The New York Times Guide to Essential Knowledge: A Desk Reference for the Curious Mind

Table of Contents

Title Page

For The New York Times:

INTRODUCTION

THE FINE ARTS

ARCHITECTURE

A Brief History of Architecture

Non-Western Architecture

Glossary of Architectural Terms

ART

History of Art in the Western Tradition

PHOTOGRAPHY

A Technical History of Photography

An Art History of Photography

Glossary of Photographic Terms

LITERATURE

World Literature

English Poetry

The English Novel

American Literature

Popular Literature

Glossary of Literary Terms

Literary Criticism

Great Works of Western Literature

THE PERFORMING ARTS

MUSIC

History of Western Classical Music

Opera

The Human Voice

Musical Forms

Structure of the Symphony Orchestra

History of American Popular Music

Blues to Jazz: The Origins of Modern Popular Music

Modern American Popular Music

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

Country Music Hall of Fame

World Music

Musical Instruments

Glossary of Musical Terms

Music Notation

FILM

History of Film

International Film

Glossary of Film Terms

American Film Institute 100 Best American Movies

Great American Film Directors

DANCE

Ballet

Modern Dance

Social Dance

DRAMA

History of Western Drama

Shakespeare’s Major Plays

World Theater

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

ASTRONOMY

History of Astronomy

Techniques of Astronomy

Contents of the Universe

Glossary of Astronomical Terms

BIOLOGY

History of Biology

Taxonomy

Cell Biology

The Human Body

Evolution

Genetics

Ecology

Biochemistry

BOTANY

History of Botany

Fields of Botanical Study

Practical Uses of Botany

Plant Anatomy

Types of Plants

Plant Diseases and Disorders

ZOOLOGY

History of Zoology

Branches of Modern Zoology

Evolutionary History

Animal Characteristics

Phyla of the Kingdom Animalia

Vertebrate Zoology

Primates

THE ENVIRONMENT

Environment and Civilization

Environmentalism in the United States

Global Warming

The Ozone Layer

Biodiversity

Water

Air Pollution

Waste

Major Events in the History of the Environment

Glossary of Environmental Terms

GEOLOGY

History of Geology

Historical Geology

Physical Geology

Structural Geology

The Earth in Upheaval

Paleontology

CHEMISTRY

History of Chemistry

The Elements

Glossary of Chemistry Terms

PHYSICS

History of Physics

Basic Laws of Physics

Subatomic Particles

Glossary of Physics Terms

MATHEMATICS

History of Mathematics

Branches of Mathematics

Mathematical Formulas

Numbers and Number Systems

Probability

Glossary of Mathematical Terms

PSYCHOLOGY

A Brief History of Psychology

Disorders

Common Treatments

Glossary of Psychology Terms

MEDICINE

A Brief History of Medicine

Disease

Diagnostic Tests

Medications

TECHNOLOGY

History of Significant Technologies

Energy

History of Computing

The Internet

Glossary of Computer and Internet Terms

The History of Home Video Games

SOCIAL SCIENCES

HISTORY

World History

Major Wars in History

The Changing Face of War

Key Battles in World History

History of the United States

GEOGRAPHY

Climate and Weather

Glossary of Weather Words

The Continents

The United States

World Population

Oceans

Major Seas, Gulfs, and Straits of the World

Rivers and Canals of the World

Islands and Archipelagos of the World

Mountain Ranges

Glossary of Geographical Terms

Languages of the World

GOVERNMENT

Origins of Government

Government Systems

American Government

LAW

A Brief History of Law

The American Constitutional System

Criminal Law and Civil Law

Other Legal Systems

Important Supreme Court Decisions

Glossary of Legal Terms

The Constitution of the United States of America: An Annotated Guide

The Bill of Rights

Later Amendments

ANTHROPOLOGY

Branches of Anthropology

History of Anthropology

PHILOSOPHY, RELIGION & MYTHOLOGY

PHILOSOPHY

History of Western Philosophy

Glossary of Philosophy Terms

RELIGION

Judaism

Christianity

Islam

Hinduism

Buddhism

Other World Religions

New Religions

Atheism

Glossary of Religious Terms

The Bible

MYTHOLOGY

Classical Mythology

Mesopotamian Mythology

Egyptian Mythology

ECONOMICS & BUSINESS

ECONOMICS

Economic History

Microeconomics

Macroeconomics

International Economics

The European Union

Glossary of Economic Terms

BUSINESS

A Brief History of Business

Glossary of Business Terms

FINANCE

A Brief History of Finance

A Financial History of the United States

Stock Markets

Mutual Funds

Globalization of Finance

The Insurance Industry

Glossary of Finance Terms

MEDIA

PRINT MEDIA

Newspapers

Magazines

Books

ELECTRONIC MEDIA

Radio

Television

ADVERTISING

History of Advertising

SPORTS

BASEBALL

History

Rules of the Game

Glossary of Baseball Terms

The World Series

BASKETBALL

Rules and Conduct of Play

History of Basketball

Glossary of Basketball Terms

FOOTBALL

Rules and Conduct of Play

College Football

Professional Football

Professional Football Hall of Fame

ICE HOCKEY

History

Equipment, Rules, and Field of Play

Glossary of Ice Hockey Terms

GOLF

History

Rules of the Game

Glossary of Golf Terms

TENNIS

History of Tennis

Rules of the Game

Glossary of Tennis Terms

SOCCER

History

Rules of the Game

Club Soccer

Glossary of Soccer Terms

HORSE RACING

Origins

The Basics

History

OLYMPIC GAMES

History

TRACK AND FIELD

SWIMMING

History

The Sport of Swimming

The Olympics

AUTO RACING

Formula One

NASCAR

Indy Car

Le Mans

FOOD

THE GLOBAL FOOD SYSTEM

The Green Revolution

Growing Population

Global Food Supply Today

Global Hunger Today

DICTIONARY OF FOOD

Cereals and Grains

Fruit

Vegetables

Herbs

Spices

Salt

Fungi

Fish

Animal Foods

Dairy Foods

Chocolate, Coffee and Tea

Nuts

WINE

A Brief History of Wine

Regions

A Glossary of Wine Words

BEER

A Brief History

FOOD AND NUTRITION

Food and Nutrition

REFERENCE LIBRARY

A WRITER’S GUIDE

The Eight Parts of Speech

Basic Sentence Grammar

Punctuation

Mechanics

Spelling

Words Commonly Confused and Misused

Using Capitals

AWARDS AND PRIZES

Pulitzer Prizes

The Nobel Prizes

WEIGHTS AND MEASURES

Systems of Measurement

THE WONDERS OF THE WORLD

The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World

Other Wonders

Modern Wonders

The World Heritage Sites

U.S. STATES

U.S. States

NATIONS OF THE WORLD

The United Nations

PUZZLES

How to Solve The New York Times Crossword Puzzle

Concise Crossword Dictionary

CALENDARS & HOLY DAYS

Calendar of the Year

Holy Days

BIOGRAPHICAL DICTIONARY

INDEX

Copyright Page

For The New York Times:

Administration: Michael Greenspon, General Manager, News Services; Nancy Lee, Vice President and Executive Editor, News Services and Syndicate; Alex Ward, Editorial Director, Book Development; Mitchel Levitas, Executive Associate.

