Architecture
Plans, Sections, Elevations · A Field Manual
The largest art form humans practise. Six millennia of stacked stone, bent timber, poured concrete, and tensioned cable, in roughly the order they were stacked, bent, poured, and tensioned. Each sheet of this set is a single building, era, or idea. Read them as a roll of drawings; or jump to whatever room you want to enter first.
Sheet Index
- A-002The Greek TempleOptical refinements; the Parthenon
- A-003Roman ConcretePantheon; the dome learns to span
- A-004Gothic CathedralsPointed arches; flying buttresses
- A-005The RenaissanceBrunelleschi to Palladio
- A-006Baroque EnergyBernini, Borromini, Wren
- A-007Beaux-Arts & VictoriansIron, glass, and ornament
- A-008ModernismLe Corbusier — Mies — Wright
- A-009BrutalismBéton brut
- A-010Postmodern PranksVenturi to Graves
- A-011High-TechPompidou, HSBC, Lloyd's
- A-012DeconstructivistGehry, Hadid, Libeskind
- A-013ParametricAlgorithm, fabrication
- A-014Vernacular & ClimateThe local answer
- A-015MaterialsStone · Wood · Steel · Glass
- A-016Tools of the ArchitectPlan / Section / Elevation
- A-017WatchlistFilms & videos
- A-018Closing Title BlockFooter
PLAN · The Parthenon, Athens
Iktinos and Kallikrates, working under Phidias's general supervision, built the Parthenon between 447 and 432 BC on the Acropolis. Pentelic marble, Doric order, peripteral plan: eight columns on the short ends, seventeen down the long sides. Inside: a 12-metre chryselephantine statue of Athena Parthenos.
The famous trick is the optical refinements. None of the lines are actually straight. The stylobate (base) curves up slightly in the middle, the columns lean inward by about 6 cm, the corner columns are thicker than the others, and the entablature tilts forward. All to make the building look straight against the bright Aegean sky. The eye, fooled, reads it as perfect.
It survived 2,200 years almost intact, then in 1687 a Venetian shell hit a Turkish powder magazine inside it. Most of what fell down then is still on the ground. Most of what stayed up is in the British Museum.
Plan view — 8 × 17 columns, peripteral
"Architecture is the art that makes the body and the soul one with the building." — Vitruvius (paraphrased), De Architectura
SECTION · The Pantheon, Rome
The Greeks placed columns. The Romans poured concrete. Opus caementicium — lime, volcanic ash from Pozzuoli, broken stone — was lighter than stone, cheaper than marble, and could be cast into any shape. It enabled the dome.
Hadrian's Pantheon, completed around 128 AD, is a hemisphere 43.3 metres in diameter resting on a cylinder of equal interior height. Aged poured-concrete; aggregate that grades from heavy basalt at the base to light pumice at the crown; an oculus 9 metres across that lights the whole interior with a single moving sundisk. It remained the largest unreinforced concrete dome in the world until the present day. Brunelleschi studied it before designing Florence's. Michelangelo studied it before designing St Peter's.
Why does it stand? The concrete walls are 6 metres thick at the base, hollowed by relieving niches, and the dome's coffers are not decoration — they are weight reduction. Every line is structural.
Section — the sphere inscribed in the cylinder
ELEVATION · The Gothic Cathedral
Saint-Denis, north of Paris, 1144. Abbot Suger consecrates the new choir of his abbey. He has pushed his masons to thin the walls, raise the windows, and make the stone glow. He has, in effect, invented the Gothic. Within fifty years it has spread to Notre-Dame, Chartres, Reims, Amiens, Cologne, Lincoln, and Salisbury.
Three innovations, stacked
- i.POINTED ARCHChannels load downward, not outward
- ii.RIB VAULTStone skeleton; thin web fill
- iii.FLYING BUTTRESSExternal prop, freeing the wall
Together they let the walls dissolve into stained glass. Chartres, finished in 1220, has 167 windows covering 2,600 square metres. The interior is colour as architecture — what Suger called lux mirabilis, marvellous light.
Cathedral elevation, schematic
The Renaissance Architects
Filippo Brunelleschi looked at the Pantheon for years, then went home to Florence and built a dome over the cathedral that no one knew how to build. He used a herringbone brick pattern that essentially holds itself up while curing, and a double-shell construction in which the outer dome protects an inner one. Finished 1436. Still the largest masonry dome in the world.
Leon Battista Alberti wrote De Re Aedificatoria (1452), the first architectural treatise since Vitruvius. Donato Bramante designed the Tempietto in Rome (1502), a circular shrine over Saint Peter's crucifixion site, so perfect that everyone agreed it had to be the centrepiece of the new St Peter's. They were right; it was.
Andrea Palladio published I Quattro Libri dell'Architettura in 1570 and gave the world the Villa Rotonda — a square house with four identical porticoes facing four points of the compass, topped with a small dome. Two hundred years later Thomas Jefferson copied it for Monticello. Plus every American courthouse.
