Architecture: quotes, facts and reflections

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WonderLanguage

The English word 'kiosk' comes from Turkish köşk, a garden pavilion. It arrived through French in the 1620s, and only in the 1860s did it start to mean a newsstand.

Turkish köşk itself came from Persian kushk, 'palace, pavilion'. In the Ottoman world it meant a light, often open-sided building in a palace garden, made for resting and enjoying the view. Topkapı Palace in Istanbul still has famous examples, such as the Baghdad Kiosk, built in 1639 to mark the capture of Baghdad. Western Europe copied the idea for its own gardens in the 17th century, and French turned the word into kiosque. From about 1865 English used it for small street stalls selling newspapers, later for telephone kiosks, and now for the touchscreen machines where people buy tickets or order food.

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DriveTechnology

A Passive House is a building designed like a thermos: carefully sealed, insulated and ventilated so it wastes very little energy.

Passive House is a performance standard, not an architectural style: any building that meets its measured limits can qualify. The idea grew from a 1988 conversation between Bo Adamson of Lund University in Sweden and the German physicist Wolfgang Feist. Four terraced houses built in Darmstadt-Kranichstein, Germany, in 1990–91 are usually cited as the first examples. Feist founded the Passivhaus Institut in Darmstadt in 1996 to certify buildings. The best-known limits are a yearly heating demand of no more than 15 kilowatt-hours per square metre of floor, and an airtightness test in which a fan pressurises the building and no more than 0.6 of its volume of air may leak out in an hour. Fresh air comes in through a ventilation unit that warms it with the heat of the stale air going out.

Passive House InstituteRead card

DriveScience

Cities are often a few degrees warmer than the countryside around them, an effect called the urban heat island. Asphalt, concrete and dark roofs soak up the sun's heat and give it back slowly, while streets without trees get no shade.

The effect was first described in the 1810s by Luke Howard, a London manufacturing chemist and amateur meteorologist, who found that the centre of London stayed about 2°C warmer at night than the surrounding countryside. In the United States, the Environmental Protection Agency puts the typical difference at roughly 0.5 to 4°C by day and 1 to 3°C at night. The gap is often widest after dark, when concrete and asphalt release the heat they stored during the day. Cities respond with pale, reflective pavements and roofs, green roofs and street trees, because shade and light-coloured surfaces measurably lower local temperatures. The heat also falls unevenly: neighbourhoods with fewer trees and more paving are usually the hottest.

U.S. Environmental Protection AgencyRead card

WonderArchitecture

A windcatcher, badgir in Persian, is a tall tower on a roof that catches passing breezes and channels them down into the rooms below. It has cooled houses in hot, dry places such as Iran for centuries, without any machinery.

The top of the tower has openings that face the wind. Air pushed in is forced down a shaft into the house, while warm air leaves through openings on the sheltered side; on still days the sun-warmed tower works like a chimney and draws air through the rooms. Yazd, a desert city in central Iran listed by UNESCO in 2017, is famous for its many windcatchers, and the one in its Dowlatabad Garden, about 33 metres high, is often described as the tallest in the world. Paired with covered water reservoirs called ab-anbars, windcatchers helped keep drinking water cool. Similar towers are found from Egypt to the Persian Gulf, and architects now study them for low-energy cooling.

Traditional Persian architectureRead card

WonderArchitecture

The Jantar Mantar in Jaipur, India, completed in 1734 for the Rajput king Sawai Jai Singh II, is a collection of giant stone instruments for measuring the sky with the naked eye. Its largest sundial stands about 27 metres high.

Jai Singh, who founded the city of Jaipur in 1727, wanted more accurate astronomical tables for calendars and eclipse predictions, and built five observatories across northern India: at Delhi, Jaipur, Ujjain, Mathura and Varanasi. Jaipur's is the largest and best preserved. The name is usually explained as 'calculating instrument'. Its nineteen main instruments measure time, the height of the Sun and the positions of stars by shadows and sightlines. On the giant sundial, the Samrat Yantra, the shadow moves about six centimetres a minute, which lets it tell local time to within about two seconds. UNESCO added the observatory to its World Heritage List in 2010.