Featured Writers: Natalie Angier, Pam Belluck, Sandra Blakeslee, Graham Bowley, Jane E. Brody, Elisabeth Bumiller, Kenneth Chang, Celia W. Dugger, Justin Gillis, Michiko Kakutani, Michael Kimmelman, Anna Kisselgoff, Gina Kolata, Sonia Kolesnikov-Jessop, Alastair Macauley, Charles McGrath, Anahad O’Connor, Nicolai Ouroussoff, Dennis Overbye, Jon Pareles, Thom Shanker, Will Shortz, Brian Stelter, Anthony Tommasini, Hal Varian, Nicholas Wade, John Noble Wilford.

Contributors:

This book was assembled and edited by the staff of Elizabeth Publishing and by a group of academic and professional writers.

Elizabeth Publishing:

General Editor: John W. Wright

Executive Editors: Matt Fisher, Lisette Cheresson

Designer: Virginia Norey

Senior Writers and Editors:

Herb Addison (Architecture, Business, Economics); Ariana Brookes (Literature, Music, Reference Library); Ellen Chodosh (Medicine, Music, Dance); Philip Francis (Psychology, Biographies, Sports); Terry Golway (History); Colleen Hamilton, Ph.D. (Literature); C. Alan Joyce; Deborah Kaple, Ph.D. (Government); John Major, Ph.D. (Art, Religion, World History, Languages); David Major, Ph.D. (Anthropology, Chemistry, Economics, Environment, Geography, Religion); Michael Miller (Botany, Computers, Music, Zoology); Robert Murphy (Literature, Biographies); Lincoln Paine (Geography, History, Biographies); Lisa Renaud (Literature); Jenny Tesar (Biochemistry, Biology, Medicine, Nutrition).

Principal Contributors:

Christopher Anderson, Ph.D., Indiana University (Radio and Television); Bryan Bunch (Math, Physics); Richard Carlin (Popular Music, Dance); T. Susan Chang (Food); Michael Coffey (Baseball); Susan Doll (Film); Abigail Elbow (Photography); Alice Finer (Mythology, Biographies); Pete Fornatale (Sports); Kurt Hettler (Sports, Wine); Michael Kaufman, Ph.D., San Jose State University (Astronomy); Christine Leahy (Art, Biographies); Edward O’Donnell, Ph.D., Holy Cross College (American History); John Rosenthal (Business, Finance); Robert Sharp (Major Wars); Michael Signer, Ph.D., J.D. (Law); David Sobel (Geology); Murray Sperber, Ph.D., Indiana University (College Sports); Robert L. Spring (Literature); Karen Tolchin, Ph.D., Florida Gulf Coast University (American Literature); Harvey Wiener, Ph.D., formerly of City University of New York and Adelphi University (Writer’s Guide); Thomas Willkens (Philosophy).

Contributing Editors: Jeff Deeney, Andrea Galyean, Anna Kelman, Ben Keene, James McCaffery, Fred Riccardi, George L. Seibel IV, Laura Stickney, Randy Te Velde, Joseph Wiener, Saul Wiener.

Senior Copy Editors: Jerold Kappes, Susan Gamer.

INTRODUCTION

BY SAM TANENHAUS

Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts, Henry Adams remarks in The Education of Henry Adams, his classic autobiography, published in 1907, when its author was sixty-nine. Adams, he goes on, in the self-mocking third-person address he uses throughout, had looked at most of the accumulations of art in the storehouses called Art Museums; yet he did not know to look at the art-exhibits of 1900. He had studied Karl Marx and his doctrines of history with profound attention, yet he could not apply them at Paris.

This is the admission not of a man who disdains facts, but of one who had placed inordinate faith in them, though facts of a high order. Anyone who has worked his way through a chapter of Das Kapital or looked at the paintings in a single gallery of the Louvre instantly realizes he has entered a world in which facts of a particular kind—ice-hard atoms of observed reality—converge into interlocking systems, often governed by a single unifying principle. Adams, as it happened, hoped to achieve something like this himself. His life ambition was to find or invent a universal law that might bind together all the loose contradictory multiplicities he encountered in his relentless pursuit of truth. The search led him to investigate almost the entire range of available knowledge. A partial list of the disciplines he studied includes biology, geology, mathematics, magnetics, foreign languages, medieval architecture, international diplomacy, Washington politics, global finance, the art of the novel.

In this, Adams was following the dictates of his age’s intellectuals. What was the goal of reason if not to uncover the underlying meaning of things—of all things—and so achieve an exalted state of being? Knowledge enormous makes a god of me, John Keats had declared in Hyperion, an epic poem, meant to rival Paradise Lost, which Keats began and abandoned in his early twenties. True knowledge promised emancipation. This was also true for Marx as well as for others whose work Adams mastered: Charles Darwin, Charles Lyell, Thomas Macaulay. We might add later names, too: Durkheim, Einstein, Freud, Joyce, Picasso, Weber. Each was born in the 19th century. Each was a system-builder, a creator of cosmologies. And each, in his way, was a stepchild of the Enlightenment, the era that gave us the first true compendium of knowledge.

The book you’re now holding belongs to this tradition and so, quite properly, signals its debt in the following sentences: "In Paris a group of intellectuals led by Voltaire and Denis Diderot produced the first encyclopedia, which they claimed was based on rational and secular values. The Encylopédie consisting at first of 28 volumes was published in 1728 and was an immediate success."

The New York Times Guide to Essential Knowledge, now in its third edition, also encompasses much of the world, and in a single very large volume, though the range of facts is wide and, like its French forerunner, is anchored in its specific historical moment. Thus, the entry on books includes not only a concise survey of the great works of Western Literature but also a useful discussion of Popular genres, including romance fiction, science fiction and fantasy, and police procedurals. And why not, since today an accomplished literary writer like the Irish author John Banville, winner of the prestigious Booker Prize, doubles, under the pseudonym Benjamin Black, as the author of crime fiction?