- 1436BrunelleschiFlorence Duomo dome
- 1470AlbertiS. Andrea, Mantua
- 1502BramanteTempietto, Rome
- 1546MichelangeloSt Peter's dome (designed)
- 1567PalladioVilla Rotonda, Vicenza
Baroque Energy
If the Renaissance was the diagram, the Baroque was the dance. Gian Lorenzo Bernini designed the colonnade of St Peter's Square (1656–67) as two arms reaching out to embrace the faithful. Francesco Borromini, his rival, twisted the wall of San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane (1638) into an undulating S-curve so subtle that you have to walk past it to feel the building breathe.
In London, Christopher Wren rebuilt fifty-two churches after the Great Fire of 1666. St Paul's Cathedral, finished 1710, was his life's work and his memorial. Si monumentum requiris, circumspice. If you seek his monument, look around.
In Bavaria, the Asam brothers and Balthasar Neumann took the Baroque to the edge of hallucination — gilded plaster cherubs swarming up walls into ceilings that opened into painted skies. Rococo arrived next, finer and pinker, before the Enlightenment took the gilt away again.
Iron, Glass, Beaux-Arts
Joseph Paxton's Crystal Palace, built in 1851 for the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park, was a 564-metre prefabricated greenhouse of cast iron and 84,000 square metres of plate glass. It was assembled in nine months. It demonstrated that the building of the future would be made of standardised parts shipped from a foundry.
Henri Labrouste's Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève in Paris (1850) put a slim cast-iron structure inside a Beaux-Arts shell. The Bibliothèque Nationale's reading room (1875) opens to nine glass domes on iron columns thinner than a person.
Gustave Eiffel's tower (1889) was meant to be temporary. Louis Sullivan in Chicago invented the modern office building — the Wainwright (1891), the Carson Pirie Scott store (1899) — and coined the phrase "form ever follows function," which his pupil Frank Lloyd Wright would prove and disprove for the next sixty years.
PLAN · The Open Plan
Mies van der Rohe's Barcelona Pavilion (1929) had no walls. It had eight chrome columns in a regular grid, a flat roof, and a few free-standing planes of travertine, onyx, and green tinian marble that defined spaces without enclosing them. The Barcelona Chair, designed for the King and Queen of Spain to sit on for ten minutes, became an icon of modern furniture for the next century.
Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye (1931) demonstrated his Five Points (see Modernism deck). Wright's Fallingwater (1937) cantilevered out over a Pennsylvania waterfall — the most dramatic horizontal building ever built. His Guggenheim (1959) made a building out of a single ramp.
After 1945 the international style went corporate: Lever House (SOM, 1952), the Seagram Building (Mies, 1958), every glass curtain wall in every American downtown for the next forty years. Modernism became the default, and the default became invisible.
Free plan: walls do not carry. Columns do.
Béton Brut
The word comes from béton brut, raw concrete — Le Corbusier's term for the unfinished, board-marked concrete of his Unité d'Habitation in Marseille (1952). Reyner Banham named the style in 1955 in The Architectural Review. For two decades it became the visual language of social ambition: housing estates, universities, libraries, town halls, theatres.
Paul Rudolph's Yale Art & Architecture Building (1963), with its bush-hammered concrete that scratches if you lean on it. Lina Bo Bardi's São Paulo Museum of Art (1968), a glass box hung from concrete portals 70 metres apart. The Barbican estate in London (1969–82). The National Theatre on the South Bank (Lasdun, 1976), once voted both Britain's most-loved and most-hated building in the same poll.
Now half of it is being knocked down. The rest has Instagram accounts.
Less Is a Bore
Robert Venturi's Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966) was a quiet manifesto: bring history back, allow contradiction, allow the duck and the decorated shed. He and Denise Scott Brown drove a station wagon across the Las Vegas strip in 1968 and came back arguing that the strip was the future of architecture. Many of their colleagues never quite forgave them.
Charles Moore's Piazza d'Italia in New Orleans (1978). Michael Graves's Portland Building (1982), with its enormous painted columns and a giant ribbon. Philip Johnson's AT&T Building in New York (1984), with the Chippendale top. Aldo Rossi's Teatro del Mondo (1980), floating into Venice on a barge.
The historical references were sometimes affectionate, sometimes ironic, sometimes both. By the 1990s the style had aged poorly — some of those buildings were renovated within twenty years. The arguments are still useful.
The Building as Machine
Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers won the competition for the Centre Pompidou (Paris, 1977) by turning the building inside out. Lifts, ducts, structure: all on the outside, colour-coded (blue for air, green for water, yellow for electricity, red for circulation). The interior was an empty flexible loft. The art could move. The plumbing was the architecture.
Norman Foster did the same trick at HSBC Hong Kong (1986), suspending the floors from external trusses so the interior had no columns. Rogers went further at Lloyd's of London (1986), with stainless-steel toilet pods clipped to the outside of the building.
High-tech became the British signature, and the new Apple stores' steel-and-glass language is its descendant. The Pompidou, fifty years on, is being repainted, slowly, in a tarpaulin of scaffolding. The pipes are the same colours.
