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Welcome to Our Generation USA!

Architecture
covers all man-made structures including buildings, bridges and tunnels used in pedestrian or vehicle transit, hydroelectric power stations (e.g., Hoover Dam) as well as statues/monuments (e.g., Mount Rushmore), including Architectural Schools
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Architecture of Buildings, Bridges, Tunnels, Monuments and Pedestrian Bridges
YouTube Video: Inside the New 1 World Trade Center
Pictured: L-R: The New World Trade Center, New York; Golden Gate Bridge: San Francisco; Mount Rushmore. South Dakota

​Architecture is both the process and the product of planning, designing, and constructing buildings and other physical structures.

Architectural works, in the material form of buildings, are often perceived as cultural symbols and as works of art. Historical civilizations are often identified with their surviving architectural achievements.

"Architecture" can mean:
  • A general term to describe buildings and other physical structures.
  • The art and science of designing buildings and (some) non-building structures.
  • The style of design and method of construction of buildings and other physical structures.
  • Knowledge of art, science, technology and humanity.
  • The practice of the architect, where architecture means offering or rendering professional services in connection with the design and construction of buildings, or built environments.
  • The design activity of the architect, from the macro-level (urban design, landscape architecture) to the micro-level (construction details and furniture).

​Architecture has to do with planning and designing form, space and ambience to reflect functional, technical, social, environmental and aesthetic considerations.

It requires the creative manipulation and coordination of materials and technology, and of light and shadow. Often, conflicting requirements must be resolved.

The practice of architecture also encompasses the pragmatic aspects of realizing buildings and structures, including scheduling, cost estimation and construction administration.

Documentation produced by architects, typically drawings, plans and technical specifications, defines the structure and/or behavior of a building or other kind of system that is to be or has been constructed.

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St. Louis Gateway Arch
YouTube Video: Saint Louis Gateway Arch : "A RIDE TO THE TOP" - Tour
Pictured: St. Louis Gateway Arch: LEFT: last piece being installed Oct. 28, 1965; RIGHT: framing fireworks display

​The Gateway Arch is a 630-foot (192 m) monument in St. Louis, Missouri. Built as a monument to the westward expansion of the United States, it is the centerpiece of the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial and has become an internationally famous symbol of St. Louis.

Clad in stainless steel and built in the form of an inverted, weighted catenary arch, it is the world's tallest arch, the tallest man-made monument in the Western Hemisphere, and Missouri's tallest accessible building. 

The arch sits at the site of St. Louis' founding on the west bank of the Mississippi River.

The Gateway Arch was designed by Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen in 1947; construction began on February 12, 1963, and was completed on October 28, 1965, for $13 million (equivalent to $190 million in 2015). The monument opened to the public on June 10, 1967.

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Residential Housing including: YouTube Videos: Pictured (L-R): A ranch-style house in Salinas, California, U.S.; (R) Tiny houses on display in Portland, Oregon (courtesy of DanDavidCook)
Click here for a List of House Types

A house is a building that functions as a home, ranging from simple dwellings such as rudimentary huts of nomadic tribes and the improvised shacks in shantytowns to complex, fixed structures of wood, brick, concrete or other materials containing plumbing, ventilation and electrical systems.

Houses use a range of different roofing systems to keep precipitation such as rain from getting into the dwelling space. Houses may have doors or locks to secure the dwelling space and protect its inhabitants and contents from burglars or other trespassers.

Most conventional modern houses in Western cultures will contain one or more bedrooms and bathrooms, a kitchen or cooking area, and a living room. A house may have a separate dining room, or the eating area may be integrated into another room. Some large houses in North America have a recreation room.

In traditional agriculture-oriented societies, domestic animals such as chickens or larger livestock (like cattle) may share part of the house with humans. The social unit that lives in a house is known as a household.

Most commonly, a household is a family unit of some kind, although households may also be other social groups, such as roommates or, in a rooming house, unconnected individuals.

Some houses only have a dwelling space for one family or similar-sized group; larger houses called townhouses or row houses may contain numerous family dwellings in the same structure.

A house may be accompanied by outbuildings, such as a garage for vehicles or a shed for gardening equipment and tools. A house may have a backyard or front yard, which serve as additional areas where inhabitants can relax or eat.

Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about Residential Housing: ___________________________________________________________________________

The following is a List of building materials as it applies to residential housing.

Many types of building materials are used in the building construction and construction industry to create buildings and structures.

​These categories of materials and products are used by architects and construction project managers to specify the materials and methods used for building projects.