The planet is more concretely knowable than in the days of Voltaire and Diderot. Eighteenth-century cartographers could only dream of a time when every great river could be measured. The editors of this book not only furnish the numbers, they have also ranked all the major rivers by length and so inform us that the Arkansas and Colorado rivers flow for exactly 1,450 miles, nearly as far as the Ganges (1,560 miles) and the Euphrates (1,510).

Any decent American fact-book should have a roster of Hall of Fame baseball players, complete with essential statistics. Once again, the editors of this book have added telling details. Who knew Paul Waner hit 62 doubles in 1932 or that Larry Doby, the American League’s first black player (overshadowed all those years and still today by the legend of Jackie Robinson) was a seven-time All Star and twice led his league in homers?

A good encyclopedia must be more than a compendium. If it is to be read, it must be written. Here is one choice sentence (from the entry on Beer Styles and Brewing Nations), on Bavarian brews: Hefeweizen or Hefeweissbier, has flavors and aromas that are banana-like, clove-like, or even akin to bubble-gum, while the darker Weizenbock or Weissbock tends to have a bready malt flavor and a caramel sweetness. Both are lightly hopped.

It is fair to ask, with Henry Adams, what all these pleasures add up to, if anything at all. The French encyclopedists, again, offered a distinctive vision. As our latter-day editors note of their antecedents, "Many of these philosophes were atheists, although not all of them professed their non-belief in public." Today this non-belief seems ablaze with spiritual purpose, set forth in Encyclopédie’s most celebrated passage, its preliminary discourse, composed by the mathematician and philosopher Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, who asked, Are not the ideas of ‘all,’ of ‘part,’ of ‘larger,’ and of ‘smaller,’ strictly speaking, the same simple and individual idea, since we cannot have the one without all the others presenting themselves at the same time? And if so, couldn’t this same truth be applied across the widest conceivable spectrum, until the universe, if we may be permitted to say so, would only be one fact and one great truth for whoever knew how to embrace it from a single point of view? In other words, the encyclopedists were intent not simply on disproving inherited orthodoxies or ancient superstitions, but on replacing them with a newer, truer revelation.

Are the editors of The New York Times Guide to Essential Knowledge also saying something like that? Is this book too meant to defy religious teachings or at least espouse a post-religious position? If so, there’s no hint of it in the many pages here on the world’s religions, with particular emphasis on the three major monotheisms, or in the discussion of the Books of the Bible, Old Testament and New. Some may think the editors’ inclusive ecumenicalism muddles the issue. Others may accuse them of wanting their truth both ways—that is, of being craftily political or politically correct. Diderot and d’Alembert, proud in their ultra-rationalism, at least let us know where they stood. Why can’t our 21st-century encyclopedists do the same?

Here’s one reason. In many areas the old debates have been exhausted. Of course there remain fervent advocates on both sides (and the most engaged combatants, or fundamentalists, will bristle even at the suggestion that there are two legitimate sides). But as a general rule the intellectual climate has changed, the monistic ideal has given way to the pluralistic. This isn’t surprising or shouldn’t be. Most of us, born in the 20th century and adjusting to the 21st, have learned to distrust monism, whether religious or secular, because it inclines toward absolutism. And the absolutist, we have also learned, is not content to accumulate inert facts. Instead he marshals them in a cause, or crusade, with results that are often catastrophic.

But pluralism poses dangers too. The worst is the discrediting of the very idea of authority—authority in the sense of earned respect (as distinct from power, which is ruthlessly imposed). If our moment has its own secular belief, it is the insistent hope that in the digital age, with more facts available than ever before, the highest authority rests in numerical consensus, whether calculated algorithmically via visits and hits or computed by likes and follow buttons. It is the doctrine of tabulation. Some 900,000 blog posts, 50 million tweets, more than 60 million Facebook status updates, and 210 billion emails are sent off into the electronic either every day, Eli Pariser estimates in The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding from You. He informs us as well that Eric Schmidt, the Google executive, likes to point out that if you recorded all human communications from the dawn of time to 2003, it’d take up about 5 billion gigabytes of storage space. Now we’re creating that much data every two days.

What this doesn’t tell us is how much of this data is either useful or true. Data was once a synonym for facts. Today it is absorbed into the category of information where it is entangled with its damaged offspring misinformation and disinformation.

Best, in this discussion of fact, to admit an obvious one: If you type any of the entries found in this guide into Google you’ll instantly get information—particles of fact that will direct you to other facts and with luck, deliver the answer you had been seeking. But this book makes a bolder promise. Its proffered information will guide us toward knowledge. This last word says much.

Even the casual browser of this book expresses a form of faith in its editors and contributors, faith in the reliability of the many facts they present and also in the interlocking system they have devised. Expect a good deal from it, but not overly much. Henry Adams, who was quite possibly the best informed American of his time, reminds us continually that his prodigious education amounted to no education at all. Not that his ignorance troubled him! He knew enough to be ignorant. His course led him through oceans of ignorance; he had tumbled from one ocean into another till he had learned to swim.

To swim is to be in constant motion, taking the facts as we meet them, but always testing them against our own experience, until we arrive at something like the truth.

Sam Tanenhaus is the editor of The New York Times Book Review and the author of Whittaker Chambers: A Biography and The Death of Conservatism.

THE FINE ARTS

ARCHITECTURE

A Brief History of Architecture

Noted architectural historian Spiro Kostof stated: Architecture, in the end, is nothing more, and nothing less than the gift of making places for some human purpose. This almost deceptively simple definition captures the essence of what we call architecture. The definition is broad enough to include the Paleolithic caves inhabited by early humans, the great Gothic cathedrals, and modern Levittowns of hundreds of nearly identical suburban houses.

The characteristics of individual works of architecture reflect this definition and derive from the interplay of three elements that are inseparable from one another: purpose, the reason for the building to exist; design, the shape that a building takes in response to its perceived purpose; and structure, the way the building is put together out of its constituent parts.

Paleolithic Architecture

The earliest known humans who left evidence of their dwelling places were hunters who followed migratory game herds and did not establish permanent living places. They did, however, seek shelter in caves and huts to which they regularly returned. These primitive dwellings were the earliest beginnings of architecture.

Caves Beginning around 40,000 years ago in Europe, the modern humans who displaced the earlier Neanderthals began to create domestic and ceremonial spaces in caves that were often elaborately decorated with wall paintings. A typical example is the cave at Lascaux in southwestern France, which was inhabited between 10,000 and 20,000 years ago. Not only does it contain evidence of daily life, but its walls are painted with pictures of animals and humans of exquisite sensitivity; these paintings are believed to have had religious or magical significance.