Jantar Mantar, JaipurRead card

WonderEngineering

Roman concrete has kept harbours, domes and aqueducts standing for 2,000 years, and small white lumps of lime inside it are one reason. When water seeps into a crack, calcium from these lumps can form new crystals that seal it.

For a long time these white lumps, called lime clasts, were taken as a sign of careless mixing. A 2023 study in Science Advances by a team at MIT led by Admir Masic proposed another explanation. The Romans, it argued, added quicklime, a highly reactive form of lime, directly to the mix, where it heats up as it reacts; this method, called hot mixing, left the lumps behind. To test the idea, the team made concrete the same way, cracked it and ran water through the cracks. Within about two weeks the cracks had sealed, while in a sample made without quicklime they did not. Volcanic ash from the Bay of Naples also added strength. A 2017 study of Roman harbour walls, led by the geologist Marie Jackson, found a different process: seawater seeping through them reacts with the volcanic ash and grows rare minerals that reinforce the concrete.

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WonderArchitecture

Machu Picchu, a 15th-century Inca estate on a ridge high in the Peruvian Andes, stands on hundreds of stone terraces. They hold the steep soil in place, drain away heavy rain and gave the Inca room to grow crops.

It was built around 1450 as a royal estate for the Inca ruler Pachacuti, at about 2,430 metres. Much of its engineering is hidden: studies led by the hydrologist Kenneth Wright suggest that some 60 per cent of the construction lies underground, in foundations and layers of crushed stone that let the frequent heavy rain drain away instead of washing the slopes down. The site was never truly lost. Local Quechua farmers always knew it, and the Peruvian Agustín Lizárraga reached it in 1902. The American explorer Hiram Bingham made it world-famous in 1911. UNESCO listed it as a World Heritage Site in 1983.

Machu PicchuRead card

WonderArchitecture

The Great Mosque of Djenné in Mali, often called the largest mud-brick building in the world, survives because the whole town re-plasters its walls with fresh mud every year before the rains.

The present building was completed in 1907 under Ismaila Traoré, head of the town's guild of masons, on the site of a mosque said to date from the 13th century. Its walls are made of sun-dried mud bricks, and bundles of palm wood jutting from them serve as permanent scaffolding. Rain wears the plaster away each year, so every spring the town holds a festival, the Crépissage, to renew it. Men and boys race to carry baskets of mud up the walls, women bring water from the river, and the elders of the masons' guild direct the work. Djenné's old town has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1988.

Great Mosque of DjennéRead card

WonderArchitecture

Petra, the rock-carved city of the Nabataeans in southern Jordan, could thrive in the desert thanks to its water engineering: channels, dams, cisterns and reservoirs that caught springs, rain and flash floods.

The Nabataeans were an Arab people who grew rich from the caravan trade in incense and spices, and Petra was their capital. The city was at its height around the 1st century AD, until Rome annexed the kingdom in AD 106. In a region that gets only about 15 centimetres of rain a year, its channels, dams, tunnels and cisterns stored water through the dry months; the American Society of Civil Engineers estimates the system supplied 30,000 to 40,000 people. As trade routes shifted and earthquakes struck, the city declined. The Swiss explorer Johann Ludwig Burckhardt, travelling in disguise, brought it to European attention in 1812. UNESCO listed it in 1985.

PetraRead card

WonderArchitecture

Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, finished in 537 as the cathedral of Constantinople, has one of the most influential interiors in architecture. Its great dome rests on pendentives, curved triangles of masonry that let a round dome sit on a square plan, and 40 windows around its base fill it with light.

Emperor Justinian I ordered the church after riots in 532 burned down its predecessor. Two scholars, Anthemius of Tralles and Isidore of Miletus, both skilled in mathematics and mechanics, designed it, and it was finished in under six years. The dome is about 31 metres across and its crown rises some 55 metres above the floor. The historian Procopius wrote that it seemed not to rest on masonry but to hang from heaven on a golden chain. Earthquakes brought part of the first dome down in 558, and it was rebuilt higher and steeper. The building was a cathedral for over 900 years, a mosque after the Ottoman conquest of 1453 and a museum from 1934, and it has been a mosque again since 2020.