Bend Everything
The 1988 MoMA show "Deconstructivist Architecture," curated by Philip Johnson and Mark Wigley, gathered seven architects who were bending Cartesian geometry: Gehry, Hadid, Libeskind, Eisenman, Koolhaas, Tschumi, Coop Himmelb(l)au. Most of them had built almost nothing.
Then Frank Gehry built the Guggenheim Bilbao (1997). 33,000 sheets of titanium curving over an iron-and-stone frame, every panel modeled in CATIA, the aerospace software his office had bought to run the geometry. The city of Bilbao, dying with its shipyards, suddenly had a tourism industry. The Bilbao effect entered the language.
Zaha Hadid had drawn impossibilities since the 1980s — the Peak Club in Hong Kong, never built — and finally the technology caught up. The MAXXI in Rome (2010), the Heydar Aliyev Centre in Baku (2013). Daniel Libeskind designed the Jewish Museum Berlin (2001) as a zigzag wound. Each architect sold a recognisable signature; each became a brand; the era of the Starchitect began.
Algorithm · Fabrication
By 2005 the personal computer in an architect's office could run scripts that would have taken months in 1980. Patrik Schumacher, Hadid's partner, called the new style Parametricism: forms generated by parameters — sun angle, structural load, occupant flow — rather than drawn directly.
Sou Fujimoto's House NA, Beijing's Bird's Nest stadium (Herzog & de Meuron, 2008), the Heydar Aliyev Centre, BIG's mountain-shaped Copenhagen waste-to-energy plant. Each surface a CNC-milled, robot-welded, cast-glass panel. No two pieces are quite alike.
The next frontier is robotic fabrication and mass timber: cross-laminated timber towers like Mjøstårnet in Norway (85 m, 2019). Concrete is being replaced with engineered wood at every scale that codes allow. Architecture is, at last, becoming carbon-aware.
A parametric surface, sampled and rebuilt in panels
The Local Answer
The architecture you live in is mostly anonymous. Bedouin tents, Japanese minka, Yemeni high-rises in Shibam (the "Manhattan of the desert," 16th century, mud brick, 11 storeys), the I-house of Appalachia, the trulli of Apulia, the dogtrot houses of the American South. Vernacular building is what climate teaches when no architect is in the room.
Hassan Fathy's Architecture for the Poor (1969) argued that the modernist concrete house imported into Cairo was hotter, noisier, more expensive, and uglier than the mud-brick courtyard house it replaced. He built New Gourna out of mud and won very few clients. Glenn Murcutt in Australia builds long thin tin-roofed houses that breathe with the cross-wind; he has never had an office or an employee.
The vernacular returns under new names — biophilic, passive, regenerative. The principles are old. The problem is selling them in cities that price land by the square metre, not the kilowatt.
What the Building Is Made Of
- STONECompression onlyPyramids, Parthenon, Gothic. Heavy, slow, eternal.
- BRICKModular masonryMesopotamia onward. Persian arches, Dutch row houses.
- TIMBERTension & compressionJapanese pagodas, North American balloon frame, Norway's CLT towers.
- CONCRETECast in placeRoman to brutalist. Rebar gives it tension.
- IRONCast columns, wrought beamsCrystal Palace, Eiffel.
- STEELTension & compression at speedSkyscrapers, suspension bridges.
- GLASSTransparency, weather skinGothic windows to curtain wall.
- ETFEPneumatic plastic pillowsAllianz Arena, Eden Project. 1% the weight of glass.
The Three Drawings
PLAN
Horizontal slice taken about 1.2 m above the floor. Walls cut, doors swung. The diagram of how a body moves through the building.
SECTION
Vertical slice. Floors, ceilings, stairs. The diagram of how the building stands up and how a body moves through it from below to above.
ELEVATION
Flat view of one face. No perspective. The drawing the public will read once the scaffolding comes down.
Plus the axonometric (a 3D drawing without vanishing points), the perspective (a vanishing point invented in 1413; see Renaissance deck), and increasingly the BIM model (the digital twin from which every drawing is now generated). Architecture is a building twice: once as drawings, once as the thing.
Photographic reference · built environment
Look At Next
Architectural Digest · tour of an iconic modern house
Three more channels
- VOXWhy every city looks the sameThe international style explained in 8 min.
- STEWART HICKSArchitectural critic on YouTubeLong-form analyses of single buildings.
- THE B1MConstruction technologyHow the megaprojects actually go up.
- DEZEENStudio visitsWorking architects, in their offices.
"You employ stone, wood, and concrete, and with these materials you build houses and palaces. That is construction. Ingenuity is at work. But suddenly you touch my heart, you do me good. I am happy and I say: this is beautiful. That is architecture." — Le Corbusier
Closing
You will, in your life, spend more than ninety percent of your hours inside a building. The shape of those buildings — whether they let the light in, where they put the staircase, what they look like from the corner — is not a luxury problem. It is a public-health problem. It is a climate problem. It is also one of the deepest pleasures available to a literate eye.
Walk to a building you have walked past for years. Go inside. Look at the staircase. Look up. Notice the joints. Architecture rewards staring more than almost any other art.
SET COMPLETE