Colonial Revival architecture

The video on YouTube named “Middle Ages Architecture: How the great cathedrals were built-Documentary” by Science&Technology 4U states that Gothic Cathedrals have dominated the skies for over a thousand years. How did engineers in the middle ages without any modern tools constructed cathedrals? Some experts started investigating how engineers built those amazing cathedrals. Apparently, a hidden mathematical code written on the pages of The Bible was used as a blueprint. Taller than the ancient…

There are many variants of choices we have to make in life, some are nugatory and facile choices to make, while others are hard and may transmute our lives thoroughly. In the poems “If” by Rudyard Kipling and “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost, each poet captures the essence of how consequential choices are. Kipling takes a more literal way of exhibiting how choices affect us while Frost shows choices in a more symbolic and consequential way that makes a reader authentically celebrate. "…

In the short story, “The Chrysanthemums” by John Steinbeck and in the poem “The Goblin Market” by Christina Rossetti the authors portray a tremendous amount of symbolism. “The Chrysanthemums” is a short story about a middle-aged woman named Elisa, who is married with no children and is very unsatisfied with her life. The poem, “The Goblin Market” tells a story about two sisters, Laura and Lizzie, who are tempted by goblins to eat the forbidden fruit they offer them. In the short story and the…

gothic architecture and his style inspired many builders for years. The building material he incorporated in his work was the concept of light to reflect a symbol of god inside the cathedral. The more he used light, the more he “hoped for people to be closer to god”. 2) How did this style of architecture come to be called “Gothic”? The name behind “Gothic Architecture” originated from critics that saw Abbot’s “modern” title possibly less interesting. Instead, critics named the architecture…

While Pirenne exaggerated Gregory while explaining a strong Merovingian poetic tradition, he takes Gregory’s writing too literally when he describes 6th century Frankish architecture and makes a claim contrary to archeological evidence concerning Merovingian architectural prowess. The Frankish city Clermont, according to Pirenne, was “marked by Byzantine luxury,” (Pirenne, 134). In this case, Gregory agrees with Pirenne, describing the church walls as, “adorned with many kinds of marble,”…

In this chapter of Murray’s book, he examines gothic cathedrals as objects of desire and the relationships between these objects and their agents of its creation. Using Saint Denis as its main example, Murray uses the writings of three principle agents: the ecclesiastical patron, artisans and financers. For his example of Saint Denis, he focused on the writings, illustrations, and correspondence of Abbot Suger, Gervase of Canterbury, and Villard de Honnecourt. He begins by reflecting on how a…

Choice: The act of picking between two or more possibilities. This definition came right out of the dictionary and it makes choice sound very black and white. In reality, there are many factors that tie in with it. Every individual has a choice but their decision, whether good or bad are all based on their morals and their circumstances in life. There are a wide variety of choices popping up constantly in everyday life. One example of this is shown in Adrienne Rich’s article. The overall…

The theme of our tour to India centers on the golden age of architecture of the Mughal Empire in Agra India. The Mughal Empire was founded in 1526 by Babur, a descendant of Mongol warlords. It was the most powerful Islamic state to rule in India, most prosperously during the 17th century. Under Mughal emperors, roads were built, trade prospered, and the arts flourished. The Mughals governed northern India, and over time, their rule extended from Afghanistan in the west to Bengal in the east.…

architectural qualities, proving that styles are not merely frozen in time. “In itself it was no more than a small, enclosed world…yet its shadow reached out to the most distant corners of the continent, and even beyond.” It is a beautiful thing when architecture can pull of such an amazing…

“In the design of the building itself it is often difficult to draw a line between practical necessity and deliberate intention, since Iktinos seems subtly to have exploited the former in the latter.” This quote about the Greek Parthenon, taken from Pollitt’s work on ancient Greek art and separated from its context, could almost be applied to a description of a much later, almost millennia later, Notre-Dame de Reims Cathedral. While separated both by time and location, each ‘temple’ was created…