Unit Eight Architecture Engineering.doc

Unit Eight Architecture Engineering Passage One What a Building Is? Architecture is a public art. It is the building block of the city, a compound work. Cities are always changing, growing and being altered, being destroyed and being rebuilt, and all in response to social and political change, to the demands of commerce and industry, and to the rhythms of technological innovation. Each time a new building is proposed it must be studied, not in isolation, but evaluated as a part of the increasingly complex whole that forms all regions. Architecture is a liberal art that is taught at our universities, and is a discipline that should be amenable to rational discourse. In the history of architecture, ancient Greeks made two expectations when they created cities: architects are able to create both the background architecture that forms the buildings in a town or city, and the noble civil and religious structures that embody a society’s highest aspirations. It was in this way that architects of the past arranged their designs in city plans to make the new as beautiful, or better than, what was there before. One remarkable example of this is: Wren’s buildings at Oxford and Cambridge. In the modern architecture, architects think a building does not express its meaning in the same way as a picture or a sculpture, because it is by nature much more complex. It demands a prior effort of analysis. In the first place, we never see a building in its totality: we can never obtain more than partial views both of the exterior and interior, with the result that we are always obliged to relate what we can see to what we cannot see to form a clear picture of the whole. It is impossible to indulge the pleasure of the eye: one has to think as well as look. To help us in this intellectual exercises we have an important tool to hand, the plan, which informs us simultaneously about exterior and interior, the whole and the part. Together with the cross section, which reveals the struct