Video on Architecture

I watched a video on prairie style and architecture: The science of design. There were truly both a fascinating videos. The first video was really intriguing and got me thinking about what kind of houses that I wanted to live in permanently in the future. The second video showed me different kind of apartments, especially a smart apartment.

All these video links to the textbook because architecture is a type of an art form. It depends how to want to layout a house according to nature and integrate the organic aspect into the clients' home.

Frank Lloyd Wright was an architect, and a very well known for the prairie style of homes. It was mainly composed of 7 feet tall houses but spread out horizontally. His main idea was the box like homes to wide open horizontal living spaces. Wright designed lots of single family houses in Chicago where homes should reflect time, place and landscape. The front door was mystique and not just slammed right in front of the house.

My favorite part of this was how Wright integrated the organic relationships between the house and its surrounding. The Vancouver landscape was also a inspiring creation. It is a landscape of mountains and trees rather than flat prairie. It consists of water, stones and plants that make it look like a quarry where the stone came from. The spaces of the house all flow out into the garden. The best design is total integration between the furniture, the house, the site, the client and the way they live. This the idea of Frank Lloyd Wright so he became one of the best architect in the western culture.

In the second video it was really cool to see the smart houses. I knew about this already. In the beginning it really defined how skyscrapers came about. The urban cities was the important spot of growth. There were no more vacant lots in urban cities so people needed to build up. New materials such as concrete and steel brought about the construction to build skyscrapers. A skyscraper is made up of super structure, which is all that stands above ground and underground subculture. Wood sticks are put in ground, then immense slab of concrete is extended out beyond the perimeter of the building.

Wind is important in considering for foundation. For example, wind in a 100 story building will be 4 times more violent than it is around a 50 story structure. When the wind swirls around a tall building, it usually breaks up into whorls or vortexes which alternate on the opposite facades of the building. It makes the building sway. A high rise with flat surfaces and right angles reacts very badly to wind.

A smart apartment is a computer, linked to the houses various appliances, ,the switches and electric plugs, the security system, and the unites that control humidity and temperature. Circuits converge onto the relay board and the board ids equipped to microprocessors that are in calculators or watches, that activate the relays and the real stats on computer's orders.

This was a really cool development and shows how advanced technology has become.