Architectural Guidance

More with less: Cibic & Partners and dogtrot

noreply@blogger.com (ओंकार देशमुख) — Sun, 31 Jul 2011 09:33:00 +0000

More with less , a miniature village of prefab houses and vegetable gardens , stems freom a project by Cibic &Partners ( Aldo Cibic & Tommaso Cora ) in Liaison with Dogtrot.

The Basic housing unit is a 4X4 m. From this one can create all manner consultable from a chart .The look can be varied: the façade may be green , wooden ,rendered or metal : the roof can be flat ;pitched ;terrace-able ; green or equipped with photovoltaic panels.

Other variables relate to climate, function and cost. Outside features like decks ,verandas , flower boxes and partition screens can personalize the design still further . These prefab bunglows are designed to grow in time: the basic cell can be added to upwards or sideways, as the use changes. Whatever the solution, the project prioritizes sensitivity to landscaping.

The basic structure has walls of laminated wood paneling and natural forms of insulation, a cocoon of high thermal insulating ideas. Criteria of sustainability mean that there is a gamut of energy –producing system to suit all latitudes and climates. Heating may be installed and assisted by a wind-powered generator if appropriate, or heat can be accumulated from a combination of energy sources. Energy-saving features include: a green roof, LED lighting, use of vacuum hygiene facilities, retrieval of “white “water” and collection of rainwater.

Spiretech cpmpetition

noreply@blogger.com (ओंकार देशमुख) — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 08:01:00 +0000

we r taking part in spiretech cpmpetition this year..

these are some of the images of our project..

TATA Nano Free Autocad Block

noreply@blogger.com (ओंकार देशमुख) — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 18:49:00 +0000

Hi Friends ,
You Must be knowing about Tata Nano.

Tata has launched this small and cheapest car in the world last year.

As this car is going to change the extent of definition of 'Car' we decided to make a Auto cad Block for this.

You can download this block free from the link below.

NANO SIDE ELEVATION.dwg
TATA NANO FRONT.dwg

I'm an Architect ..

noreply@blogger.com (ओंकार देशमुख) — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 08:35:00 +0000

I'm an Architect ..
Its a statement...or may be argument for some people...but thats the fact..
my university gave me that degree...
From first yr of my college I'm being asked...what is architecture...WDF ???
every professor needs different answer representing his subject into it..
what should we do???
Actually...what I think ...
Architects are sandwiched betweem artists and businessman..
Architects who make money works on many projects..but they dont look at art or aything shit..damn...thing..
Architects in magazines , books , news papers does only 15 to 20 projects in whole lifetime and tell stories of that all over the world..
I'm an artist..by theory..and by degree..
but what m i doing now? working with an MNC...9:30 to 6:30 ...waiting for salary on every month end...??damn..
is it real architecture??
does this mean that I' m an Architect ???

Architect

noreply@blogger.com (ओंकार देशमुख) — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 17:55:00 +0000

ARCHIMAAIK

noreply@blogger.com (ओंकार देशमुख) — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 06:22:00 +0000

The Farnsworth House By Mies van der Rohe

noreply@blogger.com (ओंकार देशमुख) — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 09:25:00 +0000

The Farnsworth House has this in common with Cannery Row
in Monterey, California: it is a poem, a quality of light, atone, a
habit, a nostalgia, a dream. It has about it, also, an aura of high
romance. The die for the romance was cast from the moment
Mies van der Rohe decided to site the house next to the great
black sugar maple - one of the most venerable in the county -
that stands immediately to the south, within a few yards of the
bank of the Fox River. The rhythms created by the juxtaposition
of the natural elements and the man-made object can be seen
at a glance - tree bending over house in a gesture of caress, a
never-ending love affair - and felt - when the leaves of the tree
brush the panes of glass on the southern elevation. In summer,
the dense foliage of the sugar maple shields the house from the
torrid heat and ensures its privacy from the river.
With its glass walls suspended on steel pilot! almost two
metres above the flood plain of the meadow, life inside the
house is very much a balance with nature, and an extension of
nature. A change in the season or an alteration of the landscape
creates a marked change in the mood inside the house. With
an electric storm of Wagnerian proportions illuminating the
night sky and shaking the foundations of the house to their very
core, it is possible to remain quite dry! When, with the melting
of the snows in spring, the Fox River becomes a roaring torrent
that bursts its banks, the house assumes the character of a
house-boat, the water level sometimes rising perilously close to
the front door. On such occasions, the approach to the house
is by canoe, which is tied up to the steps of the upper terrace.
The overriding quality of the Farnsworth House is one of
serenity. It is a very quiet house. I think this derives from the
ordered logic and clarity of the whole, from the way in which
the house has been lovingly crafted, and from the sensitive
juxtaposition of fine materials. Anxiety, stress or sheer fatigue
drop away almost overnight, and problems that had seemed
insoluble assume minor proportions after the 'therapy' exerted
by the house has washed over them for a few hours.
The start of the day is very important to me. At Farnsworth,
the dawn can be seen or sensed from the only bed in the
house, which is placed in the northeast corner. The east
elevation of the house tends to be a bit poker-faced - the dawn
greets the house more than the house welcomes the dawn.
Shortly after sunrise the early morning light, filtering through the
branches of the linden tree, first dapples and then etches the
silhouette of the leaves in sharp relief upon the curtain. It is a
scene no Japanese print could capture to greater effect.
People ask me how practical Farnsworth is to live in. As a
home for a single person, it performs extremely well. It was
never intended for anything else. The size of its single room,
55 ft by 28 ft, is a guarantee of its limitations. On the other hand,
for short periods of time it is possible to sleep three people in
comfort and privacy. This is a measure of the flexibility of the
space, and indeed it would be odd if this were not so, for
flexibility is a hallmark of Mies's work.
I believe that houses and structures are not simply inanimate
objects, but have a 'soul' of their own, and the Farnsworth
House is no exception. Before owning the house I had always
imagined that steel and glass could not possess this quality -
unlike brick, for example, which is a softer, more porous
material that seems to absorb as well as emanate a particular
atmosphere. But steel and glass are equally responsive to the
mood of the moment. The Farnsworth House is equable by
inclination and nature. It never frowns. It is sometimes sad, but
rarely forlorn. Most often it smiles and chuckles, especially
when it is host to children's laughter and shouts of delight. It
seems to eschew pretension and to welcome informality.
Living in the house I have gradually become aware of a very
special phenomenon: the man-made environment and the
natural environment are here permitted to respond to, and to
interact with, each other. While this may deviate from the
dogma of Rousseau or the writings of Thoreau, the effect is
essentially the same: that of being at one with Nature, in its
broadest sense, and with oneself.
If the start of the day is important, so is the finish. That tone
and quality of light shared with Cannery Row is seldom more
evident than at dusk, with its graduations of yellow, green, pink
and purple. At such times, one can see forever and with
astonishing clarity. Sitting outside on the upper deck one feels
like the lotus flower that floats in the water and never gets wet.
In November, a harvest moon rises slowly behind the tree-line,
as if giving a seal of approval to the day that has just gone by.
Later on, in January, when the winter snows have begun to fall
and the landscape is transformed, cars sweep silently past the
property along frozen roads, and the magical stillness of the
countryside is broken only by the plangent barking of a dog,
perhaps three miles distant.

In a low-lying meadow beside the Fox River at Piano, Illinois,
stands a serene pavilion of glass, steel and travertine.
When built it was unlike any known house, and a description
written by the American critic Arthur Drexler soon after its
completion in 1951 captures its essence: The Farnsworth
House consists of three horizontal planes: a terrace, a floor,
and a roof. Welded to the leading edge of each plane are steel
columns which keep them all suspended in mid-air. Because
they do not rest on the columns, but merely touch them in
passing, these horizontal elements seem to be held to their
supports by magnetism. Floor and roof appear as opaque
planes defining the top and bottom of a volume whose sides are
simply large panels of glass. The Farnsworth House is, indeed,
a quantity of air caught between a floor and a roof."
In spring the pavilion stands on a carpet of daffodils, in
summer upon a green meadow, in autumn amid the glow of
golden foliage; and when the adjacent river overflows the house
resembles a boat floating on the great expanse of water. It is in
effect a raised stage from which an entranced viewer may not
merely observe ever-changing nature, but almost experience
the sensation of being within it.
It is Mies van der Rohe's last realized house, built to provide a
cultivated and well-to-do urbanite with a quiet retreat where she
could enjoy nature and recover from the cares of work.
The rural escape for busy city-dwellers has a long history,
either as country villa2 or, more modestly, as the simple shooting
or fishing lodge.3 But while its function was fairly well established
in architectural tradition, the form and appearance of Farnsworth House went to the extremes of modernism, neatly
inverting (as we shall see) most of the architectural devices
developed over the past 2,500 years.
In view of its status as an architectural landmark we should
try to locate this luculent design in two contexts - one personal
(the Farnsworth House as the culmination of the architect's 40-
year sequence of continually-evolving house designs) and the
other much wider (the Farnsworth House as an ultimate icon of
that strand of European modernism that became known as the
International Style) - before going on to more practical matters
such as why the house was built, how it was built, and how it
has performed.

The Farnsworth House: a pavilion in
a meadow
Gropius and Breuer's Chamberlain
House (1940) and
Rudolph and Twitchell's Healy Guest
House (1948-50), both cabins -onstilts
designed at roughly the same
time as the Farnsworth House
Mies's first built house, the Riehl
House of 1907
Two contrasting examples of Miesian
design in the 1920s:
The Hermann Lange House of 1927-
30, which is solid and block-like
The Barcelona Pavilion of 1928-9,
which is transparent and pavilion-like

A consummation of Miesian design

At first sight Mies's first and last built houses, the Riehl House of
1907 and the Farnsworth House of 40 years later, could hardly
be more different. Beneath the contrasting appearances,
though, there is a recognizable continuity of design approach.
From first to last there shines through Mies's work a dignified
serenity, a concern for regularity and orderliness, and a
precision of detailing that are just as important as the obvious
differences seen in successive stages of his work.
These differences were not capricious but reflect a continuous
and sustained effort - particularly after about 1920 - to
eliminate what the earnest Mies saw as inessentials and to distil
his buildings to some kind of irreducible architectonic essence
of the age."
While it is always a mistake to impose an unduly neat 'line of
development' on the complex, uncertain and partly accidental
career of any designer, as though each successive work represented
a calculated step towards a clearly foreseen goal,
hindsight does allow us to divide Mies's development into three
recognizable phases. The first was pre-1919, when his designs
were invariably solid, regular and soberly traditional. The second covered the years 1919-38, when he began to
experiment (though only in some of his designs) with such
entrancing novelties as irregular plans, interiors designed as
continuous flowing fields rather than separate rooms, extreme
horizontal transparency, and floating floor and roof planes. The
third was post-1938, when he returned to the classicism and
sobriety of his earlier years, but expressed now in steel-framed buildings rather than solid masonry, and incorporating the
transparency and (in some of the pavilions) emphatic horizontality
developed in his avant-garde projects of the 1920s.
The first of these formative periods had its roots in Mies's
youth in Aachen where, the son of a master mason, he came to
love the town's historic buildings. He later recalled that 'few of
them were important buildings. They were mostly very simple,
but very clear. I was impressed by the strength of these buildings
because they did not belong to any epoch. They had been there
for over a thousand years and were still impressive, and nothing
could change that. All the great styles passed, but they were
still there ... as good as on the day they were built.'5
This early affinity with sober clarity was confirmed in 1907
when he visited Italy and was deeply impressed by his first
sight of Roman aqueducts, the heroic ruins of the Basilica of
Constantine, and in particular the bold stonework facade of the
Palazzo Pitti with its cleanly-cut window openings, of which he
said: 'You see with how few means you can make architectureand
what architecture!'6
And it crystallized into coherent principle when in 1912, on
a visit to the Netherlands, Mies encountered the work of
Hendrik Petrus Berlage. He was particularly struck by Berlage's
Amsterdam Stock Exchange (1903), an outstanding example of
the 'monolothic' way of building - that is to say one in which the
materials of construction are nakedly displayed (like the marble
components of Greek temples), in contradiction to the layered'
approach where basic materials are covered by more sophisticated
claddings (like the walls of Roman architecture). The
Stock Exchange walls are of unplastered brickwork inside and
out, and the roof trusses completely exposed, so that there is
no distinction between what is structure and what is finish,
or between what is structure and what is architecture.7 Mies
later recollected that it was at that point 'that the idea of a clear
construction came to me as one of the fundamentals we should
accept.'8 What especially appealed to him was Berlage's 'careful
construction that was honest down to the bone', forming the
basis, as Mies saw it, of 'a spiritual attitude [that] had nothing to
do with classicism, nothing to do with historic styles.'8
Between these mutually reinforcing experiences in Aachen,
Italy and Amsterdam there was a somewhat different influence
- that of the German neo-classicist Karl Friedrich Schinkel,
whose works Mies came to know while working in the Berlin
studio of Peter Behrens between 1908 and 1912.10 Mies did
not particularly admire Schinkel's early work, which to him
represented the end of a past era, but he considered that the
Bauakademie of 1831-5 'introduced a new epoch'. The lessons
he absorbed from Schinkel were concerned less with honest
construction (though the facades of the Kaufhaus project of
1827 and the later Bauakademie did reflect their underlying
structures with notable clarity) than with architectonic
composition. His compositional borrowings from Schinkel
included a tendency to place buildings on raised platforms to
create a sense of noble repose; a stern sobriety of architectural
form; highly regular spacing and careful proportioning of facade
elements; and an exceptional clarity of articulation, with the
separate elements of the building clearly differentiated.'
Seminal influences on Mies:
The bold, sharply-incised stone
facade of the Palazzo Pitti in
Florence, 1435
The rude honesty of Berlage:
Amsterdam Stock Exchange, 1903

Here, then, were two complementary influences that would
preoccupy Mies for the rest of his life - a Berlage-like affinity
with 'honesty' that led him to theorize that building form should
be determined by the structural problem being solved, and the
materials employed, and not by abstract rules of composition;12
counter-balanced by a Schinkelesque love of classical form
that led him in the converse direction, yearning to develop
architectural forms of abstracted perfection. He was aware of
the conflict, saying in 1966: 'After Berlage I had to fight with
myself to get away from the classicism of Schinkel"3 - a battle
he seems largely to have lost, with the compositional
sophistication of Schinkel generally prevailing over the rude
honesty of Berlage.14
Had his development stopped at that point, Mies might have
spent the rest of his career as a consummate designer of
somewhat blocky buildings characterized by clarity, regularity
and discipline (derived from Schinkel); making increasing use of
exposed brickwork (inspired by Berlage); and showing also the
powerful forms and glassiness of Peter Behrens"5 and the open
interiors, powerful outward thrust and emphatic horizontal of
Frank Lloyd Wright.16
It took years of digestion before 'inputs' became 'outputs'
with the gradually-developing Mies; and while some of the
above characteristics are indeed visible in the severe
monumentality of the Bismarck Memorial (1910) and Kroller
House (1912) projects, others were only to appear much later.
One thinks for instance of the fluid interior and outward thrusting
composition of the Brick Country House project (1923-4), and of the cubic forms and immaculately-detailed
brickwork of the Wolf (1925-7), Esters (1927-30) and Lange
(1927-30) houses. These designs are especially notable for
their Berlage-like use of weighty, unplastered brickwork walls
at a time when European modernism strove mostly for a
smooth, white, lightweight appearance.
After returning from military service in January 1919, Mies
underwent an astonishing transformation, and began a distinct
second developmental phase. Berlin was then in a ferment of
avant-garde activity, both political and artistic; Mies was
willingly caught up in these movements," and in 1921 he began
to produce a sequence of projects that bore little resemblance
to anything he (or indeed anyone else) had done before. These
designs, manifesto-like in their vivid clarity, helped to change
the face of twentieth-century architecture, and their influence
would be unmistakably visible in the later Farnsworth House.
His experiments from 1919-38 involved progressive transformations
of the kind of space that is shaped by architecture,
and of the kind of structure that helps do the shaping.
The Glass Skyscraper project of 1922 (figure 10), with its
open interiors and transparent envelope and its clear distinction
between structure (slim columns and hovering slabs) and
claddings (a diaphonous skin), presents a vivid illustration of
Mies's spatial and structural ideas.18 But this project is an office
building, and the specific antecedents of the Farnsworth House
are more appropriately traced in his house designs, so it is to
those that we must turn.
Looking then at Mies's development in the specific context of house design, his spatial ideas may be summarized as
follows. First he started to dissolve the interior subdivisions of
the dwelling, moving away from the box-like rooms of traditional
western architecture towards more open interiors - the latter
probably showing the intertwined influences of Frank Lloyd
Wright, the Japanese house" and the De Stijl movement.2'
The first hints of this progressive opening-up and thinning-out
of the interior appear in the unrealized Brick Country House
project. Its Berlage-like brick walls, while as solidly-built and
densely-packed as those of the past, are loosely arranged to
suggest rather than enclose a series of doorless spaces that
substituted for rooms.21 The idea is partly realized in the
1928-30 Tugendhat House, whose main floor is opened up to
become a single space within which dining, living and study
areas are lightly suggested by screens of maccassar ebony,
onyx and translucent glass. The final step, via a series of unbuilt
projects,2Z is the Farnsworth House which has no full-height
internal subdivisions except for a service core enclosing
separate bathrooms and a utility room.
Parallel to the above process Mies also started to dissolve
the boundary between inside and outside. The plan of the
unbuilt Brick Country House, while clearly influenced by Frank
Lloyd Wright,23 opens out into the site in a way unprecedented
in western architecture. The Glass Room at the Werkbund
Exhibition of 1927 uses glass walls to reduce the distinction
between inside and outside. And finally came the 1928-9
Barcelona Pavilion, an assembly of free-standing partitions
under a floating roof in which it is quite impossible to say at what point 'inside' becomes 'outside'. Though in many ways
hauntingly house-like (hence its inclusion in this genealogy)
this was a non-inhabited pavilion with no need for enclosing
walls, thus allowing the architect to take liberties that would be
impossible in a true dwelling.2" But once conceived, the idea
kept re-emerging in subsequent house designs (see figures
19-22) and again reaches a climax in the glass-walled
Farnsworth House.
The spatial opening-up of the house described above was
interconnected with the parallel development of Mies's
structural ideas from the early 1920s to the early 1940s.
Mies's long-standing love of clearly-displayed structure
found a natural means of expression in the steel-framed
apartment and office buildings of Chicago, where he settled in
1938,25 and where his third period of development as suggested
on p.7 may be said to have begun. The outcome of his engagement
with the Chicago steel frame, seen to perfection in the
Farnsworth House, was what he himself referred to as 'skin
and bones' design - a thin external skin (preferably glass) fitted
to a skeletal frame (preferably steel) of the utmost clarity and
elegance, with maximum differentiation between load-bearing
frame and non-load-bearing skin.26
In this last period his work underwent a marked change of
temper. Seemingly sated with the irregular plans and freefloating
planes of the avant-garde experiments of the 1920s,
Mies rather surprisingly reverted after about 1938 to the sober
classicism of his early architecture, shown now in buildings with
steel frames rather than stone. All that survives from the 1920s
projects is a very modern transparency and (in some of his
pavilions) a use of floating planes.
Two points must be added to the above analysis. While the
essentially aesthetic experiments with space and structure
outlined above are the central story of Mies's second and third
phases of evolution as a designer, it would bean oversimplification
to see the form and appearance of the Farnsworth
House as the outcome only of aesthetic concerns.
There were also social issues at work. Nineteenth-century
European cities were haunted by disease, particularly
tuberculosis; and Mies shared a widespread early-twentiethcentury
yearning for a new way of living that would be simpler,
cleaner and healthier than before. The theme of wholesome
living in airy, sunny rooms (in contrast with the stuffy, dusty and
over-furnished buildings of nineteenth-century architecture) is
seen in countless early twentieth-century writings, architectural and other, and led naturally to the clinically white, glassy and
sparsely furnished buildings of Mies and his contemporaries.
And there was, secondly, a spiritual aspect. Throughout his
life the apparently technology-driven Mies van der Rohe was
actually an earnest searcher after the deeper meanings behind
everyday existence.27 Some time between 1924 and 1927
he moved to the view that 'building art is always the spatial
expression of spiritual decisions' and began to gravitate away
from the rather mechanistic functionalists of the Neue
Sachlichkeit ('new objectivity') movement.28 He had for many
years been pondering the writings of Catholic philosophers
such as St Thomas Aquinas, and now discovered a new book
by Siegfried Ebeling titled DerRaum als Membran. This was
a mystical tract which treated the building as an enclosing
membrane forming a space for concentration and mystic
celebration.29 It is clear from the underlinings in Mies's personal
copy that he took Ebeling's arguments seriously.
Though this period of spirituality seems to have faded somewhat
after his Barcelona Pavilion, and he gradually returned to
drier and more objective design attitudes as noted above, the
dignified serenity of pavilions such as the Farnsworth House
and the New National Gallery in Berlin (1962-8) bear witness to
Mies's abiding preoccupation with the creation of orderly, noble
and indeed quasi-spiritual spaces in our turbulent world.
The outcome at Fox River of all the themes traced above -
aesthetic, social and spiritual - is a tranquil weekend house
of unsurpassed clarity, simplicity and elegance. Every physical
element has been distilled to its irreducible essence. The products-even if the effect had to be faked, as it usually was.
Where traditional buildings were ornamented, modern buildings
must be bare. Where traditional houses had rooms, modern
ones must be open-plan. Where traditional rooms were thickly
carpeted and curtained, and densely filled with furniture and
bric-a-brac, modern ones must have hard, clean surfaces and
be virtually devoid of furniture and possessions.
And so on. Though there were important continuities
between classicism and modernism,37 stylistic inversions such
as those above (and others which interested readers may trace
for themselves) dominated the mostly white, glassy, flatsurfaced,
sparsely-furnished buildings selected for publication
in 1932 in The International Style, five of them by Mies van der
Rohe.38 In the Farnsworth House these characteristics are taken
so far, and distilled into a composition of such elegance and
single-minded clarity, that it can stand as a late icon of what the
International Style of the late 1920s and early 1930s had been
'trying to be'.

Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye, 1928-9

Client, site and brief
In late 1945 Mies van der Rohe, then aged 59 and still relatively
unknown in America,33 met (probably at a dinner party) an
intelligent and art-conscious 42-year-old Chicago medical
specialist called Edith Farnsworth.40 She mentioned in conversation
that she owned a riverside site on the Fox River, about 60
miles west of Chicago, and was thinking of building there a
weekend retreat. She wondered aloud whether his office might
be interested. He was, and after several excursions to the site
with Edith Farnsworth he was given the commission.
It was, for Mies, an ideal challenge. A cabin for weekend use
by a single person was the kind of programme to which he best
responded. Rather like the Barcelona Pavilion of 1928-941 the
Farnsworth House was a project in which the tiresome realities
of everyday life (the need for privacy, the accumulation of
possessions, the daily litter and clutter) could be disregarded
in a single-minded quest for transcendental elegance.
The site was a narrow seven-acre strip of deciduous
woodland beside the Fox River. Its southern boundary was
formed by the river-bank and a thin line of trees; the northern
boundary by a gentle grassy rise and a thicker grove of trees,
along which ran a minor public road giving access to the site.
The eastern boundary was also formed by a grove of trees;
and the western boundary by Fox River Drive, the main road to
Piano. Between these features lay a grassy meadow, idyllically
isolated except for the (then) lightly-used road to the west.
Initial progress was rapid. Mies started designing within a
year, and a model closely resembling the final design was
exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1947.
He was ready to proceed but Dr Farnsworth had to wait for an
inheritance before authorizing a start on site. Construction
finally began in September 1949, and the house was completed
in 1951.

The lawsuit
By then, unfortunately, the initially sympathetic relationship
between architect and client had turned sour. Everyone who knew them agrees that this was at least partly due to a failed
romance between Mies van der Rohe and Edith Farnsworth. At
the start of the project they worked closely together, had picnics
on the river bank, and Dr Farnsworth was breathlessly excited
by both the man and the emerging design. Recalling the evening
she first discussed the house with Mies she later said that 'the
effect was tremendous, like a storm, a flood, or an Act of God.'42
And in June 1946, a few months after that revelatory evening,
she sent Mies a handwritten letter:

'Dear Mies
It is impossible to pay in money for what is made by heart and soul!
Such work one can only recognize and cherish - with love and
respect. But the concrete world affects us both and I must
recognize that also and see that it is dealt with in some decent
fashion.
So, dear Mies, I am enclosing a cheque for one thousand [dollars]
on account, with full awareness of its inadequacy.
Faithfully yours
Edith'

The romance went wrong, unkind remarks began to be made
on both sides,43 and in 1953 Mies sued Dr Farnsworth for unpaid
fees of $28,173. She countersued for $33,872, alleging a large
cost over-run on the original budget, a leaking roof and excessive
condensation on the glass walls.44
After a court hearing that must have been excruciatingly
painful for both sides, Mies van der Rohe and Edith Farnsworth
in mid-1953 agreed a $14,000 settlement in Mies's favour.
The battle continued outside the courtroom. Many architects
and critics had been overwhelmed by the clarity, polish and
precision of the design but the April 1953 issue of the more
populist (and in many respects more realistic) House Beautiful
attacked the house itself, the International Style of which it is an
exemplar, and the Bauhaus which was the seedbed of this kind
of design. The author, Elizabeth Gordon, accused the
architecture of being 'cold' and 'barren'; the furniture 'sterile',
'thin' and 'uncomfortable'; Mies's design as an attack on
traditional American values.45
Frank Lloyd Wright, who in the 1930s and early 1940s had
admired Mies's work and regarded him as a friend,48 joined in:
The International Style ... is totalitarianism. These Bauhaus
architects ran from political totalitarianism in Germany to what
is now made by specious promotion to seem their own
totalitarianism in art here in America ...""
Edith Farnsworth added her own angry comments, then and
later, about the general impossibility of living in her exquisite
glass pavilion. She complained that 'Mies talks about his "free
space", but the space is very fixed. I can't even put a clothes
hanger in my house without considering how it affects
everything from the outside'; and that 'I thought you could
animate a pre-determined, classic form like this with your own
presence. I wanted to do something meaningful and all I got
was this glib, false sophistication.'48 It may of course be that her
views were coloured by the extremity of her bitterness towards
Mies.49 As Professor Dieter Holm suggested to me in conversation,
had she envisaged her exquisite pavilion as a kind of
Japanese tea house in which she and her friend and mentor
would conduct exalted discussions about life and art;50 and
were her subsequent attacks an expression of rage at the man
who had let her down, rather than a comment on the house?
It seems likely. Despite her criticisms Edith Farnsworth
continued to use the house until 1971, though treating it with
scant respect. Adrian Gale saw it in 1958 and found 'a
sophisticated camp site rather than a weekend dreamhouse'.
When its subsequent purchaser Peter Palumbo visited Dr
Farnsworth in 1971 he was depressed to see an approach path
of crazy paving; the western terrace enclosed by mosquito
screens so that one entered the glass pavilion via a wire mesh
door; the once-beautiful primavera panels veneered to a
blackish, reddish colour; the floor space unpleasantly blocked
by mostly nondescript furniture; and the sink piled high with
dishes which had not been washed for several days.
A year later the Farnsworth House was sold, and entered
upon a happier phase of existence, as will be related in the
Postscript on p.24.

Planning
Before turning to the planning of the Farnsworth House itself,
that of its immediate predecessors must be considered. The
emphatic horizontal planes, glass-walled transparency and
open interiors which Mies had been perfecting since 1921
had come together in a sublime synthesis in the Barcelona
Pavilion.51 Having crystallized his ideas in that essentially
ceremonial and functionless building, where such experiments
in abstraction could be carried out relatively freely, Mies began also to incorporate them in a sequence of house designs.
The first of these was a grand residence for Fritz and Grete
Tugendhat, which Mies was actually in the process of designing
when he was commissioned to undertake the Barcelona
Pavilion. The Tugendhats were enlightened newly-weds who
wanted a modern house with generous spaces and clear,
simple forms; and who were aware of Mies's work. They
arranged a meeting in 1928 - and like many previous clients
(and his future client Dr Edith Farnsworth) were bowled over by
his massive presence and air of calm self-assurance. As Mrs
Tugendhat said later: 'From the first moment it was certain that
he was our man ... We knew we were in the same room with an
artist.' That was a common reaction among Mies's clients.52
Architect-client relations were not quite as smooth as here
implied, but the project went ahead. The Tugendhat House was
completed in 1930 and represented a decisive step away from
the solid 'block' houses Mies had been building only two years
earlier (the Esters and Lange houses of 1927-30), and towards
the transparent 'pavilion' houses he would be designing in the
future. The living room was extensive and tranquil, enclosed by
glass walls so transparent that the outer landscape and sky
seemed almost to form the room boundaries. The room was
subtly zoned into conversation, dining, study and library areas
by only two or three free-standing partitions and a few
precisely-placed pieces of furniture. It was virtually empty
except for these artwork-like items of furniture, and there was
no allowance for pictures on the walls.
In another pre-figuration of the Farnsworth House the
colours were predominantly neutral and unassertive. The floor
was covered in creamy, off-white linoleum. There was a black
silk curtain before the glass wall by the winter garden; a silverygrey
silk curtain before the main glass wall; the library could be
closed off by a white velvet curtain; and a black velvet curtain
ran between the onyx wall and the winter garden. This neutral
backdrop heightened the dramatic effect of a few carefullydevised
focal points - the rich black-and-brown ebony curved
partition; the tawny-gold onyx flat partition; the emerald-green
leather, ruby-red velvet, and white vellum furniture claddings;
and the lush green jungle of plants filling the winter garden.
After many experimental drawing-board projects Mies was
beginning to realize in built form that 'puritanical vision of
simplified, transcendental existence' referred toon p. 13.
This vision had its negative side, and along with the plaudits
the Tugendhat House began to attract comments of a kind
that would recur with the Farnsworth House. Gropius called
it a 'Sunday house', questioning its suitability for everyday
living, and a critic asked unkindly, 'Can one live in House
Tugendhat?' -a question the Tugendhats answered with an
impassioned 'yes'.53
There followed the House for a Childless Couple at the Berlin
Fair (1931), which distinctly recalls the Barcelona Pavilion; and
then a series of unbuilt Courtyard House designs (1931-8) in
which Mies tested on confined urban sites the concept of openplan
interiors, sheltering beneath horizontal roof planes and
looking out on to gardens via glass walls. One-, two- or threecourt
houses were planned, the entire site in each case being
surrounded by a brick wall. Within the privacy of these enclosures
each individual house faced its courtyard via a thin-framed,
ceiling-height glass wall. Interiors consisted of few rooms and
large areas of continuous, fluid space very reminiscent of the
Brick Country House project; and roofs were lightly supported
on the external walls plus four to eight slender columns, leaving
the internal partitions free of all load-bearing function. Space
flowed freely through the interiors and out into the courtyards.
Each walled enclosure was effectively one large 'room', part of
which was indoors and part outdoors - an intermediate stage to
the Farnsworth House where the entire surrounding meadow
would become an extension of the glass-walled interior.
In 1937-8, as Mies was in the process of emigrating to
Chicago, came the immediate forerunner of the Farnsworth
House. This was a design (alas, unbuilt) for a summer residence
for Mr and Mrs Stanley Resor bridging a small river in Wyoming.54
Very appropriately for-his first American building, the central
'bridge' section of the house was a long steel-framed box.
This was raised slightly clear of the site, formed a glass-walled
living area, and had no internal divisions except for furniture and
a fireplace.
Interestingly, Mies's previous intimate incorporation of
houses into their landscapes begins here to give way to a
distinct separation between the man-made object and nature.55
In the past, the interior spaces (the wings of the house) and
exterior spaces (the gardens and courtyards) were intimately
interlocked in projects as late as the Esters and Lange houses.
Here, while the ends of the Resor House - whose foundations were inherited by Mies from an earlier design for that site - are
firmly rooted to the site, the bridge-like central section parts
company with the landscape, hovering aloofly above an
untouched site. By a quirk of fate the site problem which
generated this elevated geometry - regular floodwaters -
would recur with his next house.
In 1946, on Dr Farnsworth's plot beside the Fox River, Mies
could finally bring all these gradually-evolved ideas to their
ultimate conclusion.
His most fundamental decision involved the relationship
between the building and the landscape - a relationship that
aimed at bringing nature, the house and human beings together
into 'a higher unity', as he put it.
The house stands about 1.6 metres (just over 5 ft) above the
surrounding meadow, leaving the site completely undisturbed
and giving its occupants a magnificent belvedere from which to
contemplate the surrounding woodland. The practical reason
for the raised floor is that the meadow is a floodplain, but Mies
has characteristically managed to transmute a technical solution
to an aesthetic masterstroke. Being elevated, the house is
detached from disorderly reality and becomes an exalted place
for contemplation -safe, serene and perfect in all its smooth,
machine-made details.
The basic arrangement of the Farnsworth House was quickly
settled, but the precise layout went through the usual painstaking
process of Miesian fine-tuning (his most characteristic
injunction to students and design assistants was, it is said, to
'work on it some more'). Literally hundreds of preliminary
drawings were produced, and these show Mies trying out
several alternative positions for the access stairs, the central
core and other minor elements before achieving finality.56 Note,
for instance, on figure 27, the two glass screens separating the
kitchen space from the rest of the house - Mies's last halfhearted
attempt at traditional boxed-in rooms before going for
a completely undivided living area.57
Another abandoned idea was the enclosure of the western
terrace by insect-proof screening. The screens were shown
on the model exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in 1947,
but Mies never liked these transparency-destroying elements
and the house was built without them. (In fact practicality would
soon triumph over aesthetics, and the idea had to be resurrected
after Dr Farnsworth moved into the house, owing to the
tormenting clouds of mosquitoes rising from the riverside
meadow every summer. Stainless steel screens were therefore
designed and installed at her request in 1951. The work was
done under Mies's supervision by his design assistant William
Dunlap, client/architect relations by then being frosty.58 The
screens were removed two decades later by the new owner
Peter Palumbo, and the mosquito-breeding meadow mown
down to a more lawn-like surface as will be related later.)
The interior as finally realized is a single glass-enclosed
space, unpartitioned except for a central service core. The
latter conceals two bathrooms (one for Dr Farnsworth, one for
visitors) and a utility room, and is set closer to the northern wall
than to the southern. This off-centre location creates a narrow
kitchen space to the north and a much larger living area to the
south. The long northern side of the core consists of a single run
of cabinets above a kitchen worktop, and the long southern
side incorporates a low, open hearth facing the living area. The
two short sides contain the entrance doors to the bathrooms.
The living area is zoned into a sleeping area on the east
(thus conforming with the excellent precept, going back to
Vitruvius's Sixth Book of Architecture, that bedrooms should
face east so that the sleeper wakes to the glory of the morning
sun), a dining area to the west, and a general sitting area
between the two. The sleeping zone is served by a freestanding
teak-faced cupboard.
Outside, the raised terrace to the west is a splendid place for
sitting at the end of the day, watching the sunset.
Turning from internal to external planning, it seems to have
been decided that allowing motor vehicles to drive right up to
the pavilion (a formative design factor in another twentiethcentury
country villa, Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye of 1929-31)
would impair the Farnsworth House's idyllic sense of seclusion.
Therefore Mies's design made no provision for car access.
Dr Farnsworth did subsequently build a conventional twocar
garage beside the gate on the northern boundary of the site,
where she presumably parked her car and walked across the
field to the house. Her visitors more commonly drove all the way
to the house and parked there. The disturbing presence of
garage, track and automobiles inevitably diminished the dreamlike
image of a small pavilion in remote woodland and, as
outlined on p.25, its next owner radically replanned the site to
overcome this defect.

The structure
The basic structure of Farnsworth House consists of eight
wide-flange steel stanchions A, to which are welded two sets of
fascia channels to form a perimeter frame B at roof level, and a
similar perimeter frame C at floor level - see figure 40.
Sets of steel cross-girders D and E are welded to the longitudinal
channels, and pre-cast concrete planks I and N placed
upon these to form the roof and floor slabs respectively. The
loading imposed upon C by the floor construction is obviously
greater than that imposed on B by the roof, but for the sake of
visual consistency Mies has made them of equal depth - an
example of the primacy of 'form' over 'function' to which he
was in principle opposed,59 but which stubbornly emerges in
almost all his mature work.™
The steel stanchions stop short of the channel cappings,
making it clear that the roof plane does not rest on the columns
but merely touches them in passing, thus helping to create the
impression alluded to at the start of this essay - that the
horizontal elements appear to be held to their vertical supports
by magnetism.
Above the roof slab is a low service module containing water
tank, boiler, extract fans from the two bathrooms and a flue
from the fireplace. Beneath the floor slab is a cylindrical drum
housing all drainage pipes and incoming water and electrical
services.

