Home Architecture Talk
What is the connection between landscape and architecture in ancient cultures?
Also, what recent theories concern that issue?
Public Comments
- well, architecture is how things were built, and you have to build things on the terrain, which contains different landforms! so the land which you're on can determine certain aspects of architecture =]
- There is connection in what the people are able to build, so this determines how easy it will be to advance as a society. Think of cultures now that live in jungles or in deserts, which even have trouble building effective storehouses or graneries to store and hold food, or for building smithies to effectively work iron and other minerals into useful products. The landscape that offers shelter, minerals, timber, and water will allow humans to experiment with new architecture and new styles that more primitive people have not even had the need to develop yet. For example in a land offerring plenty of resources, say you first build a storehouse to store extra food. Then, you see that this storehouse doesn't protect against damp in the ground, so you built it better and higher to better protect it. Then you find it doesn't protect against insects, so you develop tighter walls and windows that can open and close. And now because you have so much food you start saying that all of this is because your God looks down on you, so you start turning your store house into a kind of temple. And then because it is a temple, you want to build it taller so that it is the focus of the town, so you have to invent the technology to effectively build a tower or steeple. In this case, it's like a snowball that keeps building on itself. Now, compare that example to the one of a village in a poor land where they can't find enough food to store extra each year. These people miss out on all the technology and invention that the other group was going through. Also, this is going back to prehistoric times, but if the landscape naturally better sheltered humans against the animals that hunted them, they were less likely to develop technologies and architecture to defend against them. So if you lived in caves, you didn't need to do as much work as people who lived in a grassy plain, who had alot more work to do to defend their homes. The process of doing the work led to better invention. I'm just editing in a bit here at the bottom to say that the exact cause of landscape vs. architecture is complex. In some ways it helps, in other ways it hinders. Recent theories ask just exactly is the relationship between the two - if any at all. Some researchers might say that the relationship is completely unimportant and doesn't exist at all and focus on other reasons.
