History and Contemporary Architecture

Contemporary architects and works

Contemporary architecture is tested by linking each architect to a signature idea or building type, so the useful knowledge is the design philosophy behind the name. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe is remembered for the phrase skin and bones architecture, which describes steel-and-glass buildings whose structure is expressed on the exterior. His principle of less is more is paired with the functionalist maxim form follows function, which is credited to Louis H. Sullivan. Antoni Gaudí, the Catalan architect, is associated with organic forms and with the idea that nature contains no straight lines or sharp corners. Louis I. Kahn distinguished served spaces, the main rooms, from servant spaces, which house stairs, ducts and services. The Metabolist movement in Japan, led by Kisho Kurokawa, proposed growing megastructures with replaceable parts. Richard Rogers, working with Renzo Piano on the Centre Pompidou, coined the term bowellism for the exposed services on its façade. Dymaxion is the name of Buckminster Fuller's system of design and should not be confused with the work of Mies.

Indian practice is also studied through concepts. Charles Correa's Jawahar Kala Kendra in Jaipur is based on the navagraha mandala, a geometric representation of the cosmos. Le Corbusier's Capitol Complex in Chandigarh is associated with the bull's horns motif. Satish Grover's Oberoi Hotel in Bhubaneswar draws on the plan form of a Hindu temple. Romi Khosla's School for Spastic Children in New Delhi is linked to the image of the mother's womb. B. V. Doshi designed the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore. Roger Anger designed the Matrimandir at Auroville, a spherical golden meditation centre. Brinda Somaya designed the Nalanda International School in Vadodara. Fumihiko Maki designed the Bihar Museum in Patna, while the Indira Gandhi Rashtriya Manav Sangrahalaya in Bhopal and the Museum of Art and Photography in Bengaluru are attributed to Ram Sharma and to Soumitro Ghosh with Nisha Mathew respectively. The Titan Integrity Campus in Bengaluru is credited to Sanjay Mohe. The Pritzker Architecture Prize, awarded annually by the Hyatt Foundation, has been received by B. V. Doshi in 2018 and by Liu Jiakun in 2025, whereas Santiago Calatrava and Charles Correa have not received it.

Plan form and structure are read from geometry. The Commerzbank tower in Frankfurt has a triangular plan around a central atrium, and Apple Park in California is organised as a ring. Hyperboloid forms are doubly curved, as in Oscar Niemeyer's Cathedral of Brasilia, while geodesic domes are triangulated lattice spheres, as in the biomes of the Eden Project by Nicholas Grimshaw. A diagrid uses diagonal members on the façade to form a triangulated frame, as in Norman Foster's Hearst Tower and The Gherkin in London. Umbrella structures are thin shell-like roofs on slender stems, as in Pier Luigi Nervi's Palazzo del Lavoro in Turin. Lightweight structures include Shigeru Ban's paper log houses, base isolators protect the Te Papa Museum in Wellington, and tuned-mass dampers are placed in the upper floors of Taipei 101. Frank Gehry's Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris and Daniel Libeskind's zigzag Jewish Museum in Berlin are both examples of his fragmented or sculptural designs, while David Childs designed One World Trade Center in New York. Foster's Gherkin is a diagrid tower in London.

Spatial organisation has five standard types: centralised, linear, radial, clustered and grid. A centralised plan focuses on one dominant central space, a radial plan extends arms from a core, a clustered plan groups units around courtyards, and a grid plan repeats a rectilinear module.

Urban planning treats land use and transport as one system. Land use generates travel demand, and transport infrastructure determines accessibility and land values, so the two must be planned jointly. The automobile enabled low-density development spreading over the urban fringe, which is urban sprawl. Compact cities usually have lower per-capita transport emissions because trips are shorter and transit is more used. Adding a new transport mode changes travel times and reachable destinations, so accessibility is altered.

Styles are identified by characteristic buildings. Baroque is typified by the Palace of Versailles, Byzantine by Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, Art Deco by the stepped crown of the Chrysler Building in New York, and Art Nouveau by Gaudí's Sagrada Família in Barcelona.

Historic architectural elements

Historic elements are learned by their function and by the building type in which they first appear. A caryatid is a female figure used as a column to support an entablature, most famously in the porch of the Erechtheion in Athens. A hypostyle hall is a space filled with many columns that carry a roof over a central aisle, as in the Great Hypostyle Hall at Karnak.

A pendentive is a concave spherical triangle of masonry that carries a dome from the four corners of a square bay onto four arches or piers. Hagia Sophia in Istanbul uses pendentives to transfer the dome's load to four supports. St. Mark's Basilica in Venice and the Hagia Irene in Istanbul both carry their domes on pendentives in the Byzantine manner. Corbelled domes, in which each course projects inward over the one below, do not contain pendentives, as in the Dilwara temples of India.

An oculus is the circular opening at the crown of a dome, admitting light and ventilation, and it is characteristic of Roman domes such as the Pantheon in Rome. The term comes from the Latin word for eye. A lantern is a glazed superstructure above a dome, a rose window is a circular window in a wall, and a clerestory is a row of high windows.

A rose window is a large circular window with radiating tracery, typical of Gothic church façades from the twelfth to fourteenth centuries, notably at Notre-Dame in Paris.

A squinch is a small arch or lintel spanning diagonally across each corner of a square chamber, converting the square plan into an octagonal or circular base that supports a dome. A squinch is a single supporting element and not a double-layered dome with inner and outer masonry shells.

An onion dome is bulbous and narrows toward its top, and the main dome of the Taj Mahal in Agra is the classic Indian example. A hemispherical dome, by contrast, has a simple half-sphere profile and is not onion-shaped.