Structures The earliest known structures built by humans (Homo erectus) are at Terra Amata in southern France, dating to about 380,000 years ago. The site consists of some 20 huts built of branches held in place by large stones arrayed in oval rings. Small groups of people occupied the encampment regularly each late spring, leaving it abandoned until the following spring.

Ice-age huts built of mammoth bones that would have been covered by hides have been found at many sites in eastern Europe, including a famous example at Mezhirich, Ukraine, dating to about 15,000 years ago.

Neolithic Architecture

A warming climate about 10,000–12,000 years ago brought about the end of the last ice age. Improved techniques of managing game herds and harvesting wild plants led to an increase in population, which in turn required more intensive development of food sources. As people began growing crops and domesticating animals they began to form permanent, settled communities.

Dwellings Neolithic people in many parts of the world built small houses of woven tree limbs, pitched roofs, roof beams held up by supporting posts, and walls filled in with mud. In some places the houses were large enough to accommodate numbers of families, and in other places groups of houses were ringed by stones with paths between them defined by rows of stones.

Monuments In parts of western Europe from the Neolithic period through the Bronze Age and into the Iron Age, people built circular or linear arrays of stone (megaliths) of surprising size and complexity. Many of these ceremonial monuments still exist, the most famous of which is Stonehenge, in southwest England. There, from about 2750 to 1500 B.C., successive builders erected enormous stones in circular formations. There are many theories to explain the purpose of Stonehenge. The inner circles open toward a stone over which the sun rises on the summer solstice. The prodigious effort of construction and the elaborate layout of the stones suggest that Stonehenge must have been a ceremonial place central to the builders’ culture.

Western Asian Architecture

In the area of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in western Asia, Neolithic settlements became larger, wealthier, and socially more complex. With the rise of civilization beginning about 7500 B.C., people gathered together in cities and produced a profusion of impressive architecture.

Western Asian builders invented construction methods that were as important as their architectural forms. An absence of large stones for building, especially for long beams between columns, forced builders to find other ways of covering wide enclosed spaces. These included the round arch built of voussoirs (wedgeshaped stones or bricks) and the dome. In later times arches and domes would become central to some of the greatest works of architecture.

Towns and Cities The earliest surviving evidence of a town is Jericho on the Jordan River, where settlement began around 7500 B.C. Built largely of mud bricks and in successive waves of construction, the settlement already showed traits that would characterize later cities: a population much larger than prehistoric villages, a perimeter wall to defend against enemies, and public buildings set among private dwellings.

Temples and Ziggurats With the growth of cities, organized, state-sponsored religions appeared, and temples became a key element in the urban fabric. Temples evolved from small shrines in prehistoric villages into one of the most striking forms of architecture, the ziggurat. In its classic form, the ziggurat was a stepped pyramid set on a platform with stairs leading to the summit—a place nearest to heaven—where the supreme god was worshipped. The ziggurat of Ur-Nammu in Ur, built around 2000 B.C., is a well-known example.

In the first millennium B.C., temples of the Assyrian Empire (in present-day Iraq) were elaborately decorated with free-standing stone sculptures and narrative sculptural reliefs. One of the finest monuments of late Mesopotamian architecture, the Ishtar Gate of the Babylonian Empire (ca. 575 B.C., now at the Staatliche Museum, Berlin) is made of blue-glazed brick and decorated with reliefs of bulls and other sacred animals.

Palaces As the social order became more complex, the ruler became more dominant and palaces began to overshadow ziggurats. Huge palaces were built by the Assyrian kings. Rock-cut tombs and cities of the eastern Mediterranean, such as the city of Petra (in present-day Jordan) show Greek influence, as do the buildings of the Persian Empire, rivals of the Greeks. The palaces of Persepolis (in what is now west-central Iran) exemplify the sophistication and imagination achieved by the Persian architects. Built by Darius (ca.550–486 B.C.) and his son Xerxes (519–465 B.C.), the complex includes both Greek-influenced hypostyle (having roofs supported by columns) temples and palaces and Mesopotamian-style narrative sculptural reliefs.

Egyptian Architecture

At the same time that literate city-states were forming in western Asia, people along the Nile River in northern Africa were also developing an advanced civilization. In contrast to western Asia, there was an abundance of sandstone, limestone, and granite with which to build.

Tombs and Pyramids Early Egyptian kings were considered gods, and their tombs reflect the importance of perpetuating their life after death. One of the first architects of record was Imhotep, who designed the pyramid complex at Saqqara in 2680 B.C. as King Zoser’s tomb. Equally famous are the three pyramids at Giza, built about 2570–2500 B.C. The largest and oldest of these, the pyramid of Cheops, was originally 482 feet high and 760 feet square, and occupies about 13 acres. The manipulation of the huge stones used to build these structures required both the large-scale mobilization of labor and the invention of ingenious engineering techniques.

Temples Later pharaohs were buried in more modest tombs, furnished with sculptures and painted pictorial reliefs. For example, the tombs of Mentuhotep, about 2050 B.C., and Queen Hatshepsut, about 1500 B.C., at Deir el-Bahri, are considerably smaller than the pyramids at Giza. The temple replaced the tomb as Egypt’s dominant architectural work. The temple of Karnak—dedicated to the sun god Amon—was built in stages over a period from about 1525 B.C. to about 1350 B.C.; Karnak’s hypostyle hall is one of the great works of ancient architecture.

Greek Architecture

The architectural building types and orders developed in Greece began a long evolution in European, and eventually American, architecture that continued well into the 20th century. Early Greek building was influenced by both the monumental Egyptian buildings and the use of columns to achieve a powerful visual effect. Greek architects brought the hypostyle building to an unprecedented level of beauty and refinement. An abundance of fine-grained native marble provided them with an excellent building material.

Temples The most important and influential Greek building was the temple. Greeks believed in a pantheon of gods, and temples were dedicated to individual gods. The temple form began evolving in the 11th and 12th centuries B.C., took its characteristic form during the period beginning in 700 B.C., and reached a high point of refinement after 400 B.C.

Temples in their final form were set on a stylobate, a rectangular platform of three steps. A peristyle, a row of columns, was placed at the periphery. The columns supported a horizontal entablature. At the short ends a triangular pediment closed the ends of the pitched roof. Within the peristyle was a cella, or naos, a structure that housed a statue of the dedicated god or goddess and associated treasures.