Steelwork
As the Farnsworth House is probably the most complete and
refined statement of glass-and-steel architecture Mies ever
produced - the ultimate crystallization of an idea, as Peter
Blake has put it- it is worth examining this aspect in detail.
Mies's admiration for the structural clarity of the steel frame
long predates his arrival in Chicago, and was no doubt motivated
by reasons both aesthetic and practical.61 Aesthetically the steel
frame lent itself to clear structural display, and was 'honest' and
free of rhetoric or historical associations - highly-prized
characteristics to the future-worshipping avant-garde of the
1920s. From a practical standpoint the steel frame allowed
open-plan interiors in which walls could be freely disposed,62
and even more importantly it seemed to hold the answer to
Mies's dream of traditional construction methods being
replaced by industrial systems in which all the building parts
could be factory-made and then rapidly assembled on-site.63
His move to Chicago in 1938 brought him to a city with
unparalleled expertise in steel construction. Until then he had
been able to use the steel frame only in a semi-concealed way;64
but after 1937-8 the nakedly exposed rolled steel beam,
uncamouflaged by covering layers of 'architecture' (except
where required by fire-safety codes), would begin to form the
basis of his most characteristic designs.
But whereas American builders used the steel frame with
no-nonsense practicality,65 the European Mies had different
priorities. Ignoring his own arguments of fifteen years earlier
that 'form is not an end in itself',66 and that the use of materials
should be determined by constructive requirements, he set
about refining and intellectualizing the steel frame in what may
best be described as a quest for ideal Platonic form.67
Thus, while the American avant-garde constructed their
steel houses on the practical and economical balloon-frame
principle, with slender steel members spaced fairly closely
together (see for instance Richard Neutra's Lovell 'Health'
House of 1927-9 and Charles Eames' Case Study House of
1949), Mies used heavy steel sections, spaced widely apart
and with no visible cross-bracing to give an unprecedentedly
open appearance (see especially his Farnsworth House and
New National Gallery). For added character he chose for his
stanchions not the commonly-used steel profiles of the time
but a wide-flanged profile notable for its handsome proportions
and precision of form.
Mies also departed from standard Chicago practice in his
steel-jointing techniques. Flanged steel sections are popular
in the construction industry partly for the ease with which they
may be bolted or riveted together. The flanges are easily drilled,
holes can take the form of elongated slots to accommodate
slight inaccuracies, and all the basic operations are speedy
and straightforward.
Mies used conventional bolted connections in the less visible
parts of his structures, but in exposed positions he wished his
elegant steel members to be displayed cleanly, uncluttered by
bolts, rivets or plates; and here he defied normal practice by
using more expensive welded joints, preferably concealed and
invisible. If the weld could not be totally hidden he would have
the steel sections temporarily joined by means of Nelson stud
bolts and cleats, apply permanent welding, and then burn off the holding bolts and plug the holes. The steel surfaces would
then be ground smooth to give the appearance of being formed
of a single continuous material without breaks or joints. Finally,
to ensure a smooth and elegant appearance he had the steel
sections grit-blasted to a smooth matt surface, and the entire
assembly primed and given three coats of paint.
The effect of this sequence of operations in the Farnsworth
House was, as Franz Schulze has commented, almost to deindustrialize
the steel frame, taming the mighty product of blast
furnace, rolling mill and electric arc into a silky-surfaced,
seemingly jointless white substance of Platonic perfection.

'In summerthe great room floats
above a green meadow, its visual
boundaries extending to the leafy
screen of deciduous trees encircling
the house, and the high sun
bouncing off the travertine surface
of the covered terrace...'

Other materials
Passing on from the steel-and-glass envelope, the other materials
used in the Farnsworth House are rigorously restricted to
travertine (floors), wood (primavera for the core walls, teak for
the wardrobe) and plaster (ceilings).
The range of colours is equally limited, the better to set off
the few artworks and carefully-chosen items of furniture inside,
and the framed views of nature outside - white columns and
ceiling, off-white floors and curtains, and pale brown wood.
Such sobriety was a long-standing Miesian characteristic. In
1958 he told the architect and critic Christian Norberg-Schulz:
'I hope to make my buildings neutral frames in which man and
artworks can carry on their own lives ... Nature, too, shall have
its own life. We must beware not to disrupt it with the colour of
our houses and interior fittings. Yet we should attempt to bring
nature, houses and human beings together into a higher unity.

Steel frame
A -Steel stanchion
B -Steel channels forming perimeter frame at roof level
C -Steel channels forming perimeter frame at floor level
D -Steel cross-girders at roof level
E -Steel cross-girders at floor level
F -Intermediate mullion built up from flat steel bars

Floor construction
G -Waterproof membrane on
H -Foam glass insulation on
I -Precast concrete planks
J -Travertine slabs on
K -Mortar bed on
L -Crushed stone on
M -Metal tray on
N -Lightweight concrete fill on precast concrete slabs

If you view nature through the glass walls of the Farnsworth
House, it gains a more profound significance than if viewed
from outside ... it becomes a part of a larger whole.

Detailing
As one would expect of Mies, the use of materials in the
Farnsworth House is immaculate.69 The American journal
Architectural Forum commented that the Italian travertine slabs
that form the floors of house and terrace were fitted to the steel
frames 'with a precision equal to that of the finest incastro
stonework', and that the plaster ceiling had 'the smoothness of
a high-grade factory finish' 7°
Looking at the details more closely, one discerns a typically
Miesian grammar that places his classically-inspired detailing
at the opposite pole to that represented by arts and craftsinfluenced
designers such as Greene and Greene." Whereas
the Greene brothers exuberantly celebrate the act of joining
materials, with an abundance of highly visible fasteners
intimating what goes on behind the surface, Mies hides his
fixings deep within the structure so as to leave his surfaces
smooth and unbroken.
The joints between components also display a characteristically
Miesian grammar. Wherever two adjoining components
are structurally unified, as in the case of steel members welded
together, Mies expresses unification by making the meetingpoint
invisible - hence the process already described of
grinding, polishing, priming and painting aimed at making an
assembly of separate steel members look like a single,seamless casting. This approach is first seen in the X-crossing
of his Barcelona Chair, whose appearance Adrian Gale has
compared with those curviform eighteenth-century chairs
whose legs and rails are fluidly shaped, and invisibly jointed, to
convey an impression of the whole frame having been carved
from a single block of wood.
But wherever two adjoining components are connected
without being structurally fused, as in the case of stone slabs,
timber panels or screwed (not welded) steel members, Mies
takes the converse approach and emphasizes their separate
identities by inserting between them a neat open groove. In the
Farnsworth House such an indentation separates the plaster of
the ceiling from the steel frames that hold the glass walls.
While the use of a groove between adjoining elements was
not invented by him (it occurs in the work of both Schinkel and
Behrens, the latter using it for instance to separate window or
doorframes from adjoining wall surfaces), Mies came gradually
to replace most of the traditional cover strips with 'reveals' or
'flash gaps' - the respective American and British terms for the
separating groove. The process may be traced as follows.
In his pre-1920 houses, from the Riehl House to the Urbig
House of 1914, Mies generally used conventional interior trim to
cover building joints. In his Lange House he was still using
cornices, architraves, skirtings and other cover mouldings, but
reduced now to simple flat strips.72 In the Barcelona Pavilion he
took the last step: there are no longer any skirtings or cornices,
no column bases or capitals, and no applied trim of any kind
except for glazing beads around the glass screens. Surfaces are clean and sheer, the junctions between them unconcealed.
But cover strips over the joints in a building have a function
and cannot simply be abolished. Where separate components
or different materials meet, the fit is inevitably imperfect, leading
to an unsightly crack. The crack worsens as repeated differential
movement causes the gap to widen and become ragged - a
process called 'fretting' - and some form of camouflage must
be devised. The traditional cover strip disguises the joint by
concealment; the open groove does so by making the crack
less obtrusive, an observer's eye tending to 'read' the straightedged
groove rather than the irregular crack-line meandering
within it. After about 1940 this was Mies's preferred method for
detailing all building joints. It is also of course an instance of the
phenomenon of 'inversion' noted on p.13, the open groove
being the counterform of the cover strip.

Internal environment
As regards thermal comfort, the Farnsworth House performed
poorly before the implementation in the 1970s of corrective
measures. In hot weather the interior could become oven-like
owing to inadequate cross-ventilation and no sun-screening
except for the foliage of adjacent trees. To create some crossventilation
occupants could open the entrance doors on the
west and two small hopper windows on the east, and activate
an electric exhaust fan in the kitchen floor, but these measures
were often inadequate. In cold weather the underfloor hotwater
coils produced the pleasant heat output characteristic of
such systems (partly radiant, and with temperatures at head level not much higher than at floor-level), but insufficient in midwinter.
Underfloor systems also have a long warming-up period
that is ill-suited to an intermittently occupied house. To increase
the supply of heat, and give quicker warming, hot air could be
blown into the living area from a small furnace in the utility room.
There was also a somewhat ineffective fireplace set into the
south face of the central core, facing the living area, which it is
said to have covered with a layer of ash.
The worst cold-weather failing was the amount of condensation
streaming down the chilled glass panes and collecting
on the floor - one of Dr Edith Farnsworth's complaints in the
1953 court case as described on p.15. This was an elementary
design fault whose consequences Mies must have foreseen
and could have avoided, but presumably chose to ignore so as
not to destroy the beautiful simplicity of his glass-and-steel
facades.73
As regards electric lighting, the living and sleeping areas are
illuminated by uplighting reflected off the ceiling,augmented by
freestanding chrome lamps. The quality of the lighting thus
produced is entirely to the present owner's satisfaction.

Rainwater drainage
Efficient rainwater disposal requires sloping surfaces, a characteristic
that is somewhat at odds with the perfect horizontals of
Mies's design, but the problem is neatly solved in the Farnsworth
House. Behind its level fascia the roof surface slopes down to a
single drainage pipe directly above the utility room stack. The
steel fascia and its capping stand sufficiently high above the
roof surface to conceal the sloping roof from all surrounding
sight-lines, and to prevent water spilling over the edge and
staining the white paint.
The travertine-paved terrace has a perfectly level upper
surface and yet remains dry. This has been achieved by laying
the slabs on gravel beds contained in sheet-metal troughs with
water outlets at their lowest points (see figure 40). Rainwater
therefore drains down between the slabs, through the gravel
beds and out via the base outlets.

Assessment
The Farnsworth House expresses to near perfection Mies van
der Rohe's belief in an architecture of austere beauty, free of
historical allusion or rhetoric, relying on clean forms and noble
materials to epitomize an impersonal 'will of the age' that
stands aloof from such ephemeralities as fashion or the
personal likes and dislikes of individual clients.74 In its very
perfection, by these exalted criteria, lie the building's great
strengths but also its weaknesses.
The first strength is its success as a place, where the house
goes far towards realizing that vision of the dwelling as a
spiritual space expressed three decades earlier by Ebeling,75
and again in 1951 (the very year of its completion) in a noteworthy
essay by the German philosopher Heidegger.76
The manner in which man, architecture and nature have been
brought together on this riverside meadow creates a magical
sense of being within nature, not separated from it as in
traditional buildings. From their glass-enclosed belvedere residents may tranquilly observe the surrounding meadow and
trees change character as one season gives way to the next,
the woodland colours heightened by the white framing, and the
hourly fluctuations of light subtly reflecting off the white ceiling.
As Peter Carter (who has stayed in the Farnsworth House in
all seasons) has observed:
'In summer the great room floats above a green meadow, its
visual boundaries extending to the leafy screen of deciduous
trees encircling the house, and the high sun bouncing off the
travertine surface of the covered terrace to wash the ceiling
with a glowing luminosity. On sunny days the white steel
profiles receive bright articulation and precise modelling from
the sun's rays; on dull days the diffuse light will still pick out the
profiles of these architectural elements even when viewed from
far away in the meadow. Summer is also the season of truly
operatic storms: when witnessed from the glass-walled interior
high winds, torrential rain and chunky hail, accompanied by
deafening thunder and spectacularly dramatic lightning, leave
an indelible impression of nature's more aggressive aspect.
'In autumn the green turns to a golden glow, to be followed
by the enchantment of winter when the prairy becomes whiteblanketed
for weeks on end, the snow lit by a low sun and the
bare trees affording long views across the frozen Fox river. By
day the slanting sunlight is reflected from the snowy surface on
to and into the house, projecting images of nature on to the
folds of the curtains and creating a softly luminous interior
ambience; by night the glittering snow reflects bright moonlight
into the house, mysteriously diminishing the boundary between the man-made interior and the natural world outside.
'As winter passes the landscape becomes alive with the
fresh colours and fragrances of spring foliage, the latter slowly
closing in once again to define the secluded domain of the
home meadow.'
The diurnal cycle is as delightful. Of the sleeping area to the
east, a guest who stayed the night wrote that 'the sensation is
indescribable-the act of waking and coming to consciousness
as the light dawns and gradually grows. It illuminates the grass
and trees and the river beyond; it takes over your whole vision.
You are in nature and not in it, engulfed by it but separate from
it. It is altogether unforgettable.'77 Another frequent visitor adds:
The sunrise, of course, is ravishing. But the night as well,
especially during thunderstorms. Snowfalls are magical. And I
recall times when the river water rose almost to the level of the
floor, but not quite, so that we had to locomote by canoe... I
cannot recall a dull moment here."8
In sum: 'For those who have been fortunate enough to live in
it the healing qualities of the Farnsworth House confirm its
status as the nonpareil of country retreats.' (Peter Carter)
The second great strength of the Farnsworth House is its
perfection as an artefact. Steel, glass and travertine have been
integrated into a classical composition in which everything
looks right, from overall form down to the tiniest detail. The
result stands as an object lesson for all designers, and the core
of the lesson is that excellence cannot be achieved without an
insistenceon fine materials, consummate details and unremitting
design effort. This is especially true of 'honest' modern design,
in which components and joints are nakedly displayed as in a
Greek temple. Unlike traditional buildings, whose complex
mouldings and overlapping finishes and coverings may conceal
a host of imperfections, the clarity of such design allows few
hiding places, and it requires a Miesian drive for perfection to
achieve the results seen at Piano.79
Turning to weaknesses, the case against the Farnsworth
House is that it pretends to be what it is not in three respects:
as an exemplar of industrial materials and construction
methods; as an exemplar of rational problem-solving design;
and as a reproducible 'type-form' that might be widely adopted
for other dwellings-all of these being self-proclaimed aims of
Miesian design.80
On the first point, the Farnsworth House uses rolled steel
sections and plate glass to present itself as a model of industrial
-age construction when in fact it is an expensive artwork
fabricated largely by handcraft. A case for the defence was
suggested in 1960 by the architect and critic Peter Blake: that in
an age of throw-away products and, increasingly, throw-away
architecture, Mies was legitimately creating prototypes that the
construction industry of the future might strive to emulate; that
he saw his role as that of directing the course of industry, not
slavishly following it.81 Forty years on it looks as though Mies
may yet be vindicated - industrial technology is producing
objects of increasing perfection, and moving away from
standardized towards customized production; and twenty-firstcentury
industry could conceivably become capable of
delivering buildings of Miesian quality at normal cost.
On the second charge, it is undeniable that the Farnsworth
House suffers from serious and elementary design faults. It was
perfectly predictable that a badly-ventilated glass box, without
sun-shading except for some nearby trees, would become
oven-like in the hot Illinois summers, and that single-thickness
glass in steel frames, devoid of precautionary measures such
as convection heaters to sweep the glass with a warm air
current, would stream with condensation in an Illinois winter.
Mies's disregard of such elementary truths illustrates his
greatest weakness as an architect - namely, an obsession with
perfect form so single-minded that awkward problems were
loftily disregarded.K
That brings us to the third of the points raised above -
whether the Farnsworth House might serve as a reproducible
'type-form'. It seems clear that Mies intended the concept of
the Farnsworth House for wider application. His broadly similar
50 ft by 50 ft (15m x 15m) House project of 1950-1, which he
reportedly thought suitable for mass-production for American
family housing,83 was open-plan and glass-walled, and shared
with the 55 ft by 29 ft (16.8m x 8.8m) Farnsworth House a lack
of privacy, lack of storage space, and very little adaptability
apart from the occupants' freedom to move the furniture. For
normal living these are crippling defects.
Though Mies insisted to the end of his days that open
interiors were practical and preferable to conventional rooms,84
this cannot possibly be true for dwellings unless they are large
enough to ensure privacy by distance - which means very large
indeed: it is significant that the over 80 ft x 50 ft (24m x 15m)

open-plan living room of the successful Tugendhat House is
three-and-a-half times the size of an entire floor of the Riehl
House or Perls House. As to storage space, it is difficult to
imagine a family inhabiting the 50 ft by 50 ft house - or even the
60 ft x 60 ft (18m x 18m) version - when the bachelor aesthete
Philip Johnson's 56 ft by 32 ft (17m x 9.8m) single-space 1949
Glass House at New Canaan depended on the existence of
several nearby buildings to which possessions, guests and
other intrusions of everyday life could be conveniently
banished. In this connection Peter Blake writes that the
traditional Japanese open plan that so inspired Frank Lloyd
Wright and other twentieth-century architects depended
absolutely, even in that age of sparse possessions, on servants
and subservient wives constantly spiriting away the clutter of
everyday living into special areas outside the open plan.85
Clearly the Farnsworth House fails as a normal dwelling, and
as a prototype for normal dwellings. But turning to happier
things, it undeniably provides a supreme model for a belvedere,
a garden pavilion or even a holiday dwelling, provided the client
truly understands what he or she is getting, as the unfortunate
Dr Farnsworth probably did not. One of the contractors on her
house, Karl Freund, later told the writer David Spaeth, 'she
didn't understand the house. Mies should have made it clearer
to her what she was getting.'86 Buildings very obviously inspired
by the Farnsworth House include the 1970 Tallon House in
Dublin, Ireland by Ronnie Tallon; the 1992 Villa Maesen at
Zedelgem, Belgium by Stephane Beel; and the 1998 Skywood
House in Middlesex, England by Graham Phillips.87
In sum: the crystalline masterpiece on the riverside at Piano
is a rare building for a rare client, to be emulated selectively and
with very great care.