Some building materials like cold rolled steel framing are considered modern methods of construction, over the traditionally slower methods like blockwork and timber. Many building materials have a variety of uses, therefore it is always a good idea to consult the manufacturer to check if a product is best suited to your requirements

Click here for a List of building Materials

Industry Standards:

The Construction Specifications Institute maintains the following industry standards:
  • MasterFormat – 50 standard divisions of building materials - 2004 edition (current in 2009)
  • 16 Divisions – Original 16 divisions of building materials

See Also:
Sources: ___________________________________________________________________________

The tiny house movement (also known as the "small house movement") is a description for the architectural and social movement that advocates living simply in small homes. There is currently no set definition as to what constitutes as a tiny house; however, a residential structure under 500 square feet (46 m2) is generally accepted to be a tiny home.

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Apartments, including Rent Control in the United States
YouTube Video: How to Find an Apartment
YouTube Video: Who are Rent Control's Biggest Beneficiaries?
Pictured: Apartments Complexes as (L) Exterior; (R) Interior (with view)

An apartment is a self-contained housing unit (a type of residential real estate) that occupies only part of a building, generally on a single level.

Such a building may be called an apartment building, apartment complex, flat complex, block of flats, tower block, high-rise or, occasionally, mansion block (in British English), especially if it consists of many apartments for rent. In Scotland, it is called a block of flats or, if it is a traditional sandstone building, a tenement, a term which has a pejorative connotation in the United States. Apartments may be owned by an owner/occupier, by leasehold tenure or rented by tenants(two types of housing tenure)

The term apartment is favored in North America (although in some cities flat is used for a unit which is part of a house containing two or three units, typically one to a floor.

Technically multi-story apartments sometimes referred to as mid-rise apartments and even high-rise apartments when there are many stories. Duplex description can be different depending on the part of the country but generally has two to four dwellings with a door for each and usually two front doors close together but separate - referred to as 'duplex' (or 'triplex') indicating the number of units, not the number of floors as they are usually one story at least in the Texas area.

In the United States, some apartment-dwellers own their units, either as co-ops, in which the residents own shares of a corporation that owns the building or development; or in condominiums, whose residents own their apartments and share ownership of the public spaces.

Most apartments are in buildings designed for the purpose, but large older houses are sometimes divided into apartments. The word apartment denotes a residential unit or section in a building. In some locations, particularly the United States, the word connotes a rental unit owned by the building owner, and is not typically used for a condominium.

In some countries the word "unit" is a more general term referring to both apartments and rental business suites. The word 'unit' is generally used only in the context of a specific building; e.g., "This building has three units" or "I'm going to rent a unit in this building", but not "I'm going to rent a unit somewhere". Some buildings can be characterized as 'mixed use buildings', meaning part of the building is for commercial, business, or office use, usually on the first floor or first couple of floors, and one or more apartments are found in the rest of the building, usually on the upper floors.

Click on any of the following for more about Apartments: ___________________________________________________________________________

Rent control in the United States:

Rent control in the United States refers to laws or ordinances that set price controls on the renting of American residential housing. They function as a price ceiling.

Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about Rent Control in the United States:
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Condominiums
YouTube Video: Why great architecture should tell a story 
by Architect Ole Scheeren TED
Pictured below: Zaha Hadid Architects completes 520 West 28th Street condos in New York

​A condominium, often shortened to condo, in the United States and in most Canadian provinces, is a type of living space which is similar to an apartment but which is independently sellable and therefore regarded as real estate.

It is where the condominium building structure is divided into several units that are each separately owned, surrounded by common areas that are jointly owned. 

Residential condominiums are frequently constructed as apartment buildings, but there has been an increase in the number of "detached condominiums", which look like single-family homes but in which the yards, building exteriors, and streets are jointly owned and jointly maintained by a community association.

Unlike apartments, which are leased by their tenants, condominium units are owned outright. Additionally, the owners of the individual units also collectively own the common areas of the property, such as hallways, walkways, laundry rooms, etc.; as well as common utilities and amenities, such as the HVAC system, elevators, and so on.

Many shopping malls are industrial condominiums in which the individual retail and office spaces are owned by the businesses that occupy them while the common areas of the mall are collectively owned by all the business entities that own the individual spaces.

The common areas, amenities and utilities are managed collectively by the owners through their association, such as a homeowner association.

Scholars have traced the earliest known use of the condominium form of tenure to a document from first century Babylon. 

In the United States:

The first condominium law passed in the United States was in the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico in 1958.

In 1960, the first condominium in the Continental United States was built in Salt Lake City, Utah.  

Section 234 of the Housing Act of 1961 allowed the Federal Housing Administration to insure mortgages on condominiums, leading to a vast increase in the funds available for condominiums, and to condominium laws in every state by 1969.