Architectural Orders Greek architects also developed architectural orders called Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian. Each is easily distinguished by its fluted columns.

The Doric order was the first developed, and its column has a simple capital between the shaft and the entablature. The proportion of the width to height is less than in later orders; the effect of a Doric temple is of superbly proportioned solidity. The best known Doric temple is the Parthenon on the Acropolis in Athens (447–432 B.C.), dedicated to the goddess Athena and designed by the architects Callicrates and Iktinos.

The Ionic order denotes a style of columns that have a capital with scroll-like volutes that spread the load where the column meets the entablature. The column is more slender than the Doric, giving Ionic temples a graceful appearance. The Erechtheion (421–405 B.C.) on the Acropolis in Athens, is an example that also includes a porch with carayatids, draped female figures, taking the place of columns that support a roof structure.

The Corinthian order, though not often employed by the Greeks, is distinguished by column capitals with acanthus leaves. The columns are tall and graceful like the Ionic and support Doric or Ionic entablatures interchangeably. One of the few examples is the Olympieion in Athens designed by the Greeks but built by the Romans.

Other Building Types Though the Greek temple became a seminal icon for future architects, the Greeks developed other building types that provided models for Western architecture. The open-air theater, usually carved from a hillside, consisted of an orchestra, stage, and auditorium. The stadion, an athletic arena, was long and narrow, straight at one end and circular at the other, with tiered rows of seats on three sides. Greek democracy was reflected in the agora, an open-air forum where citizens gathered to hear speeches, discuss issues, shop, and socialize. And sometimes adjoining the agora was the stoa, a simple structure, usually long and narrow, with a flat or pitched roof that housed court sessions, shops, banquets, and public gatherings in general.

Roman Architecture

The Romans were great empire builders and equally great architectural builders. As they conquered societies from western Asia to the Atlantic Ocean, they created daring new structures as they shaped their architecture in the service of an imperial society. Roman ideas about architecture are known from the writings of the architect and theorist Marcus Vitruvius Pollio (46–30 B.C.), whose Ten Books on Architecture remains one of the most important works ever written on the subject.

Roman architects copied the true arch, using voussior stones, from Etruscan buildings in the north. The arch and its expanded variants were crucial to the prodigious achievements of Roman architects. Extend an arch in a single direction and the result is a barrel vault; a barrel vault intersected by another barrel vault is a groin vault; an arch rotated through 180° becomes a dome. These structural elements are very common in Roman buildings.

The Italian peninsula provided a variety of building materials, including travertine, tufa, peperino, lava, and marble, as well as sand and gravel. The latter were basic to the Roman invention of concrete, which allowed them to create unprecedented new building forms. Sand mixed with lime and water became very hard and, when shaped by wooden forms, liberated Roman architecture from the limitations of post-and-lintel structures.

Forums The evolution of Roman forums reflects changes in Roman governance. When Rome became a republic in about 500 B.C., nominally governed by elected representatives, Roman architects adapted the Greek agora for their forums. The Roman Forum in the heart of the city of Rome is the most important of its kind, and its ruins today give a sense of its scope.

As the empire grew through conquest and political power passed from the people to the emperor, later forums were constructed more to impress the populace with the majesty of the emperor than as democratic meeting places. Adjacent to the Roman Forum are the more impressive imperial forums of the Emperors Vespian, Augustus, and Trajan.

Temples Roman temples began by imitating the Greek peristyle, but with columns that engaged the cella instead of standing free. Roman architects freely used the Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian orders, even mixing them on the same building. To the three Greek orders, Roman architects added the Tuscan and Composite orders. Tuscan columns had a plain capital similar to Doric, but were not fluted. Composite capitals blended Ionic volutes with Corinthian acanthus leaves.

The Romans were not bound by past examples, however, and created new architectural forms for worship. The Pantheon in Rome is a round structure with a portico and crowned by a magnificent dome that is just over 142 feet across and 142 feet high. The rotunda was constructed in A.D. 120–127 and, though the building has undergone changes over the years, it is in good condition and preserves the impressive feeling of the great space under the dome.

Baths The Romans were fond of bathing, and public baths were important elements of civic architecture throughout the empire. Some were enormous and architecturally complex. The buildings enclosed three main rooms visited sequentially by the bathers—the warm room (Tepidarium), the hot room (Calidarium), and the cool room (Frigidarium). Wide barrel-vaulted ceilings covered many of the rooms, and beneath the floor were systems of ducts that brought hot air from nearby furnaces to heat the rooms.

Theaters and Amphitheaters Other places of diversions for citizens of the Roman Empire were theaters and amphitheaters. Roman theaters were similar to Greek theaters except for the decreased size of the orchestra between the auditorium and the stage. Roman builders also built free-standing theaters instead of carving them out of convenient hills, as with the Theater of Marcellus in Rome, built in 23–13 B.C.

The amphitheater, either round or oval, with seating surrounding the arena, was a Roman invention. The Colosseum in Rome, completed in A.D. 80, seated 50,000 spectators and is a structure of great complexity, including stairs and aisles to the seats, and a labyrinthine system of rooms and passages under the arena for animals, workers, and machinery.

Aqueducts and Bridges Roman engineers understood hydrodynamics and built large arched aqueducts to carry water across rivers and ravines to large cities throughout their empire. The Aqua Claudio aqueduct (A.D. 38–52) serving Rome is a well-preserved example, as are the Pont du Garde (ca. 19 B.C.) in Nimes, France, and the Segovia aqueduct (ca. A.D. 100) in Spain, in use until the late 19th century. Roman bridges were arched structures similar to aqueducts.

Basilicas Adjacent to most forums were basilicas, which contained law courts and commercial activities. Basilicas were often rectangular, with the length twice as long as the width, and featured a central nave, two or four lower side aisles, and a circular apse at one or both ends with seating and an altar for sacrifices before ceremonies. Two rows of columns supported the nave ceiling in the four-aisle model, two more rows of columns supported the two-aisle ceiling. Often clerestory windows in the nave walls above the aisles admitted light into the interior. The ceilings were either timber trusses or barrel vaults.

Early Christian and Byzantine Architecture

In the centuries following the death of Jesus of Nazareth the fabric of the Roman Empire began to weaken. As the populace began to convert to Christianity, they needed new places of public worship.

Basilican Churches In contrast to Greek and Roman temples that enclosed statues of the deities while worshipers gathered outside, Christians brought worshipers indoors. For this they developed the rectangular basilican church, a building creatively adapted from the Roman model.