Postscript
In 1971 Dr Edith Farnsworth vacated the famous pavilion that
had become so deeply intertwined with her life and would
always bear her name. Her original devotion to the house had
evaporated in the quarrel with Mies: she never furnished it
properly and angrily discouraged visits. She had nevertheless
continued to own and use it until finally demoralized by a new
misfortune.
In the 1960s the Board of Supervisors of Kendall County
decided to widen and re-align the road and bridge along the
western boundary of the site. These works required the
purchase of a 60m (200 ft) wide strip of Dr Farnsworth's land, a
proposal she vigorously contested. There followed a painful
battle with the County authority, culminating in a court hearing
after which the ground was compulsorily purchased. In 1967
the authorities built a new road that was twice the width of the
old, raised on an embankment, 45m (150 ft) closer to the house
and clearly visible therefrom. The traffic was now faster and
noisier than before, and audible from the house.
The once quiet and secluded retreat was no longer quite so
magical, and in 1968 Dr Farnsworth advertised it for sale. Thus,
with tragic symmetry, her twenty-year occupation of a house
she had commissioned with love and enthusiasm ended as it
had begun-with a traumatic court hearing ending in defeat.88
The offer to sell came to the notice of Mr Peter (now Lord)
Palumbo, a London property developer and lover of modern
architecture with a particular respect for the works of Mies van
der Rohe. Knowing of Dr Farnsworth's severe reputation he
risked entering the grounds to look at the house, and decided at
once that he must buy. Taking his life in his hands, as he put it,
he knocked on the door. 'I essentially bought the house that
afternoon', he later recalled, 'but she was a difficult, ferocious
woman and we didn't really complete the deal until 1972.'
Lord Palumbo's original dream that Mies van der Rohe might
be commissioned to restore to perfection his own twenty-yearold
building was cruelly thwarted when the latter died in 1969.
The commission was therefore given in 1972 to Dirk Lohan,
Mies's grandson and a partner in Conterato, Fugikawa and
Lohan, the successor-office to Mies's atelier.85
The principal works required were the following.90
With respect to structure, the flat roof (an inherently troubleprone form of construction in cold climates'1) had deteriorated
quite badly: condensation had caused staining, bubbling and
cracking of the plastered underside, and the paint finish on the
latter had begun to peel away. To improve its performance a
vapour barrier was installed above the plaster, additional
insulation laid above the pre-cast concrete planks, and a new
waterproof membrane laid on the upper surface. On the
underside the damaged plaster and paint were replaced.
The mosquito screens were removed from the terrace, the
white finish to all steelwork was stripped back to the primer
coat and repainted, and all the glass panels were replaced.
With respect to services, all the existing installations received
a major overhaul. The original space-heating principles (floorembedded
coils for main heating, augmented by fan-induced
hot air for quick warming-up) were left unchanged, but the
oil-fired heating system, which was dirty and cumbersome,
was converted to electricity. All the wiring in the house was
replaced. The 'almost nothing' hearth with its propensity for
spreading ash was given atravertine platform. Air-conditioning
(a rare luxury when the Farnsworth House was designed in the
1940s) was newly installed, and the plant concealed above the
service core.
And finally the interior, which Dr Farnsworth had filled with a
miscellany of inappropriate articles (see for instance the photo
on p.21 of Schulze, The Farnsworth House), was at last furnished
as first intended. Her roller blinds were replaced with off-white
curtains as envisaged by Mies, and the prosaic furniture
replaced by a few classic pieces placed almost as sparingly and precisely as exhibits in an art gallery. The black glass table
with chrome legs seen near the entrance in some published
photographs is a rare survivor of the Barcelona Pavilion.
Turning from the building to its setting, Lord Palumbo immediately
removed the crazy-paving pathway to the front steps
and put in hand a gradual improvement programme for the
entire site, which had been neglected for twenty years.
During her ownership Dr Farnsworth had bought an additional
55 acres of land to the east of the original seven-acre site,
creating the potential for a relocated and more discreet car
access route. Now Lord Palumbo commissioned the American
garden designer Lanning Roper, a devotee of informal English
garden design, to replan the landscape substantially.
In its original state the house looked out east, north and west
on terrain with grassland, natural shrub and a scattering of
trees. At first Lord Palumbo tried to enhance the sense of unspoilt
nature by allowing the grass surrounding the Farnsworth House
to grow tall, in effect creating a meadow. But the long grass
proved difficult to cut and became a fertile breeding-ground for
mosquitoes. The grass is now regularly mown, with the cutters
set at their highest level.
Lanning Roper planted trees to the east and west, leaving
the space directly behind and north of the house as a tract of
lawn that slopes lazily upward toward River Road. This open
space he filled with daffodils, literally tens of thousands of them,
which blossom progressively in the spring, leaving the ground
decorated with patches of yellow and white. The moment of
bloom is brief but compelling, and the landscape hardly less compelling later, when the flowers give way to a meadow wholly
of summery green.'92
The new stands of trees to the north, east and west now
provide an enclosure for the house and the scenic backdrop
that is seen through the transparent walls.
Roper also replanned the access route, moving the access
gate nearly 200m (650 ft) to the east of the original, out of sight
of the house, and laying a gravel drive that sweeps gently round
from the north to terminate in a new parking area 45m (150 ft)
from the south-eastern corner of the house. When visitors
arrive at this riverside parking space they leave their cars, cross
a modest timber bridge that arches over a small stream, and
make their way to towards the house through a landscape
dotted with trees. There is no pathway across the meadow, so
that the house is gradually revealed through the foliage.
The new approach, which involves walking the full length
of the house before turning at right angles towards the flight
of access steps, has therefore become more dramatic than
the simple 'house in a meadow' arrangement created by
Mies.93
The above improvements deserve high praise, but many
visitors have felt that the road realignments by Kendall
County, the designation of the opposite river bank as a
public park, and the creation of relatively lawn-like grass
in place of the original untended meadow, have combined
to transform an isolated retreat into what is essentially a
suburban house - a depressing fate shared by several
other icons of twentieth-century architecture including Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye and Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin
West.

A worse development has been a steep rise in the floodlevels
of the Fox River. Mies van der Rohe's enquiries in 1946
established a maximum water level over the past century of
about 0.9m (3 ft) above ground-level, and he considered it
safe to locate the floor 1.6m (5 ft 3 in) above the plain. But,
partly as a result of the outward expansion and paving-over
of Chicago's environs, the volume of water run-off increased
and flood levels began to rise dramatically in the 1950s.
In 1954, three years after Dr Farnsworth moved in, the
spring flood rose 1.2m (4ft) above the pavilion floor. Carpets
and furniture were ravaged but the water-marked wooden
core unit was fortunately reparable.
In 1996 came a truly gigantic downpour, with 0.45m (18 in)
of rain falling in 24 hours, most of it in eight hours. The
resulting floodwaters broke two of the glass walls, rose 1.5m
(5 ft) above the pavilion floor, swept away artefacts, and
ruined not only carpets and furniture but also the woodveneer
finish to the core. An unpleasant layer of mud and silt
covered the travertine floor and the damage came to over
$500,000.
As Lord Palumbo has put it, the house had to be 'taken
apart and put together again', and DirkLohan, now of the
architectural firm Lohan Associates, was commissioned to
carry out the necessary restoration.84 The timber core unit
was so badly damaged that it had to be discarded and built
anew. As the once-plentiful primavera was now almost extinct Dirk Lohan had to search for months to find wood of
the original colour. The new plywood panels were attached
to their frames by clips rather than screws so that the panels
could be quickly dismantled and stored on top of the core
unit in case of flood.
In February 1997, even before the above restoration had
started, there was yet another flood, rising to only 0.30 m (1
ft) above floor level but confirming that the Farnsworth
House must henceforth survive in conditions very different
from those for which it had been designed. There has been
talk of installing jacks beneath the footings, able to lift the
entire structure in case of flood, but this phenomenally
expensive solution remains conjectural. Since buying the
house Lord Palumbo has spent roughly $1 million on repairs
and improvements, mostly in restoration work after the
floods of 1996 and 1997, and one can understand a pause
for deliberation. These days the water regularly rises two or
three steps above the lower terrace, and occasionally a foot
or so above internal floor level, bringing in a layer of silt but
not (so far) causing ruin.
Despite the double irony that a dwelling designed as a
private retreat is now open to the public, and that its survival
is being threatened by the element it was specifically
designed to surmount, this chronicle can nevertheless end
on an uplifting note. Mies van der Rohe's glass pavilion,
having survived fifty troubled years, has become one of the
most revered buildings of the twentieth century, constantly
visited by admirers from all over the world.

Temple of Amun: The Hypostyle Hall

noreply@blogger.com (ओंकार देशमुख) — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 10:50:00 +0000

On the east bank of the Nile at Thebes, 440 miles (700 kilometers) south of the site of modern Cairo, stood the most extensive temple complex in ancient Egypt. From the time of the New Kingdom (1550–1069 b.c.), the northern end of this religious compound (near the modern village of Karnak) was dominated by the great temple devoted exclusively to the worship of Amun-Ra, “King of the Gods” and one of the most important Egyptian cults. Like all dynastic temples, it provided a platform upon which the pharaoh enacted rituals to ensure the annual flooding of the river and maintain life on earth. The idea of a virtual universe raised Egyptian architecture from the function of shelter to a metaphysical plane. It was, in that sense, an architecture of altered states. Other major temples in the complex were consecrated to Amun’s wife, Mut, and Monthu; there were smaller shrines for Khons, Oper, and Ptah. The hypostyle—the word is derived from the Greek, “resting on columns”—of the Temple of Amun is the building’s most remarkable feature, ranked by many among the world’s architectural masterpieces.

The temple was built over twelve centuries under the patronage of many pharaohs; the last additions were made in the Ptolemaic period (ca. 332–30 b.c.). The walled precinct was approached from the west along an avenue of ram-headed sphinxes. A gateway between two massive, battered, pylons (never finished) gave access to an open forecourt, measuring about 230 by 260 feet (70 by 80 meters). In its northwest corner stood the Temple of Seti II, and close to its southeast corner the Temple of Ramses III. The courtyard provided the setting for public ceremonies and festivals. The processional way continued along the main axis of the temple complex, and beyond the eastern gateway, through a second pair of pylons, was the hypostyle hall. It was in effect a forest of 134 columns, covered in painted bas-reliefs, filling a room 338 feet wide by 170 feet deep (102 by 53 meters).
Its central corridor, defined by twelve gigantic sandstone columns, formed a processional way into the inner parts and sanctuary of the temple, where only the kings and priests could go—“a preparatory passage from this world to the next” (Smith 1990, 14).

Amun-Ofis III commissioned the central columns on the hall’s east-west axis in about 1408 b.c. They were 33 feet (10 meters) in circumference, and their papyrus-flower capitals towered 69 feet (21 meters) above the floor, supporting the stone roof slabs of the central nave. Seven aisles on either side of the hall were defined by a total of 122 stone columns with papyrus-bud capitals; these columns were 27.5 feet (8.4 meters) in circumference and 43 feet (13 meters) high. The difference in the general ceiling height and that of the central nave allowed for the provision of clerestory windows formed with vertical stone slats that allowed air and some light to enter the hypostyle hall: most of the space was kept in mysterious shadow. The brilliantly colored, painted decoration of the interior walls and columns was initiated by Ramses I (reigned 1292–1290 b.c.), continued by Seti I (1290–1279), and completed by Ramses II (1279–1225). The external walls are decorated with battle scenes.

To the east of the hypostyle hall, another pair of pylons led to a narrow central court, and yet another pair (although somewhat smaller) to the transverse hall that subsumed the earliest sanctuary. A new sanctuary was built by Philip Arrhidaeus (323–316 b.c.), brother of Alexander the Great. Southward from the transverse hall, a walled enclosure at right angles to the main axis led through a succession of four pairs of pylons to the Temple of Mut and from there to the temples at Luxor 2 miles (3 kilometers) further south.

The Temple of Amun is presently endangered because of foundation failure and erosion of the sandstone at the base of walls through the Nile’s annual flooding. Funded in part by the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities, the Institute of Egyptian Art and Archaeology from the University of Memphis, Tennessee, is recording the inscriptions in the great hypostyle hall.

Taj Mahal , India

noreply@blogger.com (ओंकार देशमुख) — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 10:46:00 +0000

The Taj Mahal, India’s most recognizable icon, was built on the banks of the River Jamuna at Agra by the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan (reigned a.d.1628–1666), in memory of his beloved wife Arjumand Banu Begam, known as Mumtaz Mahal ("Elect of the Palace"), who died in childbirth in 1631. There is a tradition that, on her deathbed, she entreated her husband to build a tomb that would preserve her name forever. The funerary mosque, faced with white marble, was completed in 1653 after twenty-two years in the building. When it was inscribed on UNESCO’s World Heritage List in 1983, the Taj Mahal was acclaimed as “the most perfect jewel of Moslem art in India and … one of the universally admired masterpieces” in the world.

The symmetrical square mausoleum stands on a marble plinth above a 186-foot-square (59-meter) red sandstone platform. A 58-foot-diameter (18-meter) pear-shaped dome soars 213 feet (65 meters) above the octagonal central space—a two-story memorial chamber housing the bejeweled cenotaphs of Mumtaz Mahal and her husband. In fact, the real coffins lie in an unpretentious crypt below. Originally, the interior was opulently furnished with Persian carpets and articles of gold, all dimly lit by dappled sunlight that shone through intricately carved marble lattices in the drum of the dome. Two massive silver doors closed the entrance on the south side. At both levels there are eight interconnected anterooms: the four on the sides are rectangular, and the four corner spaces, also crowned with domes, are octagonal. A 163-foot (50-meter) tapering marble-faced minaret stands at each corner of the plinth. The building is praiseworthy for its composition, balance, and massing.

Closer scrutiny reveals that its surfaces, inside and out, are enriched with flower patterns of inlaid semiprecious stones using a technique known as pietradura, as well as panels and bands of calligraphic inscriptions from the Koran. Each piece of decorative work is in itself a jewel, but all are ingeniously integrated in a complex but harmonious whole. Throughout, the builders made exacting adjustments of line and surface to ensure that the Taj Mahal looked right. For example, the plinth is slightly convex, so that it appears to be horizontal. The walls are slightly inclined for the same reason. Such refinement extended to the detail of the decoration: the calligraphic inscriptions are more widely spaced as they rise, to appear uniform when viewed from below. It has been said that the tomb was “built by giants and finished by jewelers.”

The Taj Mahal was not the creation of an individual. Its overseeing architect was probably the Persian engineer-astrologer Ustad Ahmad, but there were about forty other specialists whose skills combined to fully realize his designs. So, while Ismail Khan from Turkey built the dome, Qazim Khan of Lahore cast its 30-foot (8.2-meter) gold finial. The master sculptor and mosaicist was a Delhi lapidary named Chiranji Lal, and the master calligrapher was Amanat Khan from Shiraz. Muhammad Hanif directed the masons, and Mir Abdul Karim and Mukkarimat Khan of Shiraz were what today would be called project managers. The construction employed 20,000 North Indian forced workers, as well as craftsmen from South India, Baghdad, Baluchistan, Bukhara, Shiraz, Syria, and Persia. There is a tentative view—most likely a myth—held by some Italian scholars that the Taj Mahal was designed by the Venetian Geronimo Veroneo. But Veroneo, a goldsmith, did not arrive in Agra, until 1640, when the work was already half finished. It is far more probable that he was employed on part of the decoration, among the international band.

Many of the materials were as exotic as the men who worked them. Although the red sandstone was quarried locally, marble was imported from distant Makrana in Rajasthan. A 10-mile-long (16-kilometer) earthen ramp was constructed through Agra, and it is said that the marble blocks were hauled along it to the building site by a team of 1,000 elephants. Bullock carts were also used. More than forty varieties of gemstones, corals, and rare seashells were gathered from all over the region—Afghanistan, Badakhshan, Burma (now Myanmar), Egypt, Tibet, Turkestan, and even the depths of the Indian Ocean.

The great mausoleum stands at the north end of a walled enclosure measuring 1,902 by 1,002 feet (580 by 305 meters), designed in the Charbagh style by Ali Mardan Khan, one of Shah Jahan’s courtiers. It faces the domed three-story main gateway of red sandstone at the south end of the long axis, the vista emphasized by a reflecting channel flanked by two avenues of cypresses. The entrance symbolizes the gate to Paradise, and indeed the square garden, divided into four quarters by the waterways, conjures the Garden of Paradise with its rivers of water, honey, milk, and wine. At the central meeting place of the channels is a marble tank representing the celestial Pool of Abundance, exactly placed to reflect the Taj Mahal in its still waters. Each of the four sections created by the waterways is subdivided into four smaller squares and then into four again—sixteen flower beds defined by raised stone paths. An ingenious system of reservoirs and underground earthenware and copper pipes carries water from the river to be fed to the pools and fountains and to irrigate the garden.

Two other buildings at the ends of the garden’s transverse axis complete the Taj Mahal ensemble: a red sandstone mosque to the west is reflected by an identical “rest house” to the east. The latter is known as the jawab (answer), indicating that it probably was included simply to provide symmetry in the architectural composition, rather than for any practical function. There is no place within the walls from which the serene mausoleum cannot be seen.

The white marble of the Taj Mahal has been yellowed by automobile emissions, acid rain, and industrial pollution. In April 1997 India’s Supreme Court enforced earlier orders for almost 300 nearby metal foundries to stop using coal for fuel or risk being closed down. There is now a 62-mile (100-kilometer) “safety zone” around the monument. The other threat to the fabric is the breath of up to 3 million visitors each year, which raises humidity and causes rusting of the iron cramps that hold the marble facing in place. In 1998 the French Rhône-Poulenc Foundation, UNESCO, and the Archaeological Survey of India began a three-year joint program to improve the water tightness of the Taj Mahal, undertake antifungal treatment, and extend research into stone-preservation technology.

The Taj Mahal and its romantic and poignant story have inspired poets everywhere. The Indian Rabindranath Tagore called it “a teardrop on the cheek of time,” and the Englishman Edwin Arnold saw it as “not a piece of architecture, as other buildings are, but the proud passions of an emperor’s love wrought in living stones.”

Sydney Opera House

noreply@blogger.com (ओंकार देशमुख) — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 10:44:00 +0000

The Opera House stands on Bennelong Point, which reaches out into Sydney Harbour, close to the famous bridge. It was designed by the Danish architect Jørn Utzon and engineered by the English firm of Ove Arup and Partners. Fourteen years in the building (1959–1973), the Opera House is one of the internationally recognized icons of Australia; it is also internationally acknowledged by architects, critics, and the wider public as one of the greatest pieces of architecture of the twentieth century, perhaps of any century.

At the end of World War II Sydney, Australia’s largest city, had no satisfactory venue for musical performances apart from its city hall. Orchestral concerts were held there, but opera was out of the question; neither were other theaters suitable. From about 1950 a number of influential people, led by Eugene Goosens, chief conductor of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and director of the New South Wales (NSW) Conservatorium of Music, lobbied the state’s Labor government to build a performing-arts center. Their efforts were rewarded late in 1954 when semiderelict industrial land at Bennelong Point was selected as the site for the project.

The following year an international architectural design competition for a performing-arts center was announced—the name “Opera House” was later popularly and inaccurately attached to the building. The competition called for a complex with a 3,500-seat auditorium for opera, ballet, and orchestral concerts and a 1,200-seat theater for drama and smaller musical recitals. There was no budgetary constraint in the design brief. More than 700 architects applied and over 230 entries were received from thirty-two countries. In January 1957 Utzon’s success was announced in controversial circumstances. The judging panel comprised two Australians: Professor H. Ingham Ashworth of the University of Sydney and the NSW government architect Cobden Parkes; and from overseas, Professor Leslie Martin of Cambridge University, England, and the famous American architect Eero Saarinen. There is a persistent legend that, because it ignored competition guidelines, Utzon’s entry was discarded by the others before Saarinen’s late arrival in Sydney. He then reviewed the discarded designs and persuaded his fellow judges that Utzon must win. Other sources claim that Ashworth and Martin had already warmed to the Dane’s proposal. Whatever the case, the judges’ report observed with prophetic accuracy that Utzon’s drawings conveyed “a concept of an Opera House which is capable of becoming one of the great buildings of the world.” He was awarded first prize of $A10,000 and commissioned as architect.

Soon the NSW government established a public appeal for the building. When it became clear that the subscription fund would not even approach the estimated cost of $A7 million, the government introduced the Opera House Lotteries. By 1975 they would raise 99 percent of the final cost of $A102 million.