Hagia SophiaRead card

WonderArchitecture

Angkor, capital of the Khmer Empire in today's Cambodia from the ninth to the fifteenth century, was ringed by giant reservoirs, moats and canals that stored monsoon rain and moved water across an urban area of about 1,000 square kilometres.

The largest reservoirs, called barays, are vast rectangles banked with earth: the West Baray, built in the eleventh century, measures about eight kilometres by two and still holds water. Moats such as the one around Angkor Wat framed temples modelled on the sacred mountain and surrounding oceans of Hindu and Buddhist cosmology. Radar and aerial surveys published in 2007, and airborne laser scanning (lidar) that saw through the forest in 2012, revealed roads, canals and house mounds across at least 1,000 square kilometres, the largest known pre-industrial settlement. Researchers still debate how much the barays watered rice fields. Tree rings show long droughts broken by intense monsoons in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, which damaged the network and probably contributed to Angkor's decline.

Angkor hydraulic systemRead card

WonderArchitecture

The eleven churches of Lalibela in northern Ethiopia were carved out of solid volcanic rock in the Middle Ages, each shaped from the top down inside deep trenches, and they are still a place of pilgrimage for Ethiopian Christians.

Tradition credits the churches to King Gebre Meskel Lalibela of the Zagwe dynasty, who reigned around the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries; archaeologists think some parts are older, and the building sequence is still debated. Legend says he meant the site as a new Jerusalem after Saladin captured Jerusalem in 1187, and many places there carry biblical names, such as a stream called the Jordan. Masons first cut trenches to free a block of rock, then hollowed out rooms, columns, windows and doors from it; the most famous church, Bete Giyorgis, is shaped like a cross when seen from above. Tunnels link the churches, which are still in daily use. UNESCO listed them as a World Heritage Site in 1978.

Rock-Hewn Churches, LalibelaRead card

WonderEngineering

The Pont du Gard in southern France is a three-tier Roman bridge, 48.8 metres high, built to carry the aqueduct that supplied Nîmes across the Gardon River while keeping the very slight downhill slope that let water flow by gravity alone.

The aqueduct ran about 50 kilometres from a spring near Uzès to Nîmes, yet dropped only about 12.6 metres over its whole length, an average of some 25 centimetres per kilometre. The bridge's lower arches span the river, and a row of small arches on top carries the covered water channel. It is the tallest Roman aqueduct bridge still standing. Most historians date it to the first century AD, possibly the reign of Claudius. After the aqueduct fell out of use, around the sixth century, the bridge served for centuries as a road crossing, and parts of its second tier were cut away to let carts through. Napoleon III ordered a major restoration in the 1850s, and UNESCO listed it as a World Heritage Site in 1985.

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WonderArchitecture

The Alhambra, the hilltop palace and fortress of the Nasrid sultans of Granada in Spain, is threaded with channels, pools and fountains that cool its courtyards, mirror its buildings and water the Generalife gardens beside it.

The Nasrids, the last Muslim dynasty in Spain, ruled Granada from 1238 to 1492. Their founder, Muhammad I, began the palace complex, and water reached the dry hilltop through the Acequia Real, the Royal Channel, which draws on the Darro River several kilometres upstream and runs by gravity along the hillside. The Generalife, a summer palace with terraced gardens, was built in the early fourteenth century. In the Court of the Lions, from the later fourteenth century, twelve marble lions carry a fountain whose water runs out in four channels, echoing the Islamic image of paradise as a garden watered by four rivers. Some of the original channels still water the gardens today.

Alhambra and GeneralifeRead card

WonderTrade

The Incense Route carried frankincense and myrrh, fragrant tree resins, from southern Arabia to Mediterranean markets for centuries, through a chain of caravan towns, wells, forts and water systems across the desert.

