History and Theory of Architecture

-ARCHITECTS-

SANTIAGO CALATRAVABiography :- Born in Valencia, Spain, on July 28, 1951, Calatrava grew up in an established family

involved in the primary industry of that coastal metropolis: agricultural exports. - The family's hillside home was imposing, with large rooms that Calatrava later named

as an inspiration for his attraction to major projects and big spaces.- By the time he was eight he had enrolled in art classes in Valencia.- When he was 13, they took advantage of a liberalization of travel restrictions imposed

by dictator Francisco Franco in order to send him to Paris under a student exchange program.- He later took classes in Switzerland and learned German on his way to eventual fluency in

seven languages.- Back in Valencia, he decided to attend the Escuela Tecnica Superior de Arquitectura

(Technical University of Architecture).- He challenged himself with extra work: he and a group of friends wrote two books on the

architecture of Valencia and the island of Ibiza while he was enrolled.- After he graduated he returned to Switzerland and entered a civil engineering program at

the Eidgenossische Technische Hochschule (ETH) or Federal Technology University in Zurich.

- Receiving dual Ph.D. degrees in structural engineering and technical science from that institution in 1979 and 1981, he became one of the few architects fully trained as an engineer.

- In Zurich, Calatrava met and married his wife, Robertina, a law student and later lawyer who has played an important role in managing his far-flung business enterprises.

- Calatrava opened his own architecture firm in Zurich after finishing his degree in 1981.

Design Theories :- Calatrava has defined his style as bridging the division between structural engineering

and architecture. - In his projects, he claims to continue a tradition of Spanish modernist engineering that

included Felix Candela, Antonio Gaudi, and Rafael Guastavino, with a very personal style that derives from numerous studies of the human body and the natural world.

- Architecture critics, however, see his work as a continuation of the neo-futuristic-expressionism of Eero Saarinen.

- Inspired from human body.

- Inspired from human eye. Planetarium and Imax theater,located in valencia,spain.

Turning Torso,sweden. A residential tower.

Projects :

Inspired from Fish.

1.Bach De Roda Bridge,barcelona.

2.Zurich Railway Station.

3.Satolas Railway Station.

NORMAN FOSTERBiography :- Norman foster was born in manchester, england on

june 1st 1935.

- His father was a shop manager in a poor area of manchester, later a security guard and a manual worker in a factory.

- His parents sent him to a private school, there was a strong work ethic and pressure to leave school early and be a wage earner.

- Foster worked for two years in city treasurer’s office and studied commercial law, before leaving for national service in the royal air force.

- At this time he was developing a growing interest in Architecture.

- When he came out of the air force he worked in a bakery, sold furniture, worked in a factory.

- After graduating from manchester university school of architecture and city planning in 1961, which he entered at age 21, he won a fellowship to yale university where he gained a masters degree in architecture and where he got to know richard rogers.

- They became very close friends and in 1963 he worked with him and sue rogers, gorgie wolton and his wife, wendy foster, as a member of 'team 4' until foster associates was found in 1967 (now known as foster and partners).

Design Theories :

- Flexibility is a key consideration. We design with an awareness that circumstances will change – that a building’s context will evolve; it may be used in different ways and will need to incorporate new technologies that we cannot yet predict.

- He believes that “Architecture is generated by the needs of people, both material and spiritual”.

- The process of „reinvention‟ distinguishes all of his work – past and present – and rests on a duty to design well and to design responsibly – whether that is at the scale of an airport or a door handle.

- Environmental awareness is an integral part of his design as it evolves to meet the challenges of the next forty years.

- “The quality of our surroundings has a direct influence on the quality of our lives”.

- Concept sketching for london city hall.

Projects :

1.Khan Shatyr Entertainment Center, kazaksthan.

2.Free University, berlin, germany.

3.Expo Station, singapore.

RENZO PIANO

Biography :- Born in Genoa in 1937, Piano comes from a family of builders.

- Following his graduation from Milan Polytechnic Architecture School in 1964, he worked in his father’s construction company and later was associated with the offices of Louis Kahn in Philadelphia and Z.S. Mackowski in London.

- He formed Renzo Piano Building Workshop in 1980, which now has offices in Paris, Genoa and Berlin.

- Other important influence Renzo Piano acknowledges, was Pierluigi Nervi.

- While still studying in Milan, Renzo Piano married a girl known from school days in Genoa, Magda Arduino. They have three children- 2 sons and the third child, daughter Lia, now 25, is pursuing a career in architecture.

Design Theories :- Renzo Piano's work has been called high-tech and bold

postmodernism.- His work is characterized by a genius for balance and

context.- Architecture is a complex matter, but one continuously

present dimension is the craftsmanship and the way you do things and in some way, if you go around the [High Museum] building you can feel it.

Projects :

1.Pathe Foundation, paris, france.

2.MUSE, trento, italy.

RICHARD RODGERSBiography :

- Richard Rodgers was born in Florence, Italy in 1933 to British parents.