The Opera House stands on a concrete podium projecting into Sydney Harbour, supported on 580 concrete piers founded 82 feet (25 meters) below water level. The podium houses the service areas, dressing and rehearsal rooms, minor theaters, and the box office. The harborside walkways, the raised platform around the building, as well as exterior and interior walls, stairs, and floors are faced with pink-brown reconstituted granite from Tarana, NSW. Rising from the platform are the three sets of roof shells, faced with custom-made white ceramic tiles from Sweden. The smallest shell covers a restaurant; the other two, set slightly off parallel, contain the two major performance spaces—the opera theater and the concert hall—and their foyers. The roof shells are assembled from nearly 2,200 precast concrete elements, each weighing up to 16.5 tons (15 tonnes), held together by steel cable. The two main auditoria, which are actually separate structures under their roofs, are framed with steel and faced inside and outside with brush box and white birch plywood. The open ends of the shells are glazed with laminated, tinted plate glass in bronze frames. The five theaters—there is also a drama theater, playhouse, and “The Studio”—and almost 1,000 rooms cater to the performing arts, cinema, exhibitions, and conventions. There are two other large auditoria, a reception hall, four restaurants and six bars, as well as a library, dressing rooms, rehearsal studios, and offices. About 3,000 events are presented each year, attracting audiences of 2 million.

Work started in March 1959 with a workforce from Australia, Italy, Spain, Germany, Holland, and Chile. By 1963 the podium was completed and the roof vaults had been started. The steep sail shapes originally proposed by Utzon were, according to the engineers, unbuildable. So by October 1961 he revised them as parts of a sphere, enabling time and cost savings. Cost blowouts began to cause the client concern, and in 1966 a newly elected conservative government in NSW made Utzon the undeserving scapegoat in what was really a political intrigue. It withheld part of his fees, forcing his unwilling resignation. That issue divided the Australian architectural profession. Some architects held protest marches in Sydney; others abandoned their calling, and the Victorian Chapter of the Royal Australian Institute of Architects blackballed Utzon’s replacement. Not so the NSW chapter, and in April 1966 a team of local architects, Peter Hall, Lionel Todd, and David Littlemore, was appointed to complete the Opera House under the direction of the government architect. Inside the building, they obscured Utzon’s monumental vision by their thoroughly pedestrian design. The thousands of drawings and many models that showed his ideas for the interiors were ignored; almost all the models somehow disappeared after he left Australia.

In the hands of government architects, the completion of the Opera House took longer and cost more than might have been expected under the Dane’s supervision. By September 1973 the roof vaults were completed and work commenced on the glass walls and the interiors, and outside, the promenade and approaches. The building was officially opened by Queen Elizabeth II in October 1973.

The Opera House remains a politicians’ plaything. In 1998, the NSW Labor government agreed with Utzon, then about 80 years old, that he would have control of all design decisions in a proposed ten-year, $66 million renovation of the building. About the same time, a proposed submission was put forward for formal recognition by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site. It was titled “Sydney Opera House in its Harbour Setting” because of the imminent changes to the interiors. Nevertheless, Australia’s ultraconservative prime minister John Howard refused to pass on the document to UNESCO because it might “complicate” those alterations. Despite its rough political passage, as the editors of Architecture Australia commented in December 1999, “The original inspiration and genius [seen in the Sydney Opera House] has transcended the ensuing conflicts and controversy to produce an astonishing manifestation of triumphant imagination and spirit.”

Sydney Harbour Bridge

noreply@blogger.com (ओंकार देशमुख) — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 10:43:00 +0000

The Sydney Harbour Bridge, irreverently known as “the coat hanger” to Sydneysiders, is the largest, although not the longest, one-bow bridge in the world. It crosses from Dawe’s Point on the downtown side to Milson’s Point on the North Shore, and its realization was a remarkable economic accomplishment in the years of the Great Depression—using laborintensive technology, the project employed 1,400 men—as well as being one of the twentieth century’s major engineering feats.

Before 1932, the only connections between the city center and the residential suburbs on the North Shore were ferries or a circuitous 12-mile (20-kilometer) road route that crossed five bridges over narrow inlets of the extensive harbor. The notion of a single bridge surfaced from time to time during the nineteenth century, but serious thought was not given to the project until the 1890s. In January 1900, on the eve of the Australian Federation, the New South Wales government invited tenders for the design of a North Shore bridge across the harbor. Twenty-four proposals were received but all were rejected; only one had involved a single-arch bridge.

In 1912 the civil engineer Dr. John Job Carew Bradfield was appointed chief engineer of Sydney Harbour Bridge and Metropolitan Railway Construction, and he developed the basic design with Department of Public Works engineers. Bradfield recommended an arch bridge with granite-faced pylons. In 1922 the government held an international design competition, for which six companies entered twenty schemes. The winning tender was one of six submitted by Dorman Long and Co. of Middlesborough, England. It proposed a single arch that would be built from both shores and supported by cables until it joined at midspan. The complex structural calculations for fabrication and erection were made by consulting engineers Ralph Freeman of the London firm Sir Douglas Fox and Partners and G. C. Imbault. The British firm of Sir John Burnet and Partners was named consulting architect.

The acquisition of land for the approaches and the construction yards called for the demolition of 800 houses, and their occupants were displaced without compensation. Construction began in 1923. The bridge (including the railroad line) took eight years to build. The contractors, with Lawrence Ennis as site manager, established workshops at Milson’s Point where the steel components were fabricated; almost 80 percent of the steel was imported from England. The 39-foot (12-meter) reinforced high-grade concrete foundations were set in the rock upon which the whole of Sydney stands, and 118-foot-long (36-meter), U-shaped tunnels were excavated to anchor the 128 steel cable restraints that would temporarily support each side of the bridge. Once the approach spans were built, in November 1929 work started on the 1,650-foot (503-meter) single-span hinged arch. It supports the bridge deck, the hinges at either end transferring the massive load to the foundations at either end. The two halves of the arch were erected to meet in the middle. The components were transported from the workshops on barges, positioned, hoisted by two 640-ton (580-tonne) electric creeper cranes, and assembled as the cranes traveled toward the center of the bridge. For about ten months the halves gradually reached out for each other across the harbor, finally meeting in August 1930. The 160-foot-wide (49-meter) steel deck, carried 194 feet (59 meters) above sea level, was then commenced, working outward in both directions from the center of the bridge to save time moving the cranes. The decking was fixed within nine months. The last of the 6 million rivets was in place late in January 1932. In February ninety-six railroad locomotives were used to test the bridge. The four 278-foot-high (85-meter), Moruya granite-faced concrete pylons, each standing on the gigantic pads that support the pins of the arch, have no structural role; they are there for esthetic reasons, to define the ends of the main span.

The official opening on 19 March 1932 attracted large crowds. The state premier John T. Lang was about to declare the bridge open when ex-Army Captain Francis De Groot spurred his horse forward and slashed the ribbon with his saber. The total cost of the bridge, in today’s terms, was about $A12 billion—some sources put it considerably higher. Recovered by tolls on automobiles, it was amortized by 1988. The Sydney Harbour Bridge is an essential rail and road artery in and out of the downtown area. When it was first opened, average daily traffic (in both directions) was about 10,900 vehicles. Toward the end of the century, that figure had approached 152,000. The bridge carries eight vehicle lanes, two train lines, a footway, and a cycleway. The growing pressure of traffic volumes was somewhat relieved after August 1992, with the opening of the four-lane, 1.44-mile (2.3-kilometer) Sydney Harbour Tunnel, close to the bridge. Built at a cost of $A738 million, it offered a ten-minute reduction of crossing time at peak hour. Providing an eastern bypass of the city, it is reputed to save 3 million gallons (13 million liters) of fuel a year.

Sultan Ahmet Mosque

noreply@blogger.com (ओंकार देशमुख) — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 10:41:00 +0000

The deeply religious Ottoman sultan of Istanbul Ahmet I (reigned a.d. 1603–1617) was enthroned at the age of fourteen. Six years later he commissioned his architect Sedefkar Mehmet Agha to build a mosque that would compete for size and splendor with the sixth-century Byzantine church of Hagia Sofia. A site was chosen facing the church across what is now Sultanahmet Square, and Ayse Sultan, whose palace stood on it, was duly compensated for its demolition. Construction started in 1609 on the Sultan Ahmet Mosque, also known as the Blue Mosque, probably the greatest achievement of Ottoman architecture.

Its architect had been a pupil of Sinan, considered by many to be the best architect of the early Ottoman Empire. Mehmet Agha worked in the tradition of his former master, and one of the precedents for his design was Sinan’s Suleymaniye Mosque (1550—1557) on the west bank of the Golden Horn. The other was Hagia Sofia itself, on which the Suleymaniye Mosque was based anyway. All, Islamic or Christian, grew around the same major element: an almost square, vast central space crowned with a dome. The Sultan Ahmet Mosque occupies an area of 209 by 235 feet (64 by 72 meters). Its central dome, 77 feet (23.5 meters) in diameter and reaching a height of 140 feet (43 meters), is carried on pendentives above four pointed arches, themselves supported on round, fluted piers. The central structure is stiffened by a hemidome on each of its four sides and by cupola-covered piers at the corners; then, in the manner of much Byzantine and Ottoman architecture, the loads and thrusts are transmitted to the ground by a cascade of flanking ancillary structures.

In front of the mosque stands a wide courtyard, enclosed by an openwork wall and entered on three sides through any of eight monumental gateways with bronze doors. The marble-paved inner court, with a central domed fountain for ritual ablutions, is surrounded by an arcade of slender columns of pink granite, marble, and porphyry, each bay-roofed with a cupola. Four marble minarets with pointed spires rise from the corners of the mosque; and two others, not as tall, at the outer corners of the court make the building, with six minarets, unique in Istanbul. They have a total of sixteen balconies, from which the muezzin calls the faithful to prayer, honoring the sixteen Ottoman sultans.

Around the mosque was the extensive kulliye, a collection of buildings and functions including the Imperial Lodge (hunkar) on its north side, a hospital, a caravansary, a primary school, public kitchen and service kiosk, a bazaar for the trades guilds, two-storied shops, and a college (medrese).

The architectural excellence of the Blue Mosque lies not in its structural ingenuity, because it was in fact highly derivative, nor in its challenge to the grandeur of Hagia Sofia, because it was much smaller than the ancient church. Rather, Sultan Ahmet’s building is remarkable for the splendor of its extraordinary decoration, especially the beautiful blue tiles that give the mosque its alternative name. Daylight is admitted through no fewer than 260 carefully placed windows, once glazed with stained glass, and when conditions are right the interior of the mosque is endowed with an ethereal blue haze. These tiles—there are more than 21,000 of them—were produced in nearby Iznik just when the industry was enjoying its highest level of achievement. There is an unsubstantiated tradition that the production of so many hand-decorated tiles completely exhausted the ceramicists, and the Iznik workshops began to decline. The tiles are painted with traditional floral and plant motifs, including roses, carnations, tulips, lilies, and cypresses, all in soft shades of green and blue on a white ground, and they cover the interior walls and piers to about a third of their height. The stunning effect of tiles and light is enhanced by other decorative details, including painted floral and geometrical arabesques on the domes and upper parts of the walls, although these are now for the most part modern replicas of traditional seventeenth-century designs. The graceful calligraphy everywhere is the work of Ameti Kasim Gubari. The wooden doors and window shutters, designed by Mehmet Agha, are inlaid with shell, mother-of-pearl, and ivory, and the pulpit (mimbar) as well as the niche indicating the direction of Mecca (mihrab) are both made of white Proconnesian marble, fine examples of Ottoman stone carving.

Sultan Ahmet I died of typhus only a year after his mosque was finished, and his nearby tomb and that of his wife Kosem Sultan was completed by his son Osman II.

Suez Canal

noreply@blogger.com (ओंकार देशमुख) — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 10:41:00 +0000

The Suez Canal, an artificial waterway across the Isthmus of Suez in northeastern Egypt, connects Port Said on the Mediterranean coast with Port Tawfiq on the Gulf of Suez, an inlet of the Red Sea. The 101-mile (163-kilometer) canal has no locks, making it the longest of its kind, sea level being the same at both ends. Because it exploits three natural bodies of water—Lake Manzala in the north; Lake Timsah, almost exactly at the midpoint; and a chain known as the Great Bitter Lake in the south, accounting for about 18 percent of its length—it does not follow the shortest possible route. For most of the canal, traffic is limited to a single lane, but there are passing bays, as well as two-lane bypasses in the Great Bitter Lake. A railway on the west bank runs parallel to the canal from end to end. It took a force of an estimated 1.5 million Egyptian laborers, often working under appalling conditions, eight years to dig the Suez Canal; more than 125,000 lost their lives. In every way, the project is comparable with the architectural and engineering feats of pharaonic Egypt.

In fact, the idea of a navigable link between the Mediterranean and Red Seas dates from dynastic Egypt. Earlier canals joined the Red Sea to the Nile, with obvious economic advantages for the land of the Nile. The first, said to have been commissioned by Ramses I around 2000 b.c., linked the Red Sea and the Nile, and a second component was formed by a branch of the Pelusian River that extended to the Mediterranean. Other sources claim that the first canal was constructed in the reign of Tuthmosis III (1512–1448 b.c.), and still others that Necho II (reigned 610–595 b.c.) initiated it, but lack of maintenance meant that it later became unnavigable. Whatever the case, the Persian king Darius I (558–486 b.c.) ordered the work to be completed. His canal, linking the Gulf of Suez to the Great Bitter Lake and the lake to the Nile Delta, remained in good repair through the Macedonian era. It was redug in the time of the Roman emperor Trajan (a.d. 53–117) and again by the Arab ruler Amr Ibn-Al-Aas. When a trade route around Africa was discovered, it again fell into disuse until about 1800. About then, Napoléon Bonaparte’s engineers proposed a shorter route to India by digging a north-south canal through the Isthmus of Suez. But they wrongly believed that there was a difference in sea level of about 32 feet (10 meters), an error that undermined the feasibility of the project. The Egyptian khedive Mohammed-Ali (reigned 1811–1848) showed little interest in the scheme, and it lapsed for almost half a century.

On 15 November 1854 the French diplomat and engineer Vicomte Ferdinand Marie de Lesseps, who had long championed a canal across the isthmus, approached Egypt’s new ruler, his old friend khedive Said, with a plan privately devised by a French engineer in Mohammed-Ali’s service. A. Linant de Bellefonds proposed a canal between Suez and Peluse, crossing the Great Bitter Lake and Lake Timsah. By the end of the month de Lesseps was granted a decree allowing him to dig the canal and manage it for ninety-nine years. A second agreement, signed in January 1856, ensured that the Suez Canal would be open to shipping of all nationalities and accessible for a transit fee. By December 1858 the Frenchman established the Compagnie Universelle du Canal Maritime de Suez, and shares were quickly bought by investors from all over Europe and the Ottoman Empire. Construction work started on the Suez Canal in April 1859.

Even during its construction, the canal was at the center of a political storm because of its critical military and economic importance. Before work started, the British—and particularly the prime minister, Lord Palmerston—were afraid that the French project would threaten their interests in India, and they tried to have the khedive’s decree set aside. When that failed, they used political pressure in an attempt to have the digging stopped, only six months after it had started. Such interference continued into the 1860s, after Said was succeeded by the khedive Ismael, who was persuaded to sell his shares in the Compagnie Universelle to Britain, making it the largest single shareholder.

The Suez Canal was completed in August 1869. In the course of its construction, three new towns had been built—Suez, Ismailia, and Port Said—and millions of hectares of farmland had been created. Built at immense human and economic cost (about $330 million in modern values), it was officially opened at Port Said by the French empress Eugénie on November 1869. The great waterway originally had a width of 72 feet (22 meters) at the bottom and 190 feet (58 meters) on the surface. The channel was 26 feet (8 meters) deep. It has been enlarged and deepened many times.

A couple of incidents have highlighted, at great economic cost, the Suez Canal’s critical strategic importance. In July 1956 Egypt’s President Nasser, in response to the British, French, and U.S. refusal of loans for the Aswan High Dam, nationalized the canal. That provoked the so-called Suez Crisis, beginning with the British and French invasion of Egypt in October. The Egyptians scuttled forty ships that were then in the canal. By the following March the United Nations had prevailed upon Egypt to clear and reopen the waterway. Ten years later, following the Six-Day War, when Israel occupied the Sinai Peninsula, the canal was again closed to shipping. The Egyptians reclaimed it after the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, and, cleared of mines and obstructions, it was reopened in 1975.

In 2001, about 6 percent of the world’s seaborne trade passes through it. Of course, it dramatically reduces the east-west voyage distance for vessels; for example, the route between Tokyo and Europoort in the Netherlands is only three-quarters of the distance of that around the Cape of Good Hope. The canal is a major source of income for Egypt, and the Suez Canal Authority continually makes improvements to it. The world’s largest bulk carriers—vessels that are 1,600 feet long and 230 feet wide (500 by 70 meters), with drafts up to 70 feet (21.4 meters)—can now navigate the Suez Canal. The duration of the passage is normally about twelve hours. Its present annual traffic capacity is over 25,000 vessels. Tanker traffic has declined, mostly because of competition from the 200-mile (320-kilometer) Sumed oil pipeline between the Gulf and the Mediterranean.

Storm Surge Barrier Rotterdam, the Netherlands

noreply@blogger.com (ओंकार देशमुख) — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 10:39:00 +0000

More than half the Netherlands lies below sea level, and the little country is protected from flooding by about 750 miles (1,200 kilometers) of dikes. The process of global warming and the consequent rise in sea levels will challenge their adequacy, and many of them will need to be raised and reinforced. The extensive Deltaworks project, completed in 1986, secured the province of Zeeland by sealing off its sea inlets. Its northern neighbor, South Holland, remained under threat. Responses to disastrous floods in 1953 had included plans to raise the dikes in the region, but by the 1970s there was public resistance to a scheme that entailed demolishing many historic precincts. The alternative was the construction of a movable storm surge barrier in the man-made approach to Rotterdam Europoort. It is the busiest harbor in the world, and an average of ten ships pass through the New Waterway every hour. Technological and economic feasibility studies led to the construction of the Storm Surge Barrier, one of the engineering marvels of the late twentieth century. Otherwise known as the Maeslant Kering, it is located between the Hook of Holland and the town of Maassluis, a little under 4 miles (6 kilometers) from the North Sea. Built at a cost of 1 billion guilders (U.S.$500 million), it was opened on 10 May 1997.

In response to the Dutch government’s call for submissions, the Bouwkombinatie Maeslant Kering consortium’s tender was accepted from among six competitors. Contracts were signed in October 1989, and the first pile for the hinge foundation was driven in November 1991. The barrier has a guaranteed life of 100 years. It consists of a pair of 50-foot-thick (15-meter) hollow, arc-shaped steel gates, each 73 feet (22 meters) high and 700 feet (210 meters) long and weighing 16,500 tons (15,000 tonnes). Each is attached by means of 795-foot-long (238-meter) latticed steel arms to a steel ball joint seated in a massive concrete socket on the riverbank. The 33-foot-diameter (10-meter) ball joints each weigh 760 tons (690 tonnes) and work with a tolerance of 0.04 inch (1 millimeter). The figures are almost meaningless, but in terms of comparative size, each half of the barrier—the gate, the two three-dimensional trusses, and one ball joint—weighs as much as two Eiffel Towers.

