Structure: the essence of architecture - Hardcover

Wilson, Forrest

2.86

7 ratings by Goodreads

9780289702406: Structure: the essence of architecture

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0289702402 ISBN 13: 9780289702406

Publisher: Van Nostrand Reinhold Co, 1971

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Before men had power saws, automatic hammers and all the machinery we now have to cut wood into boards and stone into blocks, they believed that rocks and trees had souls. Ancient builders worked their building material carefully, begged the stone's forgiveness then they removed him from the ground and asked the tree's pardon for thinning her branches. When buildings were built by hand, cornerstones were laid with ceremony, thresholds were blessed and the spirit of the building revered. Today we have a great deal of machinery to help us assemble buildings, huge cranes that lift entire sections of the building into the air and trucks that carry enough concrete in one load to build a small house. But it takes more than putting building materials together to create architecture. No one can explain exactly what that more is, except that architecture has a spirit and building has not. Architecture combines external form and internal space, structure and material into one essence. The structure of the building can be explained and the strength of the materials tested, but the spirit of the building , its form and spaces, must be felt in much the same way the ancients sensed spirits within the forms of rocks and trees. This book is about architecture, it begins with the art of building which man has mastered and ends with the art of understanding our built environment which he has not. It is a very simple book because the more important things are, the more simply they should be explained...

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