Romans entered basilicas on the long side, but Christians entered their churches through an atrium, an open colonnaded court at the end. Crossing the atrium, worshipers entered the church proper through a narthex vestibule, into a central nave covered by a timber roof where they heard the services. At the far end was a half-domed apse derived from the Roman apse. In front of the apse was an ambo, or pulpit, for Bible reading and services. Early churches were oriented with the apse facing west while the priest faced east toward the congregation. The basilican church became the basis for Christian churches for centuries thereafter.

Byzantine Architecture In A.D. 330, the Christian emperor Constantine I moved the capital of the empire to Byzantium (later called Constantinople, now Istanbul), on the Bosporus Strait. Byzantium offered no good building stones, which forced builders to import marble and other fine stones; it also fostered the use of concrete, which made possible bold new interior spaces.

Byzantine architects found a new expression for Christian worship beyond the rectangular early Christian churches. Borrowing the western Asian dome, they created interiors of soaring spaces. They solved the problem of placing a circular dome over a square space by inventing the pendentive, a triangular piece in the corners to provide the transition between the square and the dome. The outward thrust of the dome was transferred to half-domes at the sides, or to buttresses. Inside, the architects enhanced the effect of the space with glittering mosaics. The supreme example of Byzantine ecclesiastical design is Hagia Sophia, the Church of the Holy Wisdom, in Constantinople; it was designed by the architects Anthemios of Tralles and Isidoros of Miletus, and built in 532–537.

Romanesque Architecture

After the fall of Rome in A.D. 476, the early Christian basilican church underwent gradual changes. Eventually this gave rise to a new form, called Romanesque, that spread rapidly beginning in the 11th century. There was no pure form of Romanesque; each country’s culture, available building materials, and climate shaped its version of the Romanesque church.

Italy The spatial organization of Italian Romanesque churches is different from early Christian churches, though they continue a basic basilican plan. The atrium is abandoned in favor of a decorative treatment of the western façade leading directly to the narthex. The transept, an intersecting structure at 90° to the axis of the nave, forms a Latin cross with the nave; the chancel is extended beyond the transept, with the apse terminating the central interior space in the east. Rounded arches and wood-trussed ceilings are carried over from early Christian churches, but barrel vaults now frequently replace timber ceilings. Towers are added either attached or separate from the church.

Italian Romanesque churches, with the availability of fine stones such as marble, were often faced in contrasting colorful marbles and had small windows to filter the bright sunlight. A striking example is Pisa Cathedral, built in 1063–1092. The exterior is faced with alternating bands of red and white marble, and the west façade is enlivened with rows of arcades.

France In the south, French Romanesque churches often had only a nave with no aisles, while in the north there were aisles and a nave. Windows were narrow, especially in the sunny south. Saint Sernin in Toulouse, built in 1080–96, is a well-preserved example of southern French Romanesque; the Abbaye-aux-Hommes in Caen, also known as Saint Etienne, built in 1066–77, is a splendid example of northern Romanesque.

Germany German Romanesque churches differ from Italian and French by including more towers, transepts, and apses at both east and west ends. Windows are larger and roofs steeper to shed winter snow. The availability of suitable stone varied with region and resulted in stone construction in some places and brick in others. A fine example of German Romanesque is Worms Cathedral, built in 1110–81.

Gothic Architecture

In the 12th century, political and religious competition played a major role in the development of a new kind of architecture that came to be called Gothic. While Gothic builders produced many important halls and castles, their supreme achievement was in the equipoise of the elements of architecture—purpose, design, and structure—in Gothic cathedrals.

France Gothic architecture began in France. The kings of France sought to consolidate their power over the monasteries that owed their allegiance to the pope, and they wanted an architectural expression different from the Romanesque monasteries. Just north of Paris, Abbé Suger responded by creating the first Gothic choir at Saint-Denis, begun in 1144.

Three structural elements are at the heart of Gothic cathedrals: the pointed arch, the ribbed vault, and the flying buttress. Gothic builders created an entirely new ecclesiastical expression with these structural elements. Walls, freed from having to support heavy vaults, could be much lighter and pierced by large clerestory windows that could rise to the vaults themselves. The ribbed vaulting and flying buttresses allowed the height of the nave to be built higher and higher. The exteriors of Gothic cathedrals were carved in a delicate profusion of statues, windows, and arcades that often combined with towers on the western end to give a sense of verticality to the whole.

The unique power of the Gothic cathedrals, however, was the result both of their structure and of the interior that the structure created. The great height of the naves, with the pointed vaults and clerestory windows, drew the eyes of worshipers upward toward heaven. Multicolored light filtering through the stained glass windows created a feeling of reverence that was enhanced by the biblical scenes in the windows that served to instruct worshipers.

The choir at Saint-Denis was almost immediately emulated as cities in the Île-de-France, the area surrounding Paris, competed to erect higher and more elegant Gothic cathedrals. First was Chartres (1140–1260), followed by Notre Dame in Paris (1163–1235), Rheims (1212–1300), Amiens (1220–1280), and others.

Germany French Gothic soon spread across Europe, and in Germany this often took the form of the hall church, in which the aisles were the same height as the nave. The Frauenkirche in Nuremberg (1354–61) is an example, as is Cologne cathedral (1248–1880).

Spain Spain enthusiastically embraced Gothic architecture. The result was a number of fine cathedrals and churches in major cities, including Toledo (1226–1493), Burgos (1220–1500), and Seville (1401–1520)—the largest medieval cathedral in Europe.

Italy With a few exceptions, Italy seemed inhibited by its classical heritage and never caught the spirit of French Gothic, beyond employing pointed vaulting and windows. For example, Siena cathedral (1245–1380), with its thick walls without flying buttresses, lacks the Gothic verticality found elsewhere in Europe. Milan cathedral (1385–1485) in the north (closer to the influence of France and Germany) is a notable exception, with its delicate pinnacles, flying buttresses, and high stained glass windows.

England After the Norman conquest in 1066, England began importing ideas, words, and architecture from France. The first Gothic cathedral was erected at Canterbury (1174–1400), designed initially by William of Sens (d. ca. 1180) from France. Many Gothic cathedrals and churches followed, among which are Salisbury (1220–58), Westminster Abbey in London (1245–1740), and York Minster (1261–1324). With their lower vaults, extended choirs, and square apses, English Gothic cathedrals have their own character in the canon of Gothic architecture.