Normally, the gates are “parked” in docks in the banks. If a water surge of 10 feet (3.2 meters) above a set acceptable maximum is anticipated, a central computer instructs the automated control system to activate the barrier, and water is pumped into the parking docks. When the hollow gates start to float and the water level in the dock reaches that in the New Waterway, the dock gates are opened. The “locomobiles”—their name explains the function—on top of the gates push them horizontally out of the dock into the Waterway. The gates meet in the middle, not quite touching. They are then flooded and slowly sink to the concrete sill on the bottom of the Waterway, 56 feet (17 meters) down. The ball joints move in differrent directions following the gates’ movements: horizontally (when the gates are floated out) and vertically (upon submersion). The gates must be able to ride with the waves when being closed and opened. In a fierce storm, the water could hit the barrier with up to 33,000 tons (30,000 tonnes) force. The loads on the structure are transmitted to the 57,000-ton (52,000-tonne) triangular concrete foundations of the ball joints. After the storm the gates are floated again and driven back into the dock by the locomobiles. The dock gates are closed, and the dock is pumped dry. From the time the computer registers the need to close the barrier until the gates are in place, the operation takes nine and a half hours. After the storm, it takes two and a half hours to return the gates to their docks.

It is expected that the barrier will have to be closed (on average) once every ten years, but changes in sea levels over the next half-century may double that. Seawater can enter the Europoort area freely through other waterways, and a supplementary dike-reinforcement program is being implemented, with a further defense known as the Europoort Barrier acting to support that in the New Waterway.

Stockton and Darlington Railway

noreply@blogger.com (ओंकार देशमुख) — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 10:37:00 +0000

The Stockton and Darlington line, the world’s first public railroad, was opened on 27 September 1825. As well as carrying coal, the train drawn by “Locomotion No. 1” had about 550 passengers, most of them in coal wagons but some in a carriage named Experiment. The steam railroad was to change the course of history. There is little in the modern world that it did not affect, including our perception of time and distance, the pattern of settlement, the relationship between labor and industry, and not least the urban and rural landscape.

George Stephenson (1781–1848), born in Wylam in northeast England, invented the steam locomotive. At the age of fourteen he went to work at Dewley Colliery, becoming an engine man in 1802. Within a decade, his thorough knowledge of engines won him the post of engine wright at Killingworth Colliery, whose manager allowed him to experiment with steam-powered machines. In 1814 Stephenson built his first locomotive: The Blutcher, which could haul 33 tons (30 tonnes) uphill at 4 mph (6.4 kph), differed from contemporary engines in that the gears drove the flanged wheels; he later modified it so that the connecting rods directly drove the wheels. Over the next five years Stephenson built sixteen engines at Killingworth, mostly for local use. In 1819 the colliery owners asked him to construct an 8-mile (13-kilometer) railroad between Hetton and the coastal town of Sunderland. Employing locomotives, fixed engines, and cables and inclined planes, it was the first railroad that did not use animal power.

The Stockton and Darlington Railway dates from October 1767, when a few entrepreneurs sought to improve links between the West Durham coal mines and the seaport of Stockton-on-Tees. First (and fashionable) thoughts were for a canal system, and the navigator James Brindley was asked to suggest possible routes. The estimated cost was prohibitive and the scheme lapsed for forty years. It was revived in 1810 by the Tees Navigation Company, whose “New Cut” of the River Tees greatly reduced the length of waterways between coal mines and coast. By then, horse-drawn railroads were becoming popular, and with interest shown by Darlington businessmen, both alternatives were investigated. Again, a consultant recommended a canal; again, the project was abandoned because of the cost. Besides, parochial disputes over the route could not be resolved.

In November 1818 a committee at Darlington, convened by Edward Pease, a retired wool merchant, resolved to apply for an act of Parliament to construct a rail- or tramway to join Stockton and the collieries in West Durham. Although the estimated cost exceeded that of the canal system, when the committee issued its prospectus for building a horse-drawn railroad, the public response was overwhelming. On 19 April 1821 Parliament authorized the project, and the Stockton and Darlington Railway Company was formed. On the same day, Pease met with Stephenson, who had already walked along the proposed route and who suggested that the company should consider steam locomotion. He invited Pease to visit Killingworth Colliery, where the businessman saw The Blutcher in action. In January 1822 Stephenson was appointed chief engineer of the company. Another act of Parliament authorized it “to make and erect locomotive or moveable engines to facilitate the carriage of goods, merchandise and passengers.”

Work began on the track in May 1822. Stephenson used 15-foot (4.57-meter) lengths of malleable wrought-iron rails, developed in the previous year by the Bedlington engineer John Birkinshaw. They were carried on cast-iron chairs and laid on wooden blocks for part of the railroad and stone blocks for the remainder. The gauge was set at 4 feet 8 inches, and later eased 0.5 inch to allow freer running of the rolling stock. That became the standard gauge of British and other railroads. On 27 September 1825, the 26.75-mile (43-kilometer) Stockton and Darlington line was ready; most of the railroad had easy gradients, but there were a few very steep places, with inclines of up to one in thirty, which would present severe challenges to the locomotive.

In 1823 Pease, Thomas Richardson (another committee member), Stephenson, and his son Robert had formed Robert Stephenson and Company, the world’s first locomotive building firm. In September the Stockton and Darlington Railway Company placed an order for two high-precision steam engines at £500 each. They recruited Timothy Hackworth, foreman smith of the Wylam and Walbottle Collieries, to supervise the Newcastle-upon-Tyne workshop. Locomotion No. 1, similar to those Stephenson had built at the collieries, was finished just two years later. She had two vertical 9.5-inch-diameter (240-millimeter) cylinders with a 24-inch (610-millimeter) stroke; four wheels coupled by two side rods had a wheelbase of a little over 5 feet (about 1.5 meters). She weighed 11 tons (10 tonnes).

On 26 September 1825 Locomotion No. 1 stood at Shildon Lane End, coupled to twelve wagons of coal, another filled with sacks of flour, and the single eighteen-seat passenger carriage, Experiment. Tickets had been issued to about 300 people, but somehow 450—according to one account, 553—found room, many by sitting atop the coal. The long train, driven by George Stephenson, preceded by a horseman carrying a flag and with a cortege of twenty-four horse-drawn wagon loads of workmen and others in its wake, moved off to the applause of a great crowd of onlookers. Over the low gradients, for the first few miles the engine pulled its 110-ton (100-tonne) load at speeds reaching 12 mph (19 kph). After a couple of stops for mechanical problems, the train reached Darlington; the first 8.5 miles (13.6 kilometers) were covered in 65 minutes; at one point it achieved a speed of 15 mph (24 kph) “with perfect safety.” At Darlington, six coal wagons were uncoupled and their contents distributed to the poor. With two more wagons carrying a brass band in tow, Locomotion resumed her journey. Three hours, 7 minutes later she reached the Stockton terminus. A salute was fired from cannon on the company’s wharf, and the band rendered “God Save the King.” That evening, a celebration dinner was held at the Stockton Town Hall. The feasibility of a steam-locomotive railroad had been made evident to almost 50,000 people, and future success was guaranteed.

Statue of Liberty

noreply@blogger.com (ओंकार देशमुख) — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 10:35:00 +0000

Originally titled Liberty Enlightening the World, the colossal statue on Liberty Island in New York Harbor stands nearly 307 feet (93.5 meters) high. It represents a woman of pre-Raphaelite appearance, draped in voluminous robes and crowned with a spiked diadem. Her right hand raises a flaming torch at arm’s length; her left carries a book emblazoned with, “July 4, 1776”; broken chains are strewn around her feet. The towering figure alone is over 152 feet (46 meters) high, her right arm is 42 feet (12.8 meters) long, and her head measures 28 feet (8.5 meters) from neck to diadem. She weighs about 250 tons (227 tonnes). Conceived for other reasons, the Statue of Liberty has become since 1903 first a symbol of U.S. immigration and then a universal icon of emancipation, as well as the most recognizable emblem of New York City, perhaps even of the United States.

Primarily, the monument may have been intended to express French republican ideals when France was enduring Napoléon III’s repressive rule. The idea was first discussed in 1865 in the Paris home of the scholar Edouard de Laboulaye, who admired the wealthy industrializing nation that had just emerged from the crucible of a civil war. De Laboulaye believed that a monument expressing the idea of liberty would sustain the republican principle in France while strengthening ties with the United States, and he shared his thoughts with a ready listener, the sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi. But it was not until 1871—in which Napoléon III was deposed—that Bartholdi crossed the Atlantic to offer the statue as a gift from the French people to the American people. Although it would celebrate, on the centenary of the conflict, friendship established during the War of Independence, the gesture coincided with the perceived need to reinforce republicanism in France, where monarchist sentiment survived.

Bartholdi chose New York Harbor, a major gateway to the United States, as a site with the necessary symbolic value. He is said to have been an “academic sculptor driven by two obsessions: liberty and immensity.” Impressed with the Ramessean colossi of Egypt and accounts of the Colossus of Rhodes, he set out to design a work of overpowering scale to stand at the harbor entrance. It was agreed that the American people would finance construction of a pedestal and France would pay for the statue and its construction in the United States. The plan was announced late in 1874.

Bartholdi produced a design by 1875. His 4-foot (1.25-meter) clay model was scaled up to produce 300 full-sized plaster sections, from which wooden forms were crafted. The 452 pieces of the statue’s outer skin were made by hammer dressing 0.1-inch-thick (2.5-millimeter) sheets of Norwegian copper against the forms. The structural support for the flimsy envelope was designed by the engineer Gustave Eiffel, already reputed for his metal structures, in consultation with the architect E. E. Viollet-le-Duc. A central wrought-iron pylon carried a secondary framework of flexible iron bars to which the copper skin was riveted. This dual construction—a lightweight skin on a substantial skeleton—would not only withstand high wind loads but also safely respond to temperature changes. Lack of money slowed progress, but various fund-raising programs meant that Liberty Enlightening the World was completed and assembled in Paris in June 1884. She stood on public display for six months.

The granite pedestal, designed in 1877 by the French-trained American architect Richard Morris Hunt, was constructed in the courtyard of Fort Wood on Bedloe’s Island under the direction of the engineer Charles P. Stone. It stood just under 150 feet (45 meters) high on a mass concrete foundation, 90 feet (27 meters) square and 53 feet (16 meters) deep. In the United States, despite art shows, theatrical galas, auctions, and even prizefights, finance was not forthcoming. The statue waited in Paris while the American Committee looked for $100,000 to complete the pedestal. In January 1885 the statue was dismantled into over 300 pieces, packed in 214 crates, and shipped on the frigate Isere, arriving in New York Harbor in June. The funds for the pedestal were finally in hand by August, and the work was finished eight months later. It then took four months to reassemble Liberty Enlightening the World, and the dedication took place on 28 October 1886.

Because her torch was a navigational aid, the statue was first managed by the Lighthouse Board. In 1901 administration was transferred to the War Department, and in 1924 the great figure was declared a national monument. In 1956 Bedloe’s Island was renamed Liberty Island, and in 1965 neighboring Ellis Island, site of a large immigration station, became part of the Statue of Liberty National Monument. Between 1983 and 1986 a $140 million rehabilitation project saw French and American craftsmen repairing failed rivets and replacing the rusted iron core with stainless steel. They strengthened the right arm and replaced the old flame, which had been lit from inside, with a gold-plated copper flame lit by reflection, as Bartholdi had originally intended.

As part of the 1880s fund-raising effort the poet Emma Lazarus wrote a sonnet titled “The New Colossus.

Solomon’s Temple

noreply@blogger.com (ओंकार देशमुख) — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 10:31:00 +0000

No archeological remnant of Solomon’s Temple survives. The Bible provides descriptions, and since it is generally believed that the architectural style was constrained by regional influences, the biblical account is augmented by knowledge of contemporary buildings in the region. It is very possible that it was the most expensive structure ever built, because the gold alone, valued at 2001 prices, was worth something in the order of U.S.$62 billion. Cost aside, the temple is an architectural achievement because during the seven-year course of its construction no “sound of hammer, axe, or any other tool [was heard] at the building site.” The level of organization required to prefabricate every component of such a large and complicated stone building was a remarkable achievement.

King David united the Israelite tribes and extended the national boundaries. He ruled for seven years from Hebron, then moved the seat of government to Jerusalem—he had captured the former Jebusite town around 1000 b.c.—and reigned for another thirty-two years. The Ark of the Covenant, the nation’s most sacred object, was moved there around 955. Jerusalem stood on the south side of Mount Moriah, where Abraham had been prepared to sacrifice his son Isaac, and the mountain’s summit was the site David chose for a future temple to replace the portable Mishkan. Because David was a warlike man, the God of Israel forbade him to build the temple; the task was reserved for his son Solomon. Nevertheless, David made the plans, provided many of the resources, and enlisted foreign stonecutters, masons, carpenters, and all kinds of metalsmiths for the work.

After his father’s death, Solomon contracted with Hiram, king of Tyre, to provide cedar and cypress timber in return for grain and oil. He also raised a labor force of 30,000 Israelites and rostered them to go to Lebanon to fell trees, directed by the Sidonians. Rafts of the timber were floated down the coast, and the logs were dressed into boards and delivered to the temple site. Four years later the building work began. Solomon also employed 80,000 men to shape huge blocks of stone in the mountain quarries and another 70,000 to haul materials to the site and perform the general laboring work. There were 3,300 foremen. None of this takes account of the number of people needed to feed such a workforce, nor the resources to produce the food, estimated by some sources to be 4,950 tons (4,500 tonnes) every month.

Solomon extended Jerusalem northward of the original city to include the summit of Mount Moriah, where he built his palace complex. The temple was probably part of that precinct. It stood in its own courtyards, to which the public was admitted only according to status, immediately north of the palace. Although the designers would have avoided the religious icons of their pagan neighbors, architecturally the building was probably a typical Phoenician temple, even in aspects of its decoration. Its furnishings were similar to those in the Mishkan, although more sumptuous, and in principle it had the same spatial organization. It stood on a raised platform, and its porch was approached by a flight of ten steps.

The temple itself was 90 feet long, 33 feet wide, and 45 feet high (about 27 by 9 by 13.5 meters); as one commentator remarks, in size more like a church than a cathedral. A 15-foot-deep (4.5-meter) porch (ulam) stretched across the eastern end. On either side of the only entrance stood two freestanding hollow cast bronze pillars. Each was 27 feet high and about 6 feet in diameter (8.25 by 1.8 meters), with walls 3 inches (7.5 centimeters) thick. Their capitals, in the shape of lilies, were decorated with chains of pomegranates. Solomon named the south pillar Jachin (“Yahweh will establish your throne forever”) and the north Boaz (“In Yahweh is strength”).

The body of the temple was enveloped on three sides with a three-story annex, which had a separate entrance and contained storerooms and others for the use of the many priests and attendants who served on a rostered basis. The side rooms were connected to the walls of the temple by beams resting on corbeled blocks, and the levels, each 7.5 feet (2.3 meters) high, were connected by spiral stairways. The two major rooms of the temple were paneled from floor to ceiling with carved cedar boards; the floors were boarded with cypress. Every interior surface—walls, ceilings, floors, and roofs—was sheathed in gold, embellished with figures of angels, palm trees, and open flowers. The 60-foot-long (18-meter) outer room, known as the Holy Place (hekhal), was entered directly from the porch; it was accessible only to the priests. The inner room was a 30-foot (9-meter) cube at the west end of the temple,
separated from the Holy Place by an embroidered curtain and carved doors of olive wood, overlaid with gold. This Most Holy Place (debir) could be entered only by the high priest once a year on the Day of Atonement (Yora Kippur). Within, the Ark of the Covenant was placed and overshadowed by two 15-foot-high (4.5-meter) olive-wood statues of guardian angels, also covered with gold, with outspread wings meeting above the ark.

The Temple of Solomon was dedicated in 953 b.c., accompanied by the offering of 22,000 oxen and 120,000 sheep; needless to say, a great public feast followed. Between 604 and 597 b.c. the Babylonian Nebuchadnezzar II took the Jews into exile and stripped the great building of its fabled treasures. He had it destroyed in 586 b.c. About fifty years later Cyrus of Persia, who had conquered Babylon, allowed the Jews to return to their homeland, and the Second Temple was completed by 515 b.c. For five centuries, although enjoying occasional and short-lived freedom, Jerusalem was successively occupied by the Macedonians, Egyptians, and Seleucids. Roman rule began in 64 b.c., and early in that period the Jewish puppet king Herod the Great (reigned 37–34 b.c.) rebuilt and enlarged the Second Temple. It was totally destroyed by the armies of Titus in a.d. 70, never to rise again. Today its great rectangular platform is occupied by the Islamic Dome of the Rock.

Snowy Mountains Scheme

noreply@blogger.com (ओंकार देशमुख) — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 10:30:00 +0000

The Snowy Mountains Scheme, one of the largest engineering and construction projects in the world, extends over 2,700 square miles (7,000 square kilometers) in Australia’s Snowy Mountain Range. The “Snowies,” as they are known, form part of the Australian Alps, a southern extension of the Great Dividing Range that stretches parallel to the east coast from northeastern Queensland to Victoria. The highest peaks reach about 7,250 feet (2,300 meters). The government-financed scheme is complex but conceptually straightforward. Aqueducts and dams collect melted snow and rainwater from the upper reaches of the Snowy River and its tributary the Eucumbene, store it in reservoirs, and then divert it westward via underground tunnels. On the way, it falls 2,625 feet (800 meters) and passes through a series of power stations that generate 3,740 megawatts of electricity—approximately 16 percent of the generating capacity of southeast Australia—for the Australian Capital Territory, New South Wales, and Victoria. The water is finally released to augment irrigation along the vast inland Murrumbidgee-Murray River system for use by New South Wales, Victoria, and South Australia. The Snowy Mountains Scheme, begun in October 1949 and completed on time and under budget in 1972, involved the construction of 16 dams, 7 hydroelectric power stations, about 90 miles (145 kilometers) of tunnels, and 50 miles (80 kilometers) of aqueducts. The capital cost was $A820 million. In 1967 the American Society of Engineers listed it among the seven engineering wonders of the modern world. Thirty years later, the American Society of Civil Engineers recognized the scheme as an International Historical Civil Engineering Landmark, ranked with the Panama Canal and the Eiffel Tower.

As early as 1884 there were proposals for using the Snowy’s waters to supplement the inland rivers and relieve frequent drought conditions. In the early twentieth century, when Canberra was chosen for the site of the national capital, the river’s potential for hydroelectric power production was also considered. After protracted negotiations between the federal government and New South Wales and Victoria, in 1947 a joint federal-states technical committee was established to investigate the latent economic value of the Snowy River. The Snowy Mountains Hydroelectric Power Act was passed two years later, and an agency was created to investigate, design, and construct the Snowy Mountains Scheme.

