Foundations are extremely important to all aspects of our life whether it is the foundation of a home, building, or the foundation of knowledge. The second of the two is what we have been studying the past few weeks in my History and Theory of Design class. We have been studying the foundations of architecture from Egyptian to Gothic architecture. In this unit we started out talking about time and passage in Egyptian architecture. Time was and still is an important aspect in architecture. How long a building or structure will last depends on how long the person needs to use it and hopefully longer. Passage was an important aspect to the design in Egypt. Some examples of passage were the Nile River and the progression from pharaoh to pharaoh in Egyptian civilization. Egypt is where the column was first used in the recognized form of architecture today. Post and Lintel was something that was used a lot in the design of the columns. Egypt designed the pyramid form which was a hugely advanced form to be built that took tons of man power and time to construct. Male and female is also something that is important to the designs of buildings that really started to be used in Egypt. Examples of this would be the temple of Pyramids at Giza and the Temple of Queen Hatshepsut. After studying Egypt we moved on to Greece and studied the aspects of real and ideal. This civilization is where we were introduced to the idea of porch, court, and hearth which is something that is still seen strongly in architecture today. Another important idea that we talked about in Greece is archetype, prototype, and hybrid. We defined this idea as the prototype being the ideal and leading to the archetype and then the hybrid combines them all together. Also another thing that we saw was the column order, which was Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, and Composite. We looked at the Acropolis that houses the Parthenon, which was a building that strongly influenced architecture of the future from Greece; in fact we still see buildings especially in the US capital that appear similar to the Parthenon. Still studying Greece we talked about the “Wu-Wu and other interpretations”. The Wu-Wu is the column or at least what the column represents which is the male genital area. An example of a Wu-Wu would be the Tower of Trajan and the opposite would be the Aqueducts, which would be described as the vaginal area of a female. After learning about Greece we moved on to Rome. When talking about Rome we talked about architecture and civic life. We talked about how Rome was so advanced and how they were the inventor of roads and they started building vacation homes and using concrete which opened up a wide array of possibilities in the realms of architecture. Roman architecture took a lot of their ideas from Greece who focused more on the outside and the use of the buildings. We talked about the temples in the civilization’s places of worship which people put a lot of time into because gods and religion was very important to their lives. Overall this entire foundation unit has been very helpful, especially to the way that I design. I feel like I have gained a lot of knowledge about structure, how things can be built, and how to take influence from the past and to make it into something new.
The picture that I choose to use that I think best represents this unit is the Parthenon because it has been very inspirational in architecture even to this day.
parthenon
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