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Showing posts from March, 2018

Entries Matthew Kennedy

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State Penitentiary, Richmond VA The Virginia state penitentiary is located in Richmond Virginia stood from 1796 until 1991. It held thousands of maximum security inmates and spanned around 17 acres. They later added in electric chair within the prison. Architectural speaking there is not much to say except that the building was designed not for aesthetics but for function, which is did perfectly. During its time period it was looked at like Fort Knox impossible to escape and a very scary looking place at that. The design for functionally fitting so many inmates and keep them within is very successful. High vaulted ceilings fits 3 rows of inmates stacked atop one another which gave the guards a view of all the prisoners at one time. It is difficult to find plans and sections of this very odd layout for a prison however the aerial view shows the most information about the design of the architecture. It shows 3 to 4 separate blocks for different levels of security. There also is

Secession Building, (Vienna, Austria); 1897; De Stijl, Avant-Garde in Modern Europe and the Emergence of the Modern Movement

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Arch 162-M12 Spring 2018 The Secession Building in Vienna, Austria is an art gallery originally intended for Secession group. The Secession group consisted primarily of artist and a few architects. Originally the group was very small and consisted of seven people, they were known as club of seven. As they grew more tired of the major art galleries not giving them the opportunity to exhibit their work as it was seen too unpleasing to the eye. So here were these artists trying express their modernist and impressionist work but getting denied of having it publicly displayed. The Secession group formed shortly after a few incognito exhibitions among the artists and started to gain traction with other artists and architects. The leader of the group was Gustav Klimt as he was in his prime time it seemed like the correct position to assume. Klimt rose to fame as a decorator of buildings as well as his panel painting which won him the Emperors prize which brought a lot of attention to h

Tremont House, (Boston,Usa); 1823-1894, NeoClassical

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Isaiah Rogers, born August 17, 1800-April 13, 1869, was an architect in the United States. He was born to Isaac Rogers and Hannah Ford in Marshfield Massachusetts. In 1823 He married a woman by the name of Emily Wesley Tibet, and had eight children, only four of them survived. Two of his sons became architects studying behind their father. He was a student under Solomon Willard, and became known as the country’s foremost hotel architect, renowned in Boston for his Tremont House. The Tremont house was the first hotel built on Tremont and Season street in 1823, and was known for having the first of many items. This four-story, granite faced, piece of neoclassical architecture included indoor plumbing, indoor toilets, a reception area, locked rooms for guests, free soap, and even bellboys. There were eight toilets on the ground floor and bathrooms with baths made from copper and tin in the basement, each with heated water, heated with local gas. The water in the building was r

Brandenburg Gate, 1791, Berlin Germany, Greek Architecture, Carl Gotthard Langhans, Johann Gottfried Schadow

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Brandenburg Gate History The Brandenburg gate was built between 1788 and 1791 by Prussian king Frederick William II as key entry to the city of Berlin. The gate topped of a statue which depicted the goddess of victory driving a chariot pulled by four horses, called the “Quadriga”. The statue stayed there until Napoleon Bonaparte and his grand army occupied berlin and decided to steal it, shipping it to Paris. Napoleon forgot about the statue, and it stayed in storage until the Prussian army took over Paris after his defeat. The statue was returned to the gate and became a symbol of the Prussian army’s victory over France. During world war II, the gate received heavy damages, and after the berlin wall was erected both east and west Germany worked together to restore the gate. After the restoration, the gate was completely shut off from west berlin. It wasn’t 1963 when John Kennedy said his “I am a jelly donut Speech” right near the gate that the wall was torn down.  Ar

Secession Building

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This building was a masterpiece done by Gustav Klimt, one of the most widely recognized artworks of Secession style. It is even on the national side of the Austrian coin (.50). The Vienna Secession was founded in 1897 by Gustav Klimt, Joseph Maria Olbrich, and Josef Hoffman. Because Vienna was becoming a growing metropolis and it was supposed to be represented that way. They were inspired by arts and craft and organic geometries, essentially an abstract architecture. The building has a covered courtyard structure, it provided for gallery space on all sides of a large top-lit rectangular exhibition hall in the center. The materials used in this building was mainly masonry and metal. the crowning element sketched by Klimt included a perforated metal dome, suspended between four pylons and set above profiled planar masses. The slogan of the Secessionist movement is written above the entrance of the pavilion: "To every age its art, to every art its freedom”. Below the motto, the

REDWOOD LIBRARY

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REDWOOD HARRISON The Redwood Library and Athenaeum are in Newport. It is the oldest community library still occupying its original building in the United States founded in 1747.  His way of the design was widely copied since then, it was the beginning of the New World.  Harrison had a lot of inspirations from those before him. He had the most stylistic and most advanced private library designs of his era. Harrison used Roman Doric temple with portico and wings, which was probably an inspiration from 1735 edition of Andrea Palladio’s architecture.  The building is crafted of wood, with a rustic appeal to look like stone. This was done to make use of local materials while mimicking the look of stone because that’s what’s was big at that time. Stone shows order and power which is meant to leave a statement. The two small projecting wings of the facade provided for office space and allowed for four large windows on the front as well as three small windows in the attic. It was th

Maison Carrée, (Nimes, Southern France); 2 AD; Roman

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Maison Carrée is a building in Nimes, France. Its name is French for “square house”. The construction of Maison Carrée was completed in 2 AD and it is one of the best preserved Roman temples. Originally, the Maison Carrée was dedicated to the grandsons of Augustus, a Roman statesman and military leader. The Maison Carrée is raised on a 2.85 m high podium and the temple itself forms a rectangle that is 26.42 m by 13.54 m. On the front of the temple, there are six Corinthian temples holding up the building. Along the sides, there are twenty columns that hold it up. The door is very large and measures 6.87 m high by 3.27 m wide but it leads to a small interior space with no windows. Over the years, the Maison Carrée went through many restorations. It used to be part of a large complex that joined with other buildings. They ended up being demolished because the Romans would have enjoyed the isolation that this temple ended up being in. The Maison Carrée ended up being inspiration for

The vienna secession

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The vienna secession The vienna secession was an art movement during 1897 by a group of Austrian artists who resigned from the AAA (Association of Austrian Artists). It is also the beginning of the modern art in Austria during that time Austria is known for their conservative traditional arts. Those artists who bravely left that association were the one thinking forwarded about the view of art.   Vienna was one of the capital from old Austria Hungary which was a region to different nationalities in Europe. The Empire of the Hungary remained undeveloped industrialization and also conservative political, culture, social and economic. Even though the empire has a lot of different metropolitans Vienna has been undisputed capital always.   Franz Joseph reminded in throne for 68 years till he died. But later on Vienna became home for a lot of artists due to the revolution movements. The goal of the Association of Austrian Artists were to explore their modern art with the public a