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!