Renaissance Architecture

In the late Middle Ages, scholars began to rediscover the classical writings of ancient philosophers and scientists, and there was a growing humanistic rejection of the medieval world, including Gothic architecture. Architects, now considered artists rather than simply master builders like their medieval predecessors, became individually identified with their buildings; many drew inspiration from the classical models of Greece and Rome, and included rounded arches in their designs.

Italy The problem facing Renaissance architects was to adapt classical models to buildings that did not exist in ancient times. A competition held in 1418 to design a dome to complete the cathedral of Florence that had been begun in 1296 during the Gothic era was won by Filippo Brunelleschi (1377–1446). His design is a masterpiece of blending a Renaissance dome with an Italian Gothic cathedral.

In Rome, St. Peter’s Church was begun in 1506 by Donato Bramante (1444–1514). After his death, a succession of architects changed the design several times until Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564) was brought in at the age of 72 to redesign the structure, including the dome.

The Renaissance architect with the longest-lasting influence was Andrea Palladio (1508–1580), who worked in Venice and Vicenza. A number of his villas, including the Villa Capra (1560’s)—also known as the Rotonda—set the design for centuries of domestic and public architecture. His influence was also spread by his Four Books on Architecture, a theoretical work of idealized buildings that ranks among the most important written works about architecture. In it he implicitly rejected the Gothic style while paying tribute to the Romans—who, he said, in building well, vastly excelled all those who have [lived] since their time.

France In France Italian Renaissance architecture became the model for a number of châteaux and palaces, including the Palais de Fountainebleau (1528), designed by Gilles Le Breton (1506?–58). But the transition from Gothic was not always smooth; Saint Eustache in Paris (1532–89), begun as a Gothic church, was finished in Renaissance details, including round arches.

Germany Renaissance architecture came slowly to Germany and had a limited impact there. Heidelberg Castle (1513–1612) had many additions over time that reflect different periods of German Renaissance architecture. Political and religious turmoil in Germany inhibited the building of significant new churches during the 16th and 17th centuries, limiting the influence of the Renaissance style.

Spain Spain’s wealth and power rose to its zenith during the Renaissance, and its architects had ample opportunities for major works. King Philip II built the imposing palace of San Lorenzo de El Escorial (1559–84) near Madrid, begun by Juan Bautista de Toledo (?–1567) and finished by Juan de Herrera (1530?–97). Granada cathedral (1529), designed by Diego de Siloe (1495?–1563), is a fine example of a Spanish Renaissance church.

England Renaissance architecture came last to England, and was practiced while the Continent was entering the Baroque period. Inigo Jones (1573–1652) studied in Italy, especially Palladio’s buildings, and his subsequent work strongly influenced English Renaissance design. Jones’s Banqueting House in London (1619–21) is a famous example of his work. The Great London fire of 1666 provided Christopher Wren (1632–1723) the opportunity to design many parish churches of ingeniously differing designs, as well as Saint Paul’s Cathedral (1675–1710), with its monumental western façade, splendid dome, and barrel-vaulted interior.

Baroque Architecture

The term Baroque (possibly from the Portuguese word barroco, an irregularly shaped pearl) was originally used to mean grotesque, excessive, or bizarre. Baroque architecture created palaces and churches characterized by elaborate and often fanciful decorative elements.

Churches The great Baroque Catholic churches were designed and built after the Counter-Reformation. Giovanni Lorenzo Bernini (1598–1680), one of the great Baroque architects, asserted that churches should reach out to Catholics in order to reaffirm their faith, to heretics to reunite them with the church, and to agnostics to enlighten them with the true faith. Bernini is best known for the magnificent colonnade (1629–62) that forms the piazza in front of the entrance façade of Saint Peter’s.

Baroque architects manipulated interior spaces to be more plastic and flowing than ordered Renaissance spaces. Using stucco, an inexpensive and infinitely malleable material, they created free-flowing surfaces and elaborate decorations that would have been too expensive to carve in marble and other fine stonework.

Francesco Boromini (1599-1667) was one of the most daring in manipulating spaces. His church of San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane (1638–41) in Rome, with its oval plan, curvilinear walls, and dome that flows up from the walls, is a superb example of Baroque architecture.

Palaces and Gardens French Baroque architecture was expressed most characteristically in palaces and their associated gardens. Until the late 17th century, the Louvre in Paris was the king’s official residence, and successive kings enlarged it, joined it to the Tuileries palace, and extended an elaborately planned garden, designed by André Le Notre (1613–1700), along the banks of the Seine. The buildings themselves were restrained and classic—hardly the Baroque of Italian churches—but their relationship to the extended garden created a new sense of transition between the city and the palace.

When King Louis XIV decided to move his main residence to Versailles in 1677, he greatly enlarged the existing palace into the largest in Europe. He also commissioned Le Notre to lay out the gardens. The palace and gardens, with their enormous scope and subtle symmetry, became the model for palaces throughout Europe, such as the Hermitage and other palaces along the Neva River in Peter the Great’s new Russian capital of St. Petersburg.

The Baroque was succeeded by the Rococo style, even more refined and decorative and often incorporating chinoiserie and other exotic elements. A noted example is Frederick the Great’s summer palace, Sans-Souci (1745–47), at Potsdam.

18th- and 19th-Century Architecture

The Age of Enlightenment—led by philosophers and scientists who relied on the power of reason to challenge accepted values and beliefs—had a profound and lasting impact on architecture. No longer were architects and their patrons certain about the immutable models of the Greek, Roman, Gothic, or Baroque builders. Architects of the Enlightenment created a welter of movements, revival styles, and schools that vied with one another for supremacy.

One such movement was neoclassicism, which stripped excess ornament from Baroque forms to reveal their basic geometry. A related movement in Great Britain was the 18th-century Georgian style of domestic architecture, championed by the brothers James Adam (1728–92) and Robert Adam (1730–94); notable examples are the terraced houses at Bath and the New Town district of Edinburgh. The first half of the 19th century also saw a Gothic revival, such as the English Houses of Parliament (1835–70) by Charles Barry (1795–1860) and Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin (1812–52). In Germany the Gothic revival resulted in the scrupulous completion of Cologne cathedral in the 19th century from medieval designs.

Classicism was not dead during this period, but it took new forms. An important impetus to rethinking classicism was the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, formed after the French revolution in 1789; it taught that classical forms could be adapted to new kinds of buildings, such as bridges and office buildings. Its students, who came from a number of countries, returned home to produce new buildings in the classical manner. Examples are found virtually everywhere in Europe.