There were not enough workers in Australia to achieve the task, so the Snowy Mountains Authority recruited migrant workers from over thirty countries. They made up nearly 70 percent of the 100,000 people engaged on the scheme during the entire construction period; the size of the workforce peaked at 7,500 in 1969. Belgian, British, French, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Swiss, and U.S. companies were contracted for parts of the work, as engineering technology was imported from international centers of specialized engineering excellence. In all, about forty major contracting firms and many smaller companies built the Snowy Mountains Scheme.

The Guthega Dam and Power Station was the first stage of the project. Built by Norwegian contractors between 1951 and 1954, Guthega Power Station became operational in April 1955. The scheme’s biggest reservoir, Lake Eucumbene (with nine times the volume of Sydney Harbour), feeds the two main sections of the scheme, the Snowy-Tumut Development and the Snowy-Murray Development, through underground tunnels. Construction began on the Tumut project in 1954 and lasted until 1973. The water it diverts to the Murrumbidgee River flows via tunnels to Tumut 1 and Tumut 2 underground power stations and to Tumut 3, the largest station in the system. The Murray project, which sends water to the Murray River, was commenced in 1961. Dams and tunnels were built at Jindabyne and Island Bend. The Murray project comprises Geehi Dam, Murray 1 and Murray 2 Dams and Power Stations, Khancoban Dam, and a pumping station at Jindabyne. To construct and operate the scheme, about 500 miles (800 kilometers) of new roads were built, and nearly 190 miles (300 kilometers) of existing public roads were widened and improved.

New engineering practices were developed during construction. Rock bolting was used to strengthen the walls of the subterranean tunnels and power stations in the Tumut project. The Snowy Scheme was among the first enterprises to use computers for engineering design. Other gains included an increased knowledge of rock mechanics, advances in concrete and cement technology, improved quality of steel manufacture and welding techniques, improved diamond-drilling techniques, and advanced corrosion-protection paint systems. Workers set and reset records for hard-rock tunneling.

The Snowy Mountains Scheme also saw sweeping changes that improved the performance of the Australian construction industry: an internal supervisor training program, recognition of the workers’ role, and improvements to working conditions and industrial relations. But there were social and personal costs as well: some farms and grazing lands were acquired and flooded by new lakes and reservoirs, and the mountain townships of Adaminaby and Jindabyne were moved to new sites. Although the scheme had a relatively excellent safety record and despite major efforts to provide safe working conditions, 121 men died building it. In 1981 a memorial was dedicated to these men in the town of Cooma.

Since 1991 a systematic multimillion-dollar upgrade of the turbines, generators, and pumps has been in progress, and a new integrated control system has been installed. The Snowy Mountains Hydro Electric Authority, based at Cooma, is presently (2001) responsible for maintenance of the huge network on behalf of the Snowy Mountains Council, formed in 1958 to direct the scheme. Plans are in hand to corporatize the authority, after which the council and the scheme will be managed by a new corporation, Snowy Hydro Limited.

Skyscrapers

noreply@blogger.com (ओंकार देशमुख) — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 10:29:00 +0000

Only seldom for ideological, political or pragmatic reasons has a society called for a new building type. Ecclesiastes asserts “There is nothing new under the sun,” and most human endeavor is characterized by building upon what we already have, going “back a bit to make [ourselves] fit for going further along the way [we] seek to explore.” Even the first Christian basilicas of the fourth century a.d., despite a desperate search for a new form, drew upon precedents. A complex network of constraints lay beneath the invention, of the tall commercial building, the modern skyscraper that originated in Chicago. The conception of this building type was an architectural feat.

By about 1870 the United States was becoming an urban industrial nation and Chicago, more than any other city, was the focus of that change. What had a few years earlier been a frontier town was transformed into an internationally significant industrial metropolis as the cattle, grain, and lumber trades flourished and manufacturing activity grew. Between 1850 and 1870 the population increased tenfold to 330,000 and the city covered 18 square miles (46 square kilometers) on the Lake Michigan shore. Redevelopment and continual rebuilding provoked Mark Twain to comment that the city was “never the Chicago you saw when you passed through the last time.”

Most of its buildings were of timber construction. Fire was a perennial problem and there were over 600 in 1870. The unprecedented conflagration that started on 8 October 1871 within 30 hours swept through 73 miles (117 kilometers) of streets, killing about 300 people and leaving 100,000 homeless. It caused more than $192 million damage—a third of Chicago’s total property value—and many fortunes were lost. The theoretical and structural innovations applied to rebuilding the city were in the vanguard of an emerging industrial architecture, but the Great Fire was only a catalyst that enabled the compounding of elements already present.

Capitalism sired the skyscraper. The architecture that we call Chicago School sprang from the frugal pragmatism of speculative clients with an eye on the “bottom line.” Compelled by commercial interests, not least soaring land prices (a 600 percent increase from 1880 to 1890), architects were constrained to create a new building type, and within a couple of decades Chicago became the urban wunderkind of the Western world, where, as someone observed, “Old World assumptions were overthrown by New World realities as the past was discounted, the present glorified, and the future eagerly anticipated.” European visitors recognized the downtown Loop as a nucleus built around the quest for profit and a functional esthetic, and carried their discoveries to audiences at home.

The ten-story Montauk Block (1882), designed by Daniel Burnham and John Wellborn Root for Brooks Brothers of Boston—who insisted that it must be “for use and not for ornament”—was the first building to be dubbed “skyscraper.” Like the Rookery (1885–1886) and Monadnock Building (1889–1891) by the same architects, it was of conventional load-bearing construction. The unsuitability of the technique is underlined by the fact that the sixteen-story Monadnock’s external brick walls were 6 feet (1.8 meters) thick at ground level, wasting valuable floor space.

The economic imperative to find a better way was matched by technological potential. What soon developed was (typically) a tall office building with a metal structural skeleton, entirely covering a relatively enclosed site and whose large windows provided adequate daylight and ventilation. Access to the upper floors was by means of an electric elevator, a wonder of the age.

William Le Baron Jenney pioneered the metal structural frame essential to the development of the skyscraper. The evolution of his ideas may be seen in the “simple, glass-enclosed cage” of the first Leiter Building (1879), followed by his nine-story Home Insurance Building (1884–1885), the first multistory iron structural frame ever erected. Earlier buildings had used frame construction internally but their external walls had been self-supporting; the Home Insurance Building carried the envelope on the frame, heralding the potential of true skeleton construction.

Iron had long been used for architectural ornament and such incidentals as hinges and door handles, but not as structure. In the Industrial Revolution, engineers, unhindered by the esthetic formalism embraced by architects, were first to turn cast and wrought iron to such applications as bridges, aqueducts, railway sheds, and conservatories. When architects did use iron, it was out of sight or in such frivolous buildings as John Nash’s Royal Pavilion at Brighton (1818–1821). Joseph Paxton’s iron-and-glass Crystal Palace (1851), although a temporary structure not regarded as “real” architecture, demonstrated the potential of prefabrication, and Henri Labrouste’s National Library in Paris (1862–1868) showed how the metal column offered both structural flexibility and a new esthetic of proportion. Eiffel and Boileau’s Bon Marché department store in Paris (1867) further underlined how iron and glass fit the articulation of commercial spaces. The lessons were taken up in the United States. Since 1854 James Bogardus had been experimenting with a metallurgical architecture; taking his lead, commercial buildings with cast-iron fronts and even cast-iron frames proliferated in American cities between 1850 and 1880.

Iron had disadvantages: in fire, it failed at relatively low temperatures, and it had very low tensile strength. The former was easily addressed, and well-established techniques existed: columns and beams were simply encased in a fire-resistant material. The use of steel, readily available in large quantities of predictable strength since the Siemens-Martin open-hearth process had been developed in 1875, overcame the second problem.

Burnham and Root’s Rand McNally Building (1889–1890), a complete steel-framed commercial building, freed the skyscraper from its dependence on masonry walls and created “the plan and structure of the [modern] urban office block.” They followed it closely with the fourteen-story Reliance Building (1890–1894). Its initial four-story stage, designed by Charles Atwood and the structural engineer E. C. Shankland, is claimed to be the first example of the comprehensive system known as Chicago construction. It consisted of a riveted steel frame with plaster fireproofing, carrying hollow-tile flooring on steel joists. The bay windows (dubbed “Chicago windows”) had a central pane of fixed plate glass with opening lights at the sides and spandrel panels of terra-cotta. The concrete foundations extended 125 feet (37.5 meters) beneath the ground. That fact points to another important technological necessity that literally underpinned the skyscraper: the development of an appropriate foundation design method that dealt with the concentrated loads imposed by tall, framed buildings.

Efficient and safe systems of vertical transportation were also necessary. Steam-powered traction elevators had been used in Britain since 1835, and the German Werner von Siemens first applied an electric motor to a rack-and-pinion elevator in 1880. Motor technology and safe control methods evolved rapidly, and seven years later an elevator was built in Baltimore that moved the cage by means of a cable wound on a drum. The Otis direct-connected geared electric elevator was first used commercially in New York City in 1889. The technology of the skyscraper had been established. But what of an esthetic appropriate to the new architecture?

Although Jenney had pioneered structural innovation, he had less success with the architectural expression of the framed building. He began to address the esthetic questions in his second Leiter Building (1889–1891), Fair Store Building (1890–1891), and Manhattan Building (1889–1891) but better answers were provided by others. Some sources cite the Marshall Field Wholesale Store (1885–1887) by Henry Hobson Richardson as the stylistic model for the Chicago School. The skyscraper was a distinctly American building. The Industrial Revolution was a source of significant change in Western social structure but many nineteenth-century architects were slow to accommodate that change, wallowing in a morass of historical revival styles. Not so the French theorist E. E. Viollet-le-Duc (1814–1879), who recognized that new materials were essential as a means to a modern architectural end, and be insisted that they be used in accordance with their properties and honestly expressed in the form of the building. His widely published theories had a marked influence on the Chicago School architects just when the United States was beginning to realize that it was different from the Old World. That revelation was expressed by Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the sculptor Horatio Greenough, who in 1852 had called for a home-grown American architecture in terms that would be echoed (albeit in a French accent) in the theories of Viollet-le-Duc.

The Borden Block (1879–1880) by Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan was one of the first buildings to repudiate solid wall or heavy pier construction. Its narrow vertical piers allowed the maximum penetration of natural light to the interior. Ornament, while never completely rejected, gradually freed itself from historical precedent and became integrated with the making of the architecture, subordinated to frank structural expression, the needs of the building’s users, and the nature of materials. The economy of form of the mature skyscraper can be seen in the Marquette Building (1894–1895) by Holabird and Roche, in which narrow piers and recessed spandrels frame large rectangular windows. It is a little ironic in an essay about Chicago architecture that Adler and Sullivan’s Wainwright Building (1890–1891) in St. Louis, Missouri—their first work that exclusively used metal framing—is probably the best example of the skyscraper esthetic. Sullivan clearly expressed the external elements according to the idea set out in his tract The Tall Building Artistically Considered. He insisted that there should be a base (the public floors), a shaft (any number of identical upper floors), and a capital (the pronounced cornice crowning the composition). He denied that this articulation of die tall building form reflected the classical column, but the connection is inescapable. As noted, all human endeavor is characterized by building upon what we already have.

Skellig Michael

noreply@blogger.com (ओंकार देशमुख) — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 10:28:00 +0000

Skellig Michael (Sceilig Mhichil), or Great Skellig, is the larger of a pair of forbidding limestone pinnacles—the other is Small Skellig—jutting from the Atlantic Ocean about 7 miles (12 kilometers) off the Valentia peninsula at the southwest tip of Ireland. Skellig Michael, only 44 acres (17 hectares) in area, is dominated by two crags, one of 712 feet (218 meters) and another of 597 feet (183 meters). On top of the latter, reached via steep, winding stairways cut from the rock, there is an artificial platform with a cluster of six circular drystone huts (clochans), two boat-shaped oratories, some stone crosses, and a cemetery—all that remains of a monastery established, possibly by St. Fionán, sometime in the sixth century a.d. and called “the most westerly of Christ’s fortresses in the Western world.” This monastic foundation on Skellig Michael was one of many in which the Christian tradition was preserved as the rest of western Europe was plunged into a dark age. As the art historian Kenneth Clark once put it, European civilization escaped by the skin of its teeth.
Moreover, the island’s remarkable architecture, although small, was an achievement of inventiveness and effort seldom seen in history.
In the sixth century, just as the monastery was being established, St. Columbanus described the Irish as people “living on the edge of the world.” Hermits who chose to settle on such islands as Skellig Michael subjected themselves to long periods of total isolation, while through lives of prayer and contemplation they searched in silence and solitude for God. In winter Skellig Michael was, and still is, completely inaccessible. Paradoxically, monasticism was the vehicle for the eastward spread of Celtic Christianity. It was established in Scotland and the north of England by Columba, Ninian, Wilfrid, and Aidan.

The platform was reached by any of three zigzagging stairways—one with 670 steps—from different points at the base of the island. The monks built them by carving the rock and by carrying and placing thousands of flat stones. The terracing at the top was achieved, probably over decades, by constructing massive drystone retaining walls and filling behind them. On these level places the reclusive churchmen built their huts, using a flat-stone, corbeled technique already thousands of years old. The successive courses of the circular buildings, laid without mortar and with outward-sloping joints to drain the rainwater, gradually diminished in diameter, closing the building to form a pointed dome—a “beehive” dome. The 6-foot-thick (almost 2-meter) walls and roof were thus integrated into a single entity, providing living quarters and storage. The monks grew vegetables, probably in soil imported from the mainland, supplemented by a diet of seabirds, gulls’ eggs, and fish. They traded eggs, feathers, and seal meat with passing boats for grain, tools, and animal skins, from which they made vellum.

Vikings plundered the Skellig Michael settlement four times between 812 and 839 but the little community survived. Some rebuilding took place in I860, and it is likely that many of the surviving buildings on the island are from that period. Around 1000 the chapel was added to the monastery, using stone from nearby Valentia Island. Sometime in the twelfth century, the monks withdrew to the Augustinian priory at Ballinskelligs on the mainland. Skellig Michael became and remains a pilgrimage site. In the nineteenth century, two lighthouses were built on it, one of which remains functional. From 1986 the Irish Office of Public Works carried out restoration of the Skellig monastic site, and the buildings were added to UNESCO’s World Heritage List in 1996.

Sigiriya (Lion Mountain)

noreply@blogger.com (ओंकार देशमुख) — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 10:26:00 +0000

Sigiriya (Lion Mountain), about 130 miles (210 kilometers) from Colombo in central Sri Lanka, is a ruined ancient stronghold built on a sheer-sided rock pillar. It rises 1,144 feet (349 meters) above sea level and 600 feet (180 meters) above the surrounding plain. On the summit King Kasyapa I (reigned a.d. 477–495) built a palace. Together with the surrounding gardens, it is the best-preserved first-millennium city in Asia, combining symmetrical and asymmetrical elements, changes of level, and axial and radial planning. The central rock is flanked by rectangular precincts on the east 234 acres (90 hectares) and the west 104 acres (40 hectares), all surrounded by a double moat and three ramparts. The city plan, based on a square module, extends 2 miles (about 3 kilometers) from east to west and over 1,000 yards (1 kilometer) from north to south, with precincts set aside for hunters, scavengers, foreigners, and even heretics. There were separate cemeteries for high and low castes, hostels, and hospitals. As well as the city within the inner and outer ramparts, suburban houses spread beyond the walls. Sigiriya demonstrated a sophisticated level of urban design at a time when Europe was in its Dark Ages.

The origins of this remarkable architectural achievement are obscured by legend. A romantic if grisly tradition has it that Kasyapa murdered his father Dhatusena and usurped the throne. Seven years later, full of “paranoia, arrogance and delusions of divinity,” he forsook the Sinhalese capital Anuradhapura and built his palace on Sigiriya. Of course it was defensible, although in the event, that was of little consequence. In a.d. 495 his half brother Moggallana, the rightful heir, led an army against him and Kasyapa came down from his fastness to fight. When his forces were routed, Kasyapa cut his own throat. An alternative version has more historical support. Dhatusena was frustrated in his quest for the imperial title that Sri Lanka’s rulers traditionally held as protectors of Buddhism, because the king of Java would not relinquish it. A priest advised Dhatusena that if he reigned from the summit of a rock, a palace in the sky, he could win that higher status. When Dhatusena named Moggallana as his successor Kasyapa fled to India, returning to invade Sri Lanka seven months later. Anticipating losing the battle, his father killed himself, and Kasyapa entered Anuradhapura to seize the throne. When Kasyapa discovered Sigiriya, there was a monastery in the lower levels of the rock. He built a new place for the monks before he started work on the fortress, commissioning a Sinhalese architect, Sena Lal, to complete the work.

The entire summit of Sigiriya, nearly 3 acres (1.2 hectares) in extent, was once surrounded by an outer wall on the very rim of the cliff. An ancient guidebook, the Sihigiri Vihara Suvarnapura, describes a colonnaded mansion set in landscaped gardens made only for the use of King Kasyapa and his queen. The palace garden had terraces and rock-cut pools replete with aquatic flowers. They were fed by a mechanical pumping system from a lake at the base of the rock that kept them full of water even in the dry season. The west and south slopes of Sigiriya were terraced with houses for members of the royal household; on the west there were also two flights of stairs to the summit and a theater with seats hewn from the rock.

The spectacular feature that gave the Lion Rock its name was the ceremonial entrance, approached from the west through an elaborate water garden surrounded by a moat and across a flat piece of terrain known as the Plateau of Red Arsenic. The covered brick-and-timber stair leading to the summit was reached through the mouth of a brilliantly colored lion, built with brick and limestone and towering 45 feet (14 meters) against the granite cliff. All that remains of the lion are two gigantic paws with talons unsheathed, and a mass of broken brickwork. Images of Dhatusena and Kasyapa are painted on the rock above the lion’s head. The stairway rises past hollows to a gallery about halfway up, enclosed by a 10-foot-high (3-meter) polished plaster wall—the Mirror Wall—and then to a small cave about 45 feet (14 meters) higher, in which there are paintings of half-naked women. There is some debate about their identity: they could be apsaras (heavenly maidens), courtiers, or even Kasyapa’s concubines. Of the original 500 portraits, only 19 survive.