Frankincense and myrrh come from trees that grow in the dry lands of southern Arabia and the Horn of Africa. They were burned in temples and homes, and used in medicine, perfume and embalming. Pliny the Elder, writing his Natural History around AD 77, says the road from Thomna in southern Arabia to Gaza on the Mediterranean was divided into 65 camel stages, and that by the coast each camel-load had cost 688 denarii in water, fodder, lodging, tolls and payments to priests, guards and officials. Cities that controlled parts of the route grew rich, among them Shabwa in Yemen and the Nabataean capital Petra in today's Jordan, whose cisterns and dams stored scarce rain for the caravans.

Incense RouteRead card

DriveBiography

Fazlur Rahman Khan, a Bangladeshi-American structural engineer, made very tall buildings cheaper to build with his 'tube' systems, in which a tower's outer walls work together to resist the wind. They shaped Chicago's John Hancock Center and the Sears Tower, now Willis Tower.

Before Khan, most skyscrapers relied on a rigid internal frame of steel columns and beams, and the taller they went, the more steel they needed to keep them from swaying in the wind. In Khan's framed tube, columns are set close together around the outside of the building and tied by deep beams called spandrels, so the whole outer wall acts like one stiff, hollow tube anchored in the ground. Working at the Chicago firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, he developed variations: the John Hancock Center (1969) braces its tube with giant diagonal X-shapes, and the Sears Tower (1973) bundles nine tubes together. Khan was born in Dhaka in 1929 and died in 1982.

Fazlur Rahman KhanRead card

WonderBiography

Zaha Hadid, the Baghdad-born British architect, became in 2004 the first woman to win the Pritzker Prize, architecture's most prestigious award. Her sharply angled and flowing forms, first explored in paintings, widened what contemporary buildings could look like.

For years Hadid was called a 'paper architect': her competition entries, such as The Peak, a club planned for a Hong Kong hillside that she won in 1983, drew wide praise but were not built. She worked out her ideas in large paintings that bent perspective on purpose, treating a building less as a fixed box than as a set of forces in motion. Her first completed building, a fire station for the Vitra furniture company in Weil am Rhein, Germany, opened in 1993. As computer modelling caught up with her drawings, projects such as the Heydar Aliyev Center in Baku (2012) and the London Aquatics Centre, built for the 2012 Olympics, showed her flowing forms at full scale. She died in 2016.

Zaha HadidRead card

WonderArchitecture

The Sagrada Família in Barcelona is the basilica Antoni Gaudí worked on from 1883 until his death in 1926, and it is still being built. Its tree-like columns and forms taken from nature are his, and the Nativity façade and crypt completed in his lifetime are on UNESCO's World Heritage List.

Gaudí took over the project in 1883 from the architect Francisco de Paula del Villar and turned a conventional neo-Gothic church into something new. For an earlier church he had studied arches with hanging chains: a chain hung from two points sags into a natural curve, and turned upside down that curve gives the shape in which a stone arch carries its load purely by compression. He also used ruled surfaces, curved shapes such as hyperboloids that can be built entirely from straight lines, which made complex stonework easier to cut. As an 'expiatory' church, built as an act of atonement, it is paid for by donations and today largely by visitors' tickets, one reason it has taken so long. Pope Benedict XVI consecrated it as a basilica in 2010. Gaudí is buried in its crypt.

Sagrada FamiliaRead card

DriveEngineering

Hoover Dam, built between 1931 and 1936 in the Black Canyon of the Colorado River on the Nevada–Arizona border, controls floods, stores water in Lake Mead and generates hydroelectric power for the American Southwest.

The dam was built during the Great Depression, when thousands of men came to the desert looking for work. By the official count, 96 workers died in accidents during construction. At 221 metres it was the tallest dam in the world when finished, and it created Lake Mead, the largest reservoir in the United States by capacity. Its water is shared among seven US states under the 1922 Colorado River Compact, and with Mexico under a 1944 treaty. So much of the river is now taken for cities and farms that it rarely reaches the sea. In 2022, after years of drought, Lake Mead fell to its lowest level since it was first filled.

Hoover DamRead card

WonderArchaeology

Skara Brae, a village on Orkney off the north coast of Scotland, was built about 5,000 years ago, and its stone houses still hold their beds, hearths and dressers. It is one of the best-preserved Neolithic, or New Stone Age, villages in Europe.

