About Architecture
Architecture
"No matter how much you love a beautiful painting you can't live in it, but you can live in a beautiful house"
Elias Redwan
What is Architecture?
Ah, to build, to build! That is the noblest art of all the arts. Painting and sculpture are but images, are merely shadows cast by outward things on stone or canvas, having in themselves no separate existence. Architecture, existing in itself, and not in seeming a something it is not, surpasses them as substance shadow.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882
Architecture is a passion before it's a science, love before it's a business. It's many things together, art, science, social art, and the list goes on. Architecture is there to provide a sense of place or privacy for all types of human activity.
Architecture creates and reserve culture and traditions for thousands of years; think of the Egyptian Pyramids. Architectural works are perceived as cultural works of art; think of the Statue of Liberty.
Architecture is not only the art and science of designing buildings, it's a lot more than that. It's the most meaningful type of art. It's the beauty of living inside the "beauty itself". "No matter how much you love a painting you can't live in it, but you can live in a beautiful house" (Elias Redwan, 2007).
Architecture is a struggle between science and art. Art has no limitation, but science does. Think of theories and practical studies in architecture. Science sometimes is the architects' best friend and worst enemy, and that's why architects sometimes tend to overcome its limitation by ignoring its logic when they design for theories or pleasure.
However, to define architectural in terms of design, it is the creative manipulation of mass, space, volume, texture, light, shadow, and materials. This often "artistic manipulation" is limited or restricted by practical elements such as cost, regulations, construction and technology.
Architecture is interdisciplinary field, it involves mathematics, science, art, technology, social sciences, politics and history.
Vitruvius, one of earliest known architectural theorist, states: "Architecture is a science, arising out of many other sciences, and adorned with much and varied learning: by the help of which a judgment is formed of those works which are the result of other arts".
However, Architecture is usually governed by the architect's personal passion, approach, taste, talent or philosophy.
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