Technology Until the 19th century, most large buildings were constructed of stone, masonry, and wood. The Industrial Revolution yielded two new materials of great importance to architects: inexpensive iron, and glass produced on a large scale. When iron became cheaper than masonry, some 19th-century architects recognized its expressive potential. For example, Pierre-François-Henri Labrouste (1801–75) designed the library of Sainte-Geneviève (1838–50) and the Bibliothèque Nationale (1854–75) in Paris using classical Roman forms, but with iron construction and ample glass fenestration.

Probably the most striking iron and glass building of its time was the Crystal Palace in London, designed by Joseph Paxton (1803–65) for the Great Exhibition of 1851. Assembled entirely of cast iron members, standard sheets of glass, and wooden supports, the transparent building showed the world that new kinds of architectural experiences were possible using industrial technology.

The Skyscraper As land prices rose steadily in the heart of rapidly growing cities, there was a need to make maximum use of a given lot. The answer was to build vertically, and the industrial age had provided the means: the development of steel as a construction material, and the invention of the elevator.

The type of building that became known as the skyscraper was born in Chicago, where two visionary architects grappled with the aesthetics of tall building design. William Le Baron Jenney (1832–1907) and Louis Henri Sullivan (1856–1924) pushed their buildings up to new heights and clothed them in ways that plainly celebrated their verticality. Sullivan’s Wainright Building in St. Louis (1890–91) epitomizes his famous statement that a tall building must be every inch a proud and soaring thing. The maxim that form follows function—that is, the look of a building must be subordinate to its purpose—is also attributed to Sullivan, and was later taken up by 20th-century architects.

Modern Architecture

Architecture at the dawn of the 20th century underwent a seismic change as significant as any in its history. An American architect and a small group of European architects broke free from historical models and created a new architecture called modern. This new architecture was enabled by a new material, reinforced concrete, that combined the compressive strength of concrete with the tensile strength of steel and could be shaped into structures that were previously impossible.

Frank Lloyd Wright A seminal modern architect, Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959) paradoxically influenced but stood apart from nearly all of his modernist contemporaries. After serving an apprenticeship with Louis Sullivan, Wright opened his own office in 1893 and began designing houses in the Chicago suburbs. By the early 1900’s, he had developed his distinctive Prairie houses with their open plans arranged around large central fireplaces, and hovering hipped roofs parallel to the ground. The Robie House (1906–10) in Chicago is a masterpiece of Prairie design. Wright also produced two major large works that had a lasting impact on European architects, Unity Temple (1904) in the suburb of Oak Park, and the Larkin Company Administration Building (1903–06, demolished) in Buffalo.

Some of Wright’s greatest works, which were at odds with orthodox modernism, came after he turned 60 years old. In the 1930’s he surprised the architectural world with Fallingwater (1936–38), a country residence in western Pennsylvania with cantilevered reinforced concrete terraces built over a stream, as well as the curvilinear brick Johnson Wax Building (1936–37) in Racine, Wisconsin. His Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (1956–59) in New York City, with its spiral exhibition ramp, is a major work realized in his last years.

But Wright’s Usonian houses, designed in the 1930’s to be affordable to middle-class owners, were perhaps his most important achievement. The Herbert Jacobs House (1936) in Madison, Wisconsin, was an early example of his method of conserving of space by allowing the living room-dining room-kitchen to flow into one another without walls. Countless tract homes, including the post-World War II Levittowns, later mirrored his conservation of interior space.

Early European Modernists In 1910–11 the German publisher Wasmuth brought out two illustrated volumes of Wright’s work that caught the imagination of his European contemporaries. European architects quickly grasped the spirit of Wright’s rejection of historical models, his free flow of interior spaces, and the beauty of the sensitively proportioned plain exterior surfaces.

Five significant European architects developed a functional approach to design, using modern materials primarily in large commercial buildings: Peter Behrens (1868–1940), who designed a notable turbine factory in Berlin (1908–09); Otto Wagner (1841–1918), who designed Vienna’s Post Office Savings Bank (1904–06); Adolf Loos (1878–1933), who designed Vienna’s starkly geometric Steiner House (1910); Hendrik Petrus Berlage (1856–1934), who designed the Amsterdam Stock Exchange (1898–1903); and Auguste Perret (1874–1954), who designed the church of Notre Dame in Le Raincy (1922–24).

Bauhaus and the International Style One of Peter Behrens’s young assistants, Georg Walter Adolf Gropius (1883–1969), went on to surpass his mentor in his contribution to modern architecture. His major influence began in 1919, when he founded the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany, a school that combined craftsmanship with design and brought together artisans, painters, sculptors, and architects.

In 1926 Gropius moved the Bauhaus to Dessau, into a radical new building complex he had designed that was laid out on a pinwheel plan and constructed of concrete, steel, and glass. It became an icon of what came to be called the International Style. The interconnecting buildings were designed to foster the interaction of designers and craftspeople to create mass-produced furniture, utilitarian household objects, and low-cost housing. The ideal of inexpensive mass-produced items was never achieved, but some Bauhaus designs, especially furniture, have ironically become widely sold as luxury items.

The last director of the Bauhaus (appointed in 1930) was Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886–1969), born Ludwig Mies. Mies’s stature does not rest on his association with the Bauhaus, however, but with his many buildings based on an intense study of new building materials, their aesthetic potential, and the plasticity of architectural space. He developed his ideas in a series of houses built over a 10-year period, culminating in the Tugendhat House (1928–1930) in Brno, Czech Republic. The house stands on a sloping site, constructed of concrete and steel, with carefully defined interpenetrating living spaces, and a glass wall facing the view, part of which retracted to open the interior to the air.

In 1938 Mies became director of the architectural department at Illinois Institute of Technology. There he tested his ideas on the simplification of architectural elements that he summed up in his famous phrase, less is more. The design idiom he developed at IIT and in later buildings, particularly his bronze Seagram Building (1954–58) on Park Avenue in New York City, influenced building design in hundreds of cities in America and Europe.

Le Corbusier Born Charles-Edouard Jeanneret-Gris, Le Corbusier (1887–1965) traveled widely and met many early modern architects. He sought to reconcile his deeply felt responses to their work with the historical works he studied in his travels, particularly Greek temples.

In the 1920’s, Le Corbusier found a vocabulary for domestic architecture that resulted in one of the great works of modern architecture, the Villa Savoye in Poissy, France (1928–30). Standing alone in a field, the pristine white house is supported on pilotis, slender concrete columns that carry the load of the floors and free the interior to be developed into flowing horizontal and vertical spaces. In a seminal book, Towards a New Architecture (1923), he delivered his notorious dictum, The house is a machine for living in, but his houses were elegant, with hints of classicism, and far from machinelike.