Below Lion Mountain, a western precinct was entered across the inner moat, through a timber-and-brick gatehouse. Its water gardens were symmetrically planned, with cleverly designed hydraulic systems for horticulture, agriculture, surface drainage, and erosion control. The pools and cisterns (some 400 of them) were fed from the Sigiri Maha Wewa, an artificial lake stretching for 8 miles (13 kilometers) from the foot of the rock. There were ornamental and recreational water courses and even cooling systems using underground terra-cotta conduits. A miniature water garden inside the western precinct’s inner wall consisted of water pavilions, pools, cisterns, courtyards, conduits, and water courses, many designed as cooling devices with carefully considered visual and aural effects. The largest water garden had a central island linked to the “mainland” by causeways that formed four L-shaped pools with different water levels, designed for different functions. A narrow fountain garden was flanked by four moated islands, oriented perpendicular to the central axis of the water garden; their summer palaces were reached by bridges cut into the rock. An octagonal pond marked the point where the water garden met the asymmetrical boulder garden, set at a higher level, with its sinuous paths and natural boulders. A massive masonry wall ran from the octagonal pond to the bastion on the southeast, where wide brick walls connecting a series of boulders surrounded a rock-cut throne. Not all the gardens have been excavated and described.

When Kasyapa died, Moggallana seized Lion Rock and promptly deserted it as the capital, fixing the seat of government at Anuradhapura. Rediscovered during the British occupation of Sri Lanka, the archeological reserve and historic site of Sigiriya was declared a World Heritage Site in 1982. Conservation work continues. In 1990 an area of 12,600 acres (about 5,000 hectares) around Sigiriya was declared a wildlife sanctuary. The UNESCO-sponsored Central Cultural Fund has begun restoring Sigiriya’s water gardens, and the Sigiriya Conservation Policy means that the gardens will be stripped of all introduced plant species, leaving only the ancient flora.

Shwedagon Pagoda

noreply@blogger.com (ओंकार देशमुख) — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 10:24:00 +0000

The most spectacular building in Yangon (formerly known as Rangoon) is the Shwedagon Pagoda, a great bell-shaped, solid brick stupa covered with an estimated 55 tons (50 tonnes) of gold. It rises 368 feet (112 meters) on Theinguttara Hill, above the city. The sixteenth-century English adventurer Ralph Fitch wrote that “it is of a wonderful bigness, and all gilded from the foot to the top…. It is the fairest place, as I suppose, that is in all the world; it stands very high….” The base of the pagoda, nearly 1,500 feet (460 meters) in perimeter, is surrounded by over seventy sculpture-enriched smaller shrines. It may be approached from four directions, and in the sixteenth century the gates to its three tiered terraces opened from long avenues lined with fruit trees. Although the tourist literature justifiably claims it to be the highest pagoda and the largest golden monument in the world, it is an architectural feat if for no reason other than its size and economic value. It is a thing of great glowing beauty, and a high point in the development of Buddhist architecture in Southeast Asia.

The Shwedagon Pagoda’s origins are immersed in myth. Tradition asserts that it has stood on its hill for 2,500 years, although archeologists believe it to be about 1,000 years younger. But Theinguttara Hill had long been sacred because of the relics of three earlier Buddhas buried there: the staff of Kakuthan, the filter of Gawnagon, and the waistcloth of Kassapa. The legend describes how two brothers met Guatama Buddha, who entrusted them with strands of his hair to be enshrined in Shwedagon. With divine help, they and King Okkalapa discovered the holy hill. To guard all four relics, consecutive pagodas of silver, tin, copper, lead, marble, iron, and gold were built one upon the other. The pagoda was damaged by earthquakes on at least eight occasions between 1564 and 1919, but rebuilding and enhancement by successive kings caused it to grow from the original 66 feet (20 meters) to its present height.

Although it was in the insignificant Lower Myanmar town of Dagon, it seems that Shwedagon emerged as a major shrine during the Mon Kingdom of Hantharwaddy toward the end of the fourteenth century a.d., when King Binnyau undertook repairs to its structure. Between 1455 and 1462, Queen Shinsawpu built the terrace, balustrade, and encircling walls and gilded the pagoda, by then raised to a height of 302 feet (92.3 meters), with her body weight in gold leaf. Further changes were made in the eighteenth century.

In 1755 King Alaungpaya, patriarch of the Kon-Baung dynasty, reunited the whole of Myanmar. He recognized the strategic importance of Dagon and renamed it Yangon (“the end of strife”), which it retained until the British occupation of Burma in 1851. Shinbyushin, king of Ava, extended the Shwedagon Pagoda to its present height in 1774 and crowned it with a new golden htidaw—a seven-tiered umbrella. His son Singu regiled it four years later. In 1786 the top half of the building was brought down by a violent earthquake. The pagoda’s present form dates from its rebuilding at that time. A major renovation was ordered by King Mindon in 1871, when another new htidaw of layered gold, copper, steel, and zinc was erected. No major maintenance was then undertaken until 1999.

When the periodical gilding was being applied at the end of 1998, workers discovered the serious deterioration of King Mindon’s htidaw. Under the direction of the Committee for All-Round Perpetual Renovation of Shwedagon Pagoda, a 700-strong team of laborers and artisans set about to preserve the failing structure. Ngi Hla Nge of Yangon Technological University supervised the engineering work. At the end of April 1999 a new htidaw, consisting of a steel frame covered with gold and alloys and studded with nearly 8,000 precious stones, was hoisted into place; at its pinnacle there is a 76-carat diamond. Most of the cost was met by donations of cash, gold, and jewelry. The restoration was completed by the end of 1999.

Shibam

noreply@blogger.com (ओंकार देशमुख) — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 10:23:00 +0000

Surrounded by a 23-foot-high (7-meter) mud-brick wall, the Yemeni city of Shibam lies at the southern edge of the Rub’al-Khali Desert at the junction of several wadis and the Hadramawt Valley. Popularly known as the “Manhattan of the Desert,” this city of about 7,000 inhabitants has more than 500 earthen high-rise houses, up to twelve stories high—the world’s oldest skyscrapers—neatly contained in a quarter-square-mile (half a square kilometer) rectangle. The city has been there for at least 1,800 years, but most of these remarkable dwellings date from the sixteenth century. Inscribed on UNESCO’s World Heritage List in 1982, Shibam was described as “one of the oldest and best examples of urban planning based on the principle of vertical construction.”

Shibam was on the caravan route of the incense trade and replaced Shabwa as the capital of the Hadramawt in the third century a.d. Since then, it has enjoyed several periods of religious, political, and especially commercial power. Because it stands on a hillock barely 100 feet (30 meters) above the floor of the deep Hadramawt wadi, Shibam has been victim to floods, and it was partly destroyed by water in 1532. Thus flood protection is among the reasons given for the traditional form of its unique high-rise houses; others include the need to conserve agricultural land (the city is surrounded by groves of date palms), the desire to gather patriarchal families under one roof, and, more pragmatically, at least in earlier times, to accept the protection afforded by the perimeter wall.
Many of the towers of sun-dried, straw-reinforced mud brick taper upward, perhaps to ensure greater stability. The external walls, up to 130 feet (40 meters) high, are partly load bearing. They are set on stone foundations, supported by a framework of timber posts and beams and a large internal stairway built of stone. At ground-floor level the walls are from 4 to 6 feet (1.3 to 2 meters) thick. Interior surfaces are finished with a skim coat of lime plaster to which egg whites are added, producing a highly polished surface. The exteriors are stuccoed with a mixture of clay and chopped straw. High above the narrow lanes that separate the buildings, the living quarters on the upper floors are joined by networks of covered flyovers, so that neighbors can meet without needing to climb up and down stairs. The uppermost floors are usually covered with a thick layer of impermeable white stucco that not only protects from the rain but also reflects much of the solar radiation.

Ventilation is an important constraint upon the design in the relentless desert heat. The crowding of the tall buildings within such a small urban area produces some degree of self-shading. The walls are pierced by regular rows of narrow windows, rooms often having upper and lower sets that from outside create an illusion of more stories than there really are. Openings are closed with wooden mashrabiyas and doors, some as much as 800 years old, elaborately carved with open geometric patterns to encourage natural ventilation. The highest row of openings allows hot air to flow from the interior of the building in the summer.

Some inhabitants of Shibam have been forsaking these traditional houses for modern dwellings that line the highway to Suyan, about 30 miles (19 kilometers) away, producing a version of urban sprawl. Without maintenance, the skyscrapers in this “Manhattan of the Desert” are deteriorating; many are cracking and showing symptoms of collapse. Indeed, over the last decade, more than thirty have succumbed to the elements. Despite UNESCO’s listing and the self-conscious effort of the local people—rigorously applied building codes insist upon traditional designs, materials, and techniques—to conserve its character, the unique architectural landscape of Shibam is in imminent danger of disappearing.

Shell concrete

noreply@blogger.com (ओंकार देशमुख) — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 10:22:00 +0000

In 1919 Dr. Walter Bauersfeld of the Carl Zeiss optical works in Jena, Germany, proposed a planetarium. Following his 1922 success with a 52-foot-diameter (16-meter) iron-rod dome built on the roof of the company’s building—the first lightweight steel structural framework in the world—Bauersfeld consulted the structural engineers Dyckerhoff and Widmann about a larger version. Then, together with their designers Franz Dischinger and Ulrich Finsterwalder, he built the world’s first lightweight thin-shell concrete dome for Zeiss’s sister company, Schott and Partners. It was 131 feet (40 meters) in diameter and only 2.4 inches (6 centimeters) thick. The new structural technology, honed in later structures, made possible clear spans of lighter weight than had ever been imagined. Because concrete shells depend on configuration rather than mass for their strength, and because they exploit the fact that concrete is essentially a fluid, they have been characterized as the ultimate concrete form.

Some of the most exciting examples have come from Spanish engineer-architects. Eduardo Torroja y Miret (1899–1961) was perhaps the most innovative engineer of the early twentieth century, notable for shell concrete roof designs that employed continuous surfaces and eliminated the need for ribs. Three examples should suffice. Torroja’s first thin-shelled concrete roof was for the Market Hall in Algeciras, Spain (1933–1934), designed in conjunction with the architect Manuel Sanchez. The low-rise dome, supported at six points on its perimeter, spans 156 feet (48 meters); it is only 3.5 inches (9 centimeters) thick. In 1935, working with the architects Carlos Arniches Moltó and Martín Domínguez Esteban, Torroja produced the folded plate roof for the grandstand at the Hipódromo de la Zarzuela, Madrid. The cantilever on the graceful structure is 73 feet (22 meters). In the same year, with architect Secundino Zuazo, he designed a 180-foot-long (55-meter) vaulted roof over an indoor pelota court in Madrid. Its two intersecting parallel vaults, of 40 and 21 feet (12.2 and 6.4 meters) radius, respectively, span a total of 98 feet (30 meters); the general thickness of the vast shell is a mere 3.14 inches (8 centimeters). With José Maria Aguirre, in 1934 Torroja founded the Instituto Técnico de la Construcción y Edificación in Madrid to “develop new uses and theories for reinforced concrete”; after his death in 1961, the institute was renamed the Instituto de Ciencias de la Construcción Eduardo Torroja. In 1952, the editors of Concrete Quarterly had claimed with some accuracy, “Torroja has extracted the utmost from his chosen material, concrete; no other material could have given such structures, no other designer has.”

Another Spanish-born architect, a generation after Torroja, earned the nickname “the Shell Builder.” Felix Candela Outeriño (b. 1910), known best simply as Felix Candela, graduated from Madrid’s Escuela Superior de Arquitectura in 1935 but did not practice until he emigrated to Mexico in 1939. First working for others in Acapulco, he moved to Mexico City and set up his own practice, specializing in the design and construction of thin tensile concrete shells. Because this was a new way of building, Candela acted as architect, structural engineer, and contractor, even training the construction workers himself. He began building beautiful churches such as Medalla de la Virgen Milagrosa (1953–1955), Nuestra Señora de la Soledad Chapel (1955), and San José Obrero (1959), all in Mexico City, and the Open Chapel in Lomas de Cuernavaca (1958). The roofs and sometimes the walls are noteworthy for their seamless concrete construction, often only 1.07 inches (4 centimeters) thick. Candela stated, “It is the shape that matters.” He insisted that “the shell must be stable and of a shape which permits an easy way to work. It should be as symmetrical as possible because this simplifies its behavior” (Faber 1963, 199). To this end, he frequently made use of the hyperbolic paraboloid, a form that made the construction of timber formwork easy because it is generated only from straight lines. The best example can be found in Los Manantiales Restaurant of 1958 in Xochimilco near Mexico City; the thin concrete shell structure that encloses its radial plan is based on eight hyperbolic paraboloid segments. Critics have remarked that in Candela’s work both design and structure have been sharpened to the finest edge, imparting “a new dynamism” to architecture.

Shell concrete was promoted in North America by a single expatriate European engineer, the Viennese Anton Tedesko (1902–1994). From 1930 to 1932 he collaborated with the shell concrete pioneers Dischinger and Finsterwalder, and two years later he moved to the Chicago offices of Roberts and Schaefer, for whom he worked until 1967, designing what have been described as “watershed buildings,” including the Sports Palace (1936) in Hershey, Pennsylvania. Its ribbed-barrel, shell concrete roof spanned 255 feet (78 meters) and covered an area measuring 230 by 340 feet (70 by 104 meters). During World War II he designed seaplane hangars in San Diego for the U.S. Navy and later produced the main terminal building at Lambert International Airport, St. Louis, roofed with four bays of huge groin vaults. It was mainly through Tedesko’s evangelism that shells became respected in the United States.

According to engineering historian David Billington, the other U.S. “thin-shell” visionary engineer was Jack Christiansen of Seattle, who was chief designer of the city’s Kingdome (1976, demolished 2000). The building was not technically a dome; its 9-acre (3.63-hectare) roof was formed of hyperbolic paraboloids—22 rib arches with a 5-inch-thick (13-centimeter) concrete shell spanning between them. Kingdome was the last (and biggest) major thin shell built in the United States; it was preceded by the New Orleans Exhibition Hall of 1968 (on which Christiansen worked) and Denver’s Paraboloid (1969), created by I. M. Pei and Tedesko. After experimentation in the sixties and seventies, such large shells were eclipsed by the newer technologies of air-supported structures and steel-framed retractable roofs.

That is not to say that the concrete shell is passé. Since the early 1960s the structural engineer Heinz Isler (b. 1926) has designed more than 1,000 shells, mostly in his native Switzerland. His elegant structures, inspired by natural forms, challenge those of Candela for elegance. Instead of mathematically calculating the forms, Isler designs by experiment, using catenary models in much the way that Antoni Gaudí did almost a century before. Notable among his earlier works are the Wyss Garden Center at Solothurn (1961), a thin, double-curved geometric shell; the Sicli Company Office building (1969–1970) in Geneva; and the Bürgi Garden Center at Camorino (1973).

Semmering Railway

noreply@blogger.com (ओंकार देशमुख) — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 10:21:00 +0000

The 26-mile-long (41.8-kilometer) Semmering Railway climbs through an altitude of 1,400 feet (439 meters) over the Semmering alpine pass, at an elevation of 2,930 feet (898 meters), between Gloggnitz and Mürzzuschlag in southeastern Austria. Designed in 1843 and built between July 1848 and July 1854, it is still in use. The railway has been described in UNESCO World Heritage List documents as “one of the greatest feats of civil engineering of [the] pioneering phase of railway building.” Moreover, it “represents an outstanding technological solution to a major physical problem.”

The railway was designed by the Austrian engineer Karl von Ghega (1802–1860) as part of a double-track connection between Vienna and Trieste, Italy. In May 1842 the section of line between Vienna and Gloggnitz was opened. Just then, von Ghega, who had been appointed inspector of the Southern State Railway, was undertaking a study tour in England and North America. In August an imperial edict called for the extension of the line over the high Semmering alpine pass, and by the end of the following January von Ghega had prepared three proposals, offering the alternatives of steam locomotive (eventually chosen), cable inclines, and atmospheric railway for the consideration of Ermengildo von Francesconi, Director General of State Railways. Little action was taken on the Semmering Railway, and in October 1844 a section of track between Graz and Mürzzuschlag was completed, still leaving a gap in the line over the mountains. Political vagaries and reservations about a project that had no precedents—no one anywhere had built a railway over mountains—meant that von Ghega’s plans were shelved for four years. Then, prompted or panicked by a revolution in Vienna in spring 1848, the government was moved to urgent action.

Construction of the Gloggnitz-Payerbach and Mürzzuschlag-Spital sections of the line started in summer 1848. Each day, up to 5,000 laborers commuted from Vienna. At the peak of the project about 20,000 men and women were employed. They built sixteen arched masonry viaducts (some of them two stories high) with a total length of a little under 1 mile (1.5 kilometers) and excavated 15 tunnels with a total length of 3 miles (4.8 kilometers). By means of these structures and over 129 bridges, the track climbed along its winding, precipitous path, carved from the faces of the mountains entirely by hand and without the use of explosives. The track was lined with stone station buildings, fifty-five two-story houses for linesmen, and thirty-two timber-framed signal boxes, as well as workshops and engine halls.

Von Ghega had not convinced everyone that a steam locomotive railway would work, and for three years the project proceeded in the face of criticism from his professional peers, who preferred the use of fixed steam engines and cable inclines. They were silenced in September 1851 when a competition was held on the line. Twenty-two years earlier in England, a similar competition had established the suitability of steam locomotive power across flat country. Von Ghega’s conviction that normal vehicles could be used on the Semmering was vindicated when the four participating locomotives easily passed the test of pulling 154 tons (140 tonnes) at 7 mph (11.4 kph) on the steepest gradient. The Austrian engineers Wilhelm Freiherr von Engerth and Fischer von Röslerstamm were charged with developing the first triple-coupled locomotives, and they were built in Germany and Belgium in 1852.

The Semmering Railway was inaugurated in October 1853. The budget had been exceeded by a factor of four. Goods traffic started in May 1854, followed in July by a scheduled passenger service. Of course, a rail trip through mountain country was a totally new experience and many made it simply for the pleasure of watching the grandeur of the landscape. The journey, pulled by any of the twenty-six mountain locomotives in service, took a few minutes over two hours. The entire Vienna-Trieste line was opened at the end of July 1857.

The high elevation of the Semmering main tunnel caused problems because of freezing. Around the turn of the century, attempts were made to heat it with gas burners, and it was actually closed off with doors between trains. Flooding was also a difficulty, and after the particularly bad 1946–1947 winter, several hundred wagon loads of ice had to be excavated from the tunnel. A second tunnel was completed in March 1952 to overcome the difficulty. The Vienna-Gloggnitz line was electrified seven years later, and a four-year program was launched to upgrade tracks and buildings and electrify the Semmering section. The modifications were finished by May 1959. Coupled electric locomotives now transport up to 1,100 tons (1,000 tonnes) over the pass. Journey time, for either freight or passenger trains, is just forty-two minutes. Maximum speeds are limited to 37.5 mph (60 kph) on the north ramp and 44 mph (70 kph) on the south. The Semmering Railway continues to function well in the face of major technological change since it was first built, a testimony to the “detailed and well-founded planning” of von Ghega. However, the increased traffic has called for constant maintenance. The Semmering Railway, preserved in its nearly original form, has come under the Austrian Law of Protection of Monuments since 1923, a status confirmed by the Federal Office of Monuments as recently as March 1997. It was inscribed on UNESCO’s World Heritage List a year later.