Many Americans' first widespread awareness of condominium life came not from its largest cities but from South Florida, where developers had imported the condominium concept from Puerto Rico and used it to sell thousands of inexpensive homes to retirees arriving flush with cash from the urban Northern United States.

The primary attraction to this type of ownership is the ability to obtain affordable housing in a highly desirable area that typically is beyond economic reach. Additionally, such properties benefit from having restrictions that maintain and enhance value, providing control over blight that plagues some neighborhoods.

Over the past several decades, the residential condominium industry has been booming in all of the major metropolitan areas such as: Miami, San Francisco, Seattle, Boston, Chicago, Austin, Los Angeles, and New York City.

However, in recent years, supply within the condo industry has caught up with demand and sales have slowed. It is now in a slowdown phase.

An alternative form of ownership, popular in parts of the United States but found also in other common law jurisdictions, is housing cooperative, also known as "company share" or "co-op". A Housing Cooperative is where the building has an associated legal company and ownership of shares gives the right to a lease for residence of a unit.

Another form is ground rent (solarium) in which a single landlord retains ownership of the land (solum) but leases the surface rights (superficies) which renew in perpetuity or over a very long term. This is comparable to a civil-law emphyteusis, except that emphyteusis shifts the duties of up-keep and making improvements onto the renter.
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In the United States, there are several different styles of condominium complexes. For example, a garden condominium complex consists of low-rise buildings built with landscaped grounds surrounding them.

A townhouse condominium complex consists of multi-floor semi-detached homes. In condominium townhouses, the purchaser owns only the interior, while the building itself is owned by a condominium corporation.

The corporation is jointly owned by all the owners, and charges them fees for general maintenance and major repairs. Freehold townhouses are exclusively owned, without any condominium aspects. In the United States this type of ownership is called fee simple.

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Mount Rushmore
YouTube Video: Mount Rushmore Was Supposed to Look Very Different
(By Smithsonian Channel)
Pictured below: Mount Rushmore National Memorial

Mount Rushmore National Memorial is centered around a sculpture carved into the granite face of Mount Rushmore in the Black Hills in Keystone, South Dakota.

Sculptor Gutzon Borglum created the sculpture's design and oversaw the project's execution from 1927 to 1941 with the help of his son Lincoln Borglum. 

The sculptures feature the 60-foot (18 m) heads of Presidents George Washington (1732–1799), Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919), and Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865). 

The memorial park covers 1,278.45 acres (2.00 sq mi; 5.17 km2) and is 5,725 feet (1,745 m) above sea level.

South Dakota historian Doane Robinson is credited with conceiving the idea of carving the likenesses of famous people into the Black Hills region of South Dakota in order to promote tourism in the region. His initial idea was to sculpt the Needles; however, Gutzon Borglum rejected the Needles because of the poor quality of the granite and strong opposition from American Indian groups.  They settled on Mount Rushmore, which also has the advantage of facing southeast for maximum sun exposure.

Robinson wanted it to feature American West heroes such as Lewis and Clark, Red Cloud, and Buffalo Bill Cody, but Borglum decided that the sculpture should have broader appeal and chose the four presidents.

Senator Peter Norbeck sponsored the project and secured federal funding; construction began in 1927, and the presidents' faces were completed between 1934 and 1939. Gutzon Borglum died in March 1941, and his son Lincoln took over as leader of the construction project. Each president was originally to be depicted from head to waist, but lack of funding forced construction to end on October 31, 1941.

Mount Rushmore attracts more than two million visitors annually.

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Architectural Digest (Magazine and Website)
YouTube Video: Inside Mandy Moore's $2.6 Million Mid-century Home in Pasadena | Open Door
Pictured below: Top 100 Architects by Architectural Digest

Architectural Digest is an American monthly magazine founded in 1920. Its principal subject is interior design, rather than architecture more generally. The magazine is published by Condé Nast, which also publishes international editions of Architectural Digest in China, France, Germany, Russia, Spain, Mexico, and Latin America.

Architectural Digest is aimed at an affluent and style-conscious readership, and is subtitled "The International Design Authority". The magazine also releases the annual AD100 list, which recognizes the most influential interior designers and architects around the world.

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Architecture of the United States
YouTube Video: The History of the United States Capitol
Pictured below: The Coolest College Architecture in the United States featuring Georgetown University (by Travel & Leisure Magazine)

The architecture of the United States demonstrates a broad variety of architectural styles and built forms over the country's history of over four centuries of independence and former Spanish and British rule.

Architecture in the United States is as diverse as its multicultural society and has been shaped by many internal and external factors and regional distinctions. As a whole it represents a rich eclectic and innovative tradition.

