Architecture and Culture

Altare della Patria, Rome Photo: Alvesgaspar/Wikimedia Commons Altare della Patria ("Altar of the Fatherland") is a monument built to honor the first king of the newly unified Italy, Victor Emmanual. The monument was designed by Giuseppe Sacconi in 1885. The final structure was inaugurated in 1911 and construction was completed in 1925. It is built in the neoclassical style and incorporates Corinthian columns, fountains, equestrian statues of Victor Emmanual and statues of the goddess Victoria riding quadrigas. Its enormous size of the monument has had its fair share of criticism both for its conspicuousness, size, and pompous design. Its construction also destroyed large parts of the ancient Roman Capitoline Hill. Arc De Triomphe, Paris Photo: Dietmar Rabich/Wikimedia Commons The Arc De Triomphe is probably the world's most famous Triumphal Arch and one of Paris's most iconic landmarks. It stands at the western end of the Champs-Élysées at the center of Pla...

Parasitic architecture gallery

The Green Exhibition House appeared in Rotterdam in 2001, designed as an experiment in assembling a prefabricated structure onto an existing building. In true parasitic fashion, the water pipes, sewage and electricity were all tapped from existing connections in the base building (By: Korteknie Stuhlmacher Architecten) Manifest Destiny, by artist Mark Reigelman, is a tiny cabin affixed to the side of a hotel in downtown San Francisco. Designed to envision the “romantic spirit of the Western myth”, this interesting structure positions itself as an compelling juxtaposition between the old and the new (By: Mark Reigelman) The Parasite office in Moscow from Za Bor architects utilizes the abandoned space between buildings to create a multistory office environment. The structure sits above the laneway between the buildings and resembles an organic growth seemingly joining up the two disparate buildings on either side (By: Peter Zaytsev) From Stefan Eberstadt the Rucksack Ho...

Minoru Yamasaki Pruitt-Igoe’s buildings: the death of modern architecture

An aerial view of Pruitt-Igoe in June 1971 Photo: Bettmann/Corbis From its fanfare opening in 1954 to its live-on-TV demolition three decades later, the St Louis public housing project remains a powerful symbol of the social, racial and architectural tensions that dogged America’s cities in the mid-20th century. Whether you call Pruitt-Igoe’s short, troubled existence a failure of architecture, a failure of policy, or a failure of society, its fate remains bound up with, and reflective of, the fate of many American cities in the mid-20th century. Even before the dust settled from the infamous, widely televised 1972 implosion of one of Pruitt-Igoe’s buildings (the last of which wouldn’t fall until 1976), the argument that the design had doomed it gained serious traction. Architectural historian Charles Jencks cites that much-seen dynamiting as the moment “modern architecture died”. Other detractors used the occasion to hold up its architect, Minoru Yamasaki, for condemn...

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