Built in stone around 3180 BC and lived in for perhaps 600 years, Skara Brae is older than Stonehenge's famous stone circle and Egypt's Great Pyramid of Giza. A storm in 1850 stripped away the sand dune that had buried the village, revealing houses linked by covered passageways, each with a stone hearth, box beds and a dresser for displaying possessions, all built from slabs because Orkney has little timber. The archaeologist V. Gordon Childe carried out the first scientific excavations in the 1920s. The site now forms part of the Heart of Neolithic Orkney World Heritage Site, alongside the Ring of Brodgar and the Standing Stones of Stenness, two nearby stone circles from the same era.

Skara BraeRead card

WonderArchaeology

Must Farm, a Bronze Age village of roundhouses built on stilts in eastern England, burned around 850 BC and fell into the river channel below. The oxygen-poor mud preserved its timbers, cloth, pots and even meals.

The site lies in a clay quarry near Whittlesey in Cambridgeshire, on the bed of a vanished river in the Flag Fen basin. The University of Cambridge's archaeology unit excavated it in 2015 and 2016, and the press soon called it 'Britain's Pompeii', because the disaster sealed everyday life in place. When fire broke out, the platform and houses collapsed into the water, which put out the flames and buried what was inside. Finds include fine textiles made from plant fibres, wooden and pottery vessels, bronze tools, and a small bowl with food still in it and a wooden spatula resting inside. In 2016 the team also lifted a wooden wheel about a metre across, complete with its hub: the oldest complete wheel found in Britain. A horse's spine nearby suggests it came from a cart.

Must FarmRead card

WonderArchitecture

Chand Baori is a stepwell in Rajasthan, India: a well you reach by walking down stairs. Its 3,500 steps descend about 30 metres through 13 storeys to the water at the bottom.

Chand Baori stands in the village of Abhaneri and is said to be named after Raja Chanda, a local ruler of the Nikumbh dynasty. No inscription records its building, but its style dates it to the 8th or 9th century. In a dry region where most rain falls in a few monsoon months, stepwells stored water and let people reach it as the level dropped through the year. Here zigzag flights of steps line three sides of the square shaft, and the fourth side holds a pillared gallery with rooms. The depth also kept the air at the bottom noticeably cooler than at the surface. Beside the well stands the temple of Harshat Mata, a goddess of joy.

Chand BaoriRead card

WonderArchitecture

Shibam, a walled town in Yemen, is packed with about 500 mud-brick tower houses, some eleven storeys and over 30 metres tall. Built mostly in the 16th century, it is one of the oldest examples of a city planned to grow upwards.

People have lived at Shibam, in the long desert valley of Wadi Hadramawt, for about 1,700 years. A great flood in 1532–33 destroyed much of the earlier town, which was rebuilt on a rocky rise above the valley floor. Enclosed by a single defensive wall, it had little room to spread, so houses went up instead, with one or two rooms on each floor. Thick walls of sun-dried mud brick keep interiors cool in the desert heat, but they need constant upkeep: floods from a tropical storm in 2008 brought down several buildings. Shibam is often called the Manhattan of the Desert, and UNESCO listed it as a World Heritage Site in 1982.

Old Walled City of ShibamRead card

WonderArchitecture

Fujian tulou are huge round or square houses in south-east China with walls of pounded earth, built by Hakka and Minnan communities. One fortified ring could house a whole clan, sometimes several hundred people, around a shared courtyard.

Most tulou were built between the 12th and 20th centuries in the hills of south-western Fujian, where bandits and feuds between clans made a house that could be shut like a fortress worth the effort. Walls three to five storeys high were made by pounding earth between wooden boards, layer upon layer. The outside has a single gate and few windows; inside, timber galleries run round every floor. Each family had its own rooms from the ground to the top floor, while the courtyard held the well and the ancestral hall, where the clan honoured its forebears. The largest tulou could house up to 800 people. UNESCO listed 46 of them as a World Heritage Site in 2008.

Fujian tulouRead card