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How to become an Architect: including, ​​YouTube Video: Building Walt Disney World | The B1M
YouTube Video: 12 of the World’s Most Insane Engineering Marvels
Pictured below: America's Top Architecture Schools 2017
Professional requirements for architects vary from place to place, but usually consist of three elements: a university degree or advanced education, a period of internship or training in an office, and examination for registration with a jurisdiction.

Professionals engaged in the design and supervision of construction projects prior to the late 19th century were not necessarily trained in a separate architecture program in an academic setting. Instead, they usually carried the title of Master Builder, or surveyor, after serving a number of years as an apprentice (such as Sir Christopher Wren).

The formal study of architecture in academic institutions played a pivotal role in the development of the profession as a whole, serving as a focal point for advances in architectural technology and theory.

In the United States, people wishing to become licensed architects are required to meet the requirements of their respective state. Each state has a registration board to oversee that state's licensure laws. 

National Council of Architectural Registration Boards is a non-profit professional association created in 1919 to help ensure parity between the states' often conflicting rules.

The registration boards of each of the 50 states (and 5 territories), member boards. NCARB issues a national certificate to qualified licensed architects. The NCARB certificate is recognized in most licensing jurisdictions for the purpose of granting licensure by endorsement or reciprocity.

Requirements vary among jurisdictions, and there are three common requirements for registration: education, experience and examination. About half of the States require a professional degree from a school accredited by the National Architectural Accrediting Board (NAAB) to satisfy their education requirement; this would be either a B.Arch or M.Arch degree.

The experience requirement for degreed candidates is typically the Architectural Experience Program (AXP), a joint program of and the American Institute of Architects (AIA). AXP creates a framework to identify for the intern architect base skills and core-competencies.

The intern architect needs to earn roughly three years worth of experience across six specified divisions (Practice Management, Project Management, Programming & Analysis, Project Planning & Design, Project Development & Documentation, and Construction & Evaluation) all while working under the direct supervision of a licensed Architect.

The states that waive the degree requirement typically require a full 10 years' experience in combination with the AXP diversification requirements before the candidate is eligible to sit for the examination. California requires C-IDP (Comprehensive Intern Development Program), which builds upon the seat time requirement of IDP with the need to document learning having occurred. All jurisdictions use the Architect Registration Examination (ARE), a series of six (formerly seven) computerized exams administered by NCARB.

The NCARB also has a certification for those architects meeting NCARB's model standard: NAAB degree, AXP and ARE passage. This certificate facilitates reciprocity between the member boards should an architect desire registration in a different jurisdiction. All architects licensed by their respective states have professional status as Registered Architects (RA).

Depending on the policies of the registration board for the state in question, it is sometimes possible to become licensed as an Architect in other ways: reciprocal licensure for over-seas architects and working under an architect as an intern for an extended period of time.

Length of the typical licensure process depends on the particular combination of education, experience and pace of examination of a candidate. It is typical that the entire licensure process takes at least 7 to 11 years to complete; including five years of study (5 years for B.Arch, 3 years for M.Arch, 6 years for a "four-plus-two" program), three-plus years of experience (meeting exact IDP requirements in each category), and often a year or more to take and pass the seven ARE 4.0 exams.

Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about Professional Requirements for becoming an Architect: ___________________________________________________________________________

Architecture schools in the United States:

Architecture school in the United States refers to university schools and colleges with the purpose of educating students in the field of architecture.

Professional Degrees:
There are three types of professional degrees in architecture in the United States:
Non-professional degrees include (require a Master of Architecture for licensure):
  • Bachelor of Arts in Architecture (BA)
  • Bachelor of Science in Architecture (BS)
  • Bachelor of Fine Arts in Architecture (BFA Arch)
  • Bachelor of Environmental Design (B.Envd or B.E.D.)

A non-professional degree typically takes four years to complete and may be part of the later completion of professional degree (A "4+2" plan comprises a 4-year BA or BS in Architecture followed by a 2-year Master of Architecture).

The 5-year BArch and 6-year MArch are regarded as virtual equals in the registration and accreditation processes.

A professional Bachelor of Architecture degree takes five years to complete. (There is a 3-year B.Arch program offered by Florida Atlantic University articulated with an AA degree in architecture.) There are also M.Arch programs for those with undergraduate degrees in areas outside architecture; these program typically take six or seven semester (3 or 3-1/2 years) to complete.

Other programs (such as those offered at Drexel University, Boston Architectural College and New School of Architecture and Design) combine the required educational courses with the work component necessary to sit for the professional licensing exams.

Programs such as this often afford students the ability to immediately test for licensure upon graduation, as opposed to having to put in several years working in the field after graduation before being able to get licensed, as is common in more traditional programs.

