, said to be the first U.S.-born qualified architect, won the competition. He had been in government service for some years, designing among other public buildings the Patent Office and the Treasury in Washington, D.C. And about twenty years earlier he had produced a more modest Washington monument for Baltimore. His extravagant proposal for the national monument comprised a 500-foot (150-meter) obelisk, whose flattish pyramidal peak was adorned with a star; it rose from the center of a circular 110-foot-tall (33-meter) classical temple, between whose thirty-two Doric columns he proposed statues of Americas founding fathers. Above a central portico an enormous toga-draped figure of George Washington held the reins of a four-horse chariot. Construction began on Millss obelisk in the middle of 1848. On 4 July the 12-ton (11-tonne) cornerstone of Maryland marble was laid according to Freemasonic ritual by the District of Columbia Grand Lodge, launching a long association with the brotherhood of which George Washington had been a member. The society actively solicited contributions to the building fund from Masonic lodges throughout the nation, an appeal it repeated in 1853. It also asked other fraternities for money, but even including the sponsorship of the states the fund was almost depleted by 1854. Work slowed to a crawl. Worse came to worst. In 1854 the anti-Catholic Know-Nothing Party seized control of the societys records and elected its own members to office. The takeover was occasioned by Pope Pius IXs gift of a block of stone from the Temple of Concord in Rome that was stolen and destroyed by party members. Under the two-year Know-Nothing regime, the stream of private gifts, already reduced to a trickle, dried up completely. The obelisk rose just a few feet, poor work at that, before it stopped altogether. A more serious hiatus followed, caused by the Civil War; for more than 20 years, the Washington Monument stood unfinished at a height of about 156 feet (47 meters). In 1874, society secretary John Carrol Brent again pursued Masonic and other groups, this time with resounding, immediate success. Congress was less responsive, but the occasion of the American Centennial in 1876 raised national sentiment and funds were set aside. In August President Ulysses S. Grant authorized the government to complete the monument and to persuade the society to donate it to the American people. Public interest had waned by then, and Millss design was challenged. The temple was omitted, and there was strong criticism of the entire proposal. For example, American Architect and Building News described it as a monstrous obelisk, so cheap to design but so costly to execute, so poor in thought but so ostentatious in size

Los Angeles, California
The Watts Towers comprise a group of imaginative structures at 1765 East 107th Street in south-central Los Angeles. Once threatened with demolition, they are now listed on the National Register of Historic Places and enjoy the dual status of a State of California Historic Park and Historic-Cultural Monument and a National Historic Landmark (a distinction bestowed in 1990). Someone has described them as a unique monument to the human spirit and the persistence of a singular vision.

Stuttgart, Germany
An acute accommodation shortage after World War I led many European cities to develop low-cost public housing programs. In Stuttgart, Germany, the W

New York City
On the morning of 11 September 2001, terrorists targeted the World Trade Center in Manhattan, first crashing a hijacked commercial jetliner into the upper levels of One World Trade Center, one of its twin 110-story iconic skyscrapers. A few minutes later a second hijacked aircraft sliced through the middle levels of Two World Trade Center, the other tower. (A third airliner crashed into the Pentagon outside Washington, D.C., while a fourth crash landed in a field in Pennsylvania, its intended target undetermined.) The effects were predictably devastating: both buildings burned fiercely before totally collapsing in clouds of dust and rubble that darkened the sky above Manhattan. A third building in the complex, a forty-seven-story office block (Seven World Trade Center), damaged by flying debris, followed soon after. In an earlier raid in February 1993 Arab terrorists exploded a 1,200-pound (550-kilogram) truck bomb in the Centers parking garage, creating a 150-foot diameter (46-meter) crater. Six people died, and over 1,000 were injured. Floors were destroyed for three levels below the point of detonation, but because of the load-bearing exterior walls, the structural stability of the building was largely unaffected. Tenants returned to their offices by the end of March. The cost of repairs was $250 million. The World Trade Center occupied a 16-acre (6.5 hectare) site a few blocks from Wall Street at the southwestern tip of Manhattan Island, near the bank of the Hudson River. Designed by Minoru Yamasaki and Associates and supervised by Emery Roth and Sons, it was the core of an urban renewal scheme sponsored by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey to attract international firms to downtown Manhattan.The surviving parts of the complex are a twenty-two story, 818-room hotel (Three World Trade Center); two nine-story office buildings (Four and Five World Trade Center); and an eight-story Customs House (Six World Trade Center). With the destroyed buildings, they were grouped around the 5-acre (2 hectare) landscaped Austin J. Tobin Plaza. Beneath it is The Mall, with about sixty specialty shops, banks, restaurants, and function spaces. Before the tragedy, about 500 international companies were located in the center, employing 50,000 people. It had its own subway stations and its own zip code. In March 1999 U.S. construction executives named the World Trade Center among the top ten construction achievements of the twentieth century. For a short while the One and Two World Trade Center towers, at around 1,353 feet (411 meters), were the worlds tallest buildings, but they were superseded in 1974 by the 1,442-foot (450-meter) Sears Tower in Chicago. In 1998 the Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, reached 1,483 feet (452 meters). Even higher buildings have been projected: for example, the Taipei Financial Center, to be completed in August 2002, will stand 1,660 feet (508 meters) tall and Hong Kongs Kowloon MTR Tower will be 1,903 feet (580 meters). As technically demanding as it is, great height does not qualify a building as an architectural feat. It was their structural system and the consequent creation of usable space that made the New York World Trade Centers towers remarkable. Ironically, it also was a contributor to their collapse. Yamasakis team was selected over a dozen other American architects. During the preliminary design phase, more than 100 proposals were reviewed, ranging from a single 150-story tower (its scale was far too large) to a series of lower towers (which looked too much like a housing project