- He studied at the Architectural Association School (1953-1959) in London and received the Diploma of Architecture in 1959.

- The following year he studied at the Yale University School of Architecture in New Haven, Connecticut on a Fulbright scholarship, and received the Master of Architecture degree in 1962.

- Returning from America, Rogers formed a partnership with Norman and Wendy Foster and Su Rogers (1963-1968) in London, called Team 4.

- They completed an industrial building (1967) at Swindon, Wiltshire, England, for Reliance Controls Ltd. The Team 4 arrangement was followed by the partnership of Richard and Sue Rogers (1968-1970) and subsequently Richard Rogers Partnership (RRP), founded in 1977.

- "In my generation the idea was you'd build for the future," Rogers told.

Projects :

1.Antwerp Law Courts.

2.Shanghai Pudong Airport.

FRANK GEHRYBiography :- Frank Gehry was born Frank Owen Goldberg on February 28, 1929,

in Toronto, Canada. The Goldberg family was Polish and Jewish.

- Frank was creative at a young age, building imaginary homes and cities from items found in his grandfather's hardware store. This interest in unconventional building materials would come to characterize Gehry's architectural work.

- Gehry relocated to Los Angeles in 1949, holding a variety of jobs while attending college.

- He would eventually graduate from the University of Southern California's School of Architecture.

- It was during his time that he changed his Goldberg surname to Gehry, in an effort to preclude anti-Semitism.

- In 1956, Gehry moved to Massachusetts with his wife, Anita Snyder, to enroll at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

- He later dropped out of Harvard and divorced his wife, with whom he had two daughters. In 1975, Gehry married Berta Isabel Aguilera, and had two more children.

Design Theories : Buildings are created to address the culture and context of their sites. Buildings with a concern for the way people move through them. In the spirit of capturing the nature of contemporary music, the design for the building calls for fractured forms that will resemble guitar bodies.

Projects :

1. Vitra Design Museum, germany.

2. Peter B.lewis Building, cleveland, us.

TADAO ANDO

Biography :

- Tadao Ando was born in 1941 in Osaka, Japan. Growing up in that city as Japan recovered from the war, Tadao Ando spent the most of time out of doors, and was raised by his grandmother, whose name was "ando".

- From the age of 10 to 17 Tadao Ando worked at local carpenter, where Tadao Ando learned how to work with wood and built a number of models of airplanes and ships. His studying was very unusual. "I was never a good student. - I always prefered learning things on my own outside of class. When I was about 18, I started to visit temples, shrines and tea houses in Kyoto and nara; There's a lot of great traditional architecture in the area.

- I was studying architecture by going to see actual building, and reading books about them. His first interest in architecture was nourished in tadao's 15 by buying a book of Le Corbusier sketches.

- "I traced the drawings of his early period so many times, that all pages turned black," says Tadao Ando: "in my mind I quite often wonder how Le Corbusier would have thought about this project or that.

Design Theories : Ando’s architecture is mono systemic. A single idea is wrapped inside the core, veiled and shrouded by the outside forms. It is the concept of perfect purity. It is the form that space takes, coupled with emotion and sound, painted on a canvas of minimalism. It is a unity that can only be assembled, when you take into account, all the other distinct parts of the structure.

Projects :

1.Asia modern museum of Art,taiwan.

2.Langen Foundation,germany.

ZAHA HADIDBiography :

- Born in Baghdad Iraq in 1950, Zaha Hadid commenced her college studies at the American University in Beirut, in the field of mathematics.

- She moved to London in 1972 to study architecture at the Architectural Association and upon graduation in 1977, she joined the Office of Metropolitan Architecture (OMA).

- She also taught at the Architectural Association (AA) with OMA collaborators Rem Koolhaas and Elia Zenghelis.- She began her own practice in London in 1980 and won the prestigious competition for

the Hong Kong Peak Club, a leisure and recreational center in 1983.

- Painting and drawing, especially in her early period, are important techniques of investigation for her design work.

- Ever since her 1983 retrospective exhibition at the AA in London, her architecture has been shown in exhibitions worldwide and many of her works are held in important museum collections.

- Known as an architect who consistently pushes the boundaries of architecture and urban design, her work experiments with new spatial concepts intensifying existing urban landscapes and encompassing all fields of design, from the urban scale to interiors and furniture.

Design Theories :- Zaha Hadid is an architect who consistently pushes the boundaries of architecture and

urban design.

- Her work experiments with new spatial concepts intensifying existing urban landscapes in the pursuit of a visionary aesthetic that encompasses all fields of design, ranging from urban scale through to products, interiors and furniture.

- Best known for her seminal built works (Vitra Fire Station, Land Formation-One, Bergisel Ski Jump, Strasbourg Tram Station and Rosenthal Centre for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati) her central concerns involve a simultaneous engagement in practice, teaching and research.

- Evolution of Steven Holl’s ‘sponge concept’.

Projects :

1.Glasgow Riverside Museum of Transport, uk.

2.ROCA london gallery.

Done By,- M Vinay : 12031AA056

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