Some architecture schools, such as Florida International University, offer the Master of Architecture degree in an accelerated five-year or six-year format without the need of a bachelor's degree. There is currently an ongoing debate to upgrade the 3.5 year M.Arch title to D.Arch both for current students and retroactively for 3.5 year M.Arch graduates.

Rankings:
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Each year, the journal DesignIntelligence ranks both undergraduate and graduate architecture programs that are accredited by the National Architectural Accrediting Board.

These rankings, collectively called "America's Best Architecture & Design Schools" are obtained by surveying hundreds of practicing architecture leaders with direct and recent experience hiring and supervising architects. They are asked what programs they consider to be best preparing students for professional success overall. They are also asked to cite the programs they consider to be the best in educating and training for specific skills. These skills rankings are also published in "America's Best Architecture & Design Schools."

Founded in 1912 to advance the quality of architectural education, the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) represents all accredited programs and their faculty across the United States and Canada, as well as non-accredited and international affiliate members around the world.

The ACSA collects detailed information from these schools for its "Guide to Architecture Schools," which exists both as a book and as a free online searchable database at archschools.org. These publications are the only complete directories of all accredited professional architecture programs in North America and are used as a reference for prospective students, graduate students, educators, administrators, counselors, and practitioners.

The ACSA Guide to Architecture Schools features detailed program descriptions, an index of specialized and related degree programs, an overview of the profession of architecture and the education process, advice on how to select the right school, and scholarship and financial aid information.

In addition, "America's Best Architecture & Design Schools" each year presents Architect Registration Examination pass rates by school, a historical review of top architecture schools, how current architecture students rank their schools, and a directory of accredited programs.

These particular alphabetical lists do not compute with a DI.net average of the past decade, leaving out a series of other brilliant institutions and including others that have just recently made the lists.

The following schools have consistently been ranked within the top 17 of all undergraduate architecture schools in the nation. In alphabetical order, the top 17 schools are: 
  1. Auburn University, 
  2. Boston Architectural College, 
  3. California Polytechnic State University, 
  4. Carnegie Mellon University,
  5. Cooper Union, 
  6. Cornell University, 
  7. Iowa State University, 
  8. Pratt Institute, 
  9. Rhode Island School of Design, 
  10. Rice University, 
  11. Southern California Institute of Architecture, 
  12. Syracuse University, 
  13. University of Notre Dame, 
  14. University of Oregon,
  15. University of Southern California, 
  16. University of Texas at Austin,
  17. and Virginia Polytechnic Institute.

The following schools are top 10 graduate schools, in order, according to "America's Best Architecture & Design Schools 2014":
  1. Harvard University,
  2. Yale University,
  3. Columbia University,
  4. Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
  5. Cornell University tied with
  6. Rice University,
  7. University of Michigan,
  8. Kansas State University,
  9. University of California, Berkeley,
  10. University of Texas at Austin.

Click here for an Alphabetical List of Architectural Schools by State.







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Architectural Style, including a List of Architectural Styles
YouTube Video: The Incredible Homes of The Top 10 Richest People
YouTube Video: Top 10 Most Expensive Homes In America
Pictured below: 32 Types of Architectural Styles for the Home (Modern, Craftsman, Country, etc.)

​An architectural style is characterized by the features that make a building or other structure notable or historically identifiable.

A style may include such elements as form, method of construction, building materials, and regional character.

Most architecture can be classified within a chronology of styles which changes over time reflecting changing fashions, beliefs and religions, or the emergence of new ideas, technology, or materials which make new styles possible.

Styles therefore emerge from the history of a society. They are documented in the subject of architectural history. At any time several styles may be fashionable, and when a style changes it usually does so gradually, as architects learn and adapt to new ideas. The new style is sometimes only a rebellion against an existing style, such as post-modernism (meaning "after modernism"), which has in recent years found its own language and split into a number of styles which have acquired other names.

Styles often spread to other places, so that the style at its source continues to develop in new ways while other countries follow with their own twist. For instance, Renaissance ideas emerged in Italy around 1425 and spread to all of Europe over the next 200 years, with the French, Belgian, German, English, and Spanish Renaissances showing recognisably the same style, but with unique characteristics.

A style may also spread through colonialism, either by foreign colonies learning from their home country, or by settlers moving to a new land. One example is the Spanish missions in California, brought by Spanish priests in the late 18th century and built in a unique style.

After a style has gone out of fashion, revivals and re-interpretations may occur. For instance, classicism has been revived many times and found new life as neoclassicism. Each time it is revived, it is different.

The Spanish mission style was revived 100 years later as the Mission Revival, and that soon evolved into the Spanish Colonial Revival.

