Architecture 101

All of you know that I love architecture and cool buildings. If I had any artistic/creative skills to my name, I would have liked to be an architect. But alas, I am left as an admirer of others' work. For our second class, Dr. Miller wanted to do a brief survey on architecture in Britain. We learned about its main periods of architectural design, what style/techniques/features/designs defined them, and then he showed us lots of examples. He also gave us a primer on cathedrals, which was fascinating, as I have never been inside a major cathedral, so it's good to know what and where everything is. Basically, I was hanging on his every word for two hours, and was awed by all the pictures he showed us. 

Here are my favorites from each period (granted I have a limited knowledge base to choose from still):

Norman/Romanesque:

White Tower - London

thick stone walls, castle-like, small rounded windows

Gothic:

Bath Abbey - Bath

Check out those flying buttresses! 

Also: spires, thinner stone walls, vertical, stained glass, pointed windows

Renaissance/Tudor:

Hardwicke Hall - Derbyshire

&

Hampton Court - Greater London 

symmetry and proportion, linear 

Baroque:

St. Paul's Cathedral

curves! domes! ornamentation!

Neo-Classical (Georgian):

The British Museum

derivative of Greece and Rome, mathematical proportion

Neo-Gothic (Victorian):

Westminster Palace (aka Parliament)

mishmash of Gothic features and other styles, pointy/busy decorations, contrasting bricks and stone

Modern:

Tate Modern Museum

iconic, geometric shapes, simple exterior, function over form

Post-Modern:

Inner Courtyard of the British Museum

sculptural, three-dimensional, form over function

I can't wait to see all of these places in real life!