Vernacular architecture works slightly differently and is listed separately. It is the native method of construction used by local people, usually using labor-intensive methods and local materials, and usually for small structures such as rural cottages. It varies from region to region even within a country, and takes mini account of national styles or technology. As western society has developed, vernacular styles have mostly become outmoded due to new technology and to national building standards.

Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about Architectural Style: ___________________________________________________________________________

List of Architectural Styles:​

Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about the List of Architectural Styles:







Sustainable Architecture, including a Look Inside Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kuniss Sustainable LA Farmhouse Pictured below: People Magazine: See Inside Mila Kunis & Ashton Kutcher's Modern L.A. Farmhouse: 'We Wanted a Home, Not an Estate'
Sustainable architecture is architecture that seeks to minimize the negative environmental impact of buildings by efficiency and moderation in the use of materials, energy, development space and the ecosystem at large.

Sustainable architecture uses a conscious approach to energy and ecological conservation in the design of the built environment.

​The idea of sustainability, or ecological design, is to ensure that our use of presently available resources does not end up having detrimental effects to our collective well-being or making it impossible to obtain resources for other applications in the long run.

​Background:

Shift from narrow to broader approach:

The term “sustainability” in relation to architecture has so far been mostly considered through the lens of building technology and its transformations. Going beyond the technical sphere of “green” design, invention and expertise, some scholars are starting to position architecture within a much broader cultural framework of the human interrelationship with nature. Adopting this framework allows tracing a rich history of cultural debates about our relationship to nature and the environment, from the point of view of different historical and geographical contexts.

Changing pedagogues:

Critics of the reductionism of modernism often noted the abandonment of the teaching of architectural history as a causal factor. The fact that a number of the major players in the shift away from modernism were trained at Princeton University's School of Architecture, where recourse to history continued to be a part of design training in the 1940s and 1950s, was significant.

The increasing rise of interest in history had a profound impact on architectural education. History courses became more typical and regularized. With the demand for professors knowledgeable in the history of architecture, several PhD programs in schools of architecture arose in order to differentiate themselves from art history PhD programs, where architectural historians had previously trained.

In the US, MIT and Cornell were the first, created in the mid-1970s, followed by Columbia, Berkeley, and Princeton. Among the founders of new architectural history programs were Bruno Zevi at the Institute for the History of Architecture in Venice, Stanford Anderson and Henry Millon at MIT, Alexander Tzonis at the Architectural Association,

Anthony Vidler at Princeton, Manfredo Tafuri at the University of Venice, Kenneth
Frampton at Columbia University, and Werner Oechslin and Kurt Forster at ETH Zürich.

Sustainable energy use:
Main articles: Low-energy house and Zero-energy building

Energy efficiency over the entire life cycle of a building is the most important goal of sustainable architecture. Architects use many different passive and active techniques to reduce the energy needs of buildings and increase their ability to capture or generate their own energy. 

To minimize cost and complexity, sustainable architecture prioritizes passive systems to take advantage of building location with incorporated architectural elements, supplementing with renewable energy sources and then fossil fuel resources only as needed. Site analysis can be employed to optimize use of exploit local environmental resources such as daylight and ambient wind for heating and ventilation.

Heating, ventilation and cooling system efficiency:

Numerous passive architectural strategies have been developed over time. Examples of such strategies include the arrangement of rooms or the sizing and orientation of windows in a building, and the orientation of facades and streets or the ratio between building heights and street widths for urban planning.

An important and cost-effective element of an efficient heating, ventilating, and air conditioning (HVAC) system is a well-insulated building. A more efficient building requires less heat generating or dissipating power, but may require more ventilation capacity to expel polluted indoor air.

Significant amounts of energy are flushed out of buildings in the water, air and compost streams. Off the shelf, on-site energy recycling technologies can effectively recapture energy from waste hot water and stale air and transfer that energy into incoming fresh cold water or fresh air. Recapture of energy for uses other than gardening from compost leaving buildings requires centralized anaerobic digesters.

HVAC systems are powered by motors. Copper, versus other metal conductors, helps to improve the electrical energy efficiencies of motors, thereby enhancing the sustainability of electrical building components.

Site and building orientation have some major effects on a building's HVAC efficiency.

Passive solar building design allows buildings to harness the energy of the sun efficiently without the use of any active solar mechanisms such as photovoltaic cells or solar hot water panels. Typically passive solar building designs incorporate materials with high thermal mass that retain heat effectively and strong insulation that works to prevent heat escape. Low energy designs also requires the use of solar shading, by means of awnings, blinds or shutters, to relieve the solar heat gain in summer and to reduce the need for artificial cooling.

In addition, low energy buildings typically have a very low surface area to volume ratio to minimize heat loss. This means that sprawling multi-winged building designs (often thought to look more "organic") are often avoided in favor of more centralized structures. Traditional cold climate buildings such as American colonial saltbox designs provide a good historical model for centralized heat efficiency in a small-scale building.

Windows are placed to maximize the input of heat-creating light while minimizing the loss of heat through glass, a poor insulator. In the northern hemisphere this usually involves installing a large number of south-facing windows to collect direct sun and severely restricting the number of north-facing windows.

Certain window types, such as double or triple glazed insulated windows with gas filled spaces and low emissivity (low-E) coatings, provide much better insulation than single-pane glass windows. Preventing excess solar gain by means of solar shading devices in the summer months is important to reduce cooling needs. 

Deciduous trees are often planted in front of windows to block excessive sun in summer with their leaves but allow light through in winter when their leaves fall off. Louvers or light shelves are installed to allow the sunlight in during the winter (when the sun is lower in the sky) and keep it out in the summer (when the sun is high in the sky). Coniferous or evergreen plants are often planted to the north of buildings to shield against cold north winds.

In colder climates, heating systems are a primary focus for sustainable architecture because they are typically one of the largest single energy drains in buildings.

In warmer climates where cooling is a primary concern, passive solar designs can also be very effective. Masonry building materials with high thermal mass are very valuable for retaining the cool temperatures of night throughout the day. In addition builders often opt for sprawling single story structures in order to maximize surface area and heat loss.

Buildings are often designed to capture and channel existing winds, particularly the especially cool winds coming from nearby bodies of water. Many of these valuable strategies are employed in some way by the traditional architecture of warm regions, such as south-western mission buildings.

In climates with four seasons, an integrated energy system will increase in efficiency: when the building is well insulated, when it is sited to work with the forces of nature, when heat is recaptured (to be used immediately or stored), when the heat plant relying on fossil fuels or electricity is greater than 100% efficient, and when renewable energy is used.

Renewable energy generation:
​​
Solar panels:
Main article: Solar PV

Active solar devices such as photovoltaic solar panels help to provide sustainable electricity for any use. Electrical output of a solar panel is dependent on orientation, efficiency, latitude, and climate—solar gain varies even at the same latitude.

Typical efficiencies for commercially available PV panels range from 4% to 28%. The low
efficiency of certain photovoltaic panels can significantly affect the payback period of their installation. This low efficiency does not mean that solar panels are not a viable energy alternative. In Germany for example, Solar Panels are commonly installed in residential home construction.

Roofs are often angled toward the sun to allow photovoltaic panels to collect at maximum efficiency. In the northern hemisphere, a true-south facing orientation maximizes yield for solar panels. If true-south is not possible, solar panels can produce adequate energy if aligned within 30° of south. However, at higher latitudes, winter energy yield will be significantly reduced for non-south orientation.

To maximize efficiency in winter, the collector can be angled above horizontal Latitude +15°. To maximize efficiency in summer, the angle should be Latitude -15°. However, for an annual maximum production, the angle of the panel above horizontal should be equal to its latitude.

Wind turbines:
Main article: Wind power

The use of undersized wind turbines in energy production in sustainable structures requires the consideration of many factors. In considering costs, small wind systems are generally more expensive than larger wind turbines relative to the amount of energy they produce.

For small wind turbines, maintenance costs can be a deciding factor at sites with marginal wind-harnessing capabilities. At low-wind sites, maintenance can consume much of a small wind turbine's revenue. Wind turbines begin operating when winds reach 8 mph, achieve energy production capacity at speeds of 32-37 mph, and shut off to avoid damage at speeds exceeding 55 mph. 

The energy potential of a wind turbine is proportional to the square of the length of its blades and to the cube of the speed at which its blades spin. Though wind turbines are available that can supplement power for a single building, because of these factors, the efficiency of the wind turbine depends much upon the wind conditions at the building site.

For these reasons, for wind turbines to be at all efficient, they must be installed at locations that are known to receive a constant amount of wind (with average wind speeds of more than 15 mph), rather than locations that receive wind sporadically. A small wind turbine can be installed on a roof.

Installation issues then include the strength of the roof, vibration, and the turbulence caused by the roof ledge. Small-scale rooftop wind turbines have been known to be able to generate power from 10% to up to 25% of the electricity required of a regular domestic household dwelling. 

Turbines for residential scale use are usually between 7 feet (2 m) to 25 feet (8 m) in diameter and produce electricity at a rate of 900 watts to 10,000 watts at their tested wind speed.

Solar water heating:
Main article: Solar thermal power

Solar water heaters, also called solar domestic hot water systems, can be a cost-effective way to generate hot water for a home. They can be used in any climate, and the fuel they use—sunshine—is free.

There are two types of solar water systems- active and passive. An active solar collector system can produce about 80 to 100 gallons of hot water per day. A passive system will have a lower capacity.

There are also two types of circulation, direct circulation systems and indirect circulation systems. Direct circulation systems loop the domestic water through the panels. They should not be used in climates with temperatures below freezing. Indirect circulation loops glycol or some other fluid through the solar panels and uses a heat exchanger to heat up the domestic water.

The two most common types of collector panels are Flat-Plate and Evacuated-tube. The two work similarly except that evacuated tubes do not convectively lose heat, which greatly improves their efficiency (5%-25% more efficient). With these higher efficiencies, Evacuated-tube solar collectors can also produce higher-temperature space heating, and even higher temperatures for absorption cooling systems.

Electric-resistance water heaters that are common in homes today have an electrical demand around 4500 kW·h/year. With the use of solar collectors, the energy use is cut in half. The up-front cost of installing solar collectors is high, but with the annual energy savings, payback periods are relatively short.

Heat pumps:

Air source heat pumps (ASHP) can be thought of as reversible air conditioners. Like an air conditioner, an ASHP can take heat from a relatively cool space (e.g. a house at 70 °F) and dump it into a hot place (e.g. outside at 85 °F). However, unlike an air conditioner, the condenser and evaporator of an ASHP can switch roles and absorb heat from the cool outside air and dump it into a warm house.

Air-source heat pumps are inexpensive relative to other heat pump systems. However, the efficiency of air-source heat pumps decline when the outdoor temperature is very cold or very hot; therefore, they are only really applicable in temperate climates.

For areas not located in temperate climates, ground-source (or geothermal) heat pumps provide an efficient alternative. The difference between the two heat pumps is that the ground-source has one of its heat exchangers placed underground—usually in a horizontal or vertical arrangement.

Ground-source takes advantage of the relatively constant, mild temperatures underground, which means their efficiencies can be much greater than that of an air-source heat pump. The in-ground heat exchanger generally needs a considerable amount of area. Designers have placed them in an open area next to the building or underneath a parking lot.

Energy Star ground-source heat pumps can be 40% to 60% more efficient than their air-source counterparts. They are also quieter and can also be applied to other functions like domestic hot water heating.

In terms of initial cost, the ground-source heat pump system costs about twice as much as a standard air-source heat pump to be installed. However, the up-front costs can be more than offset by the decrease in energy costs. The reduction in energy costs is especially apparent in areas with typically hot summers and cold winters.

Other types of heat pumps are water-source and air-earth. If the building is located near a body of water, the pond or lake could be used as a heat source or sink. Air-earth heat pumps circulate the building's air through underground ducts. With higher fan power requirements and inefficient heat transfer, Air-earth heat pumps are generally not practical for major construction.

Sustainable building materials:
See also: Green building and Natural building

Some examples of sustainable building materials include:
  • recycled denim or blown-in fiber glass insulation,
  • sustainably harvested wood, 
  • Trass, 
  • Linoleum, 
  • sheep wool, 
  • hempcrete, 
  • roman concrete,
  • panels made from paper flakes,
  • baked earth,
  • rammed earth,
  • clay,
  • vermiculite,
  • flax linnen,
  • sisal,
  • seagrass,
  • expanded clay grains,
  • coconut,
  • wood fiber plates,
  • calcium sandstone,
  • locally obtained stone and rock,
  • and bamboo, which is one of the strongest and fastest growing woody plants,
  • and non-toxic low-VOC glues and paints.

Vegetative cover or shield over building envelopes also helps in the same. Paper which is fabricated or manufactured out of forest wood is supposedly hundred percent recyclable, thus it regenerates and saves almost all the forest wood that it takes during its manufacturing process.

Recycled materials:
​
Sustainable architecture often incorporates the use of recycled or second hand materials, such as reclaimed lumber and recycled copper. The reduction in use of new materials creates a corresponding reduction in embodied energy (energy used in the production of materials).

Often sustainable architects attempt to retrofit old structures to serve new needs in order to avoid unnecessary development. Architectural salvage and reclaimed materials are used when appropriate. When older buildings are demolished, frequently any good wood is reclaimed, renewed, and sold as flooring. Any good dimension stone is similarly reclaimed.

Many other parts are reused as well, such as doors, windows, mantels, and hardware, thus reducing the consumption of new goods. When new materials are employed, green designers look for materials that are rapidly replenished, such as bamboo, which can be harvested for commercial use after only 6 years of growth, sorghum or wheat straw, both of which are waste material that can be pressed into panels, or cork oak, in which only the outer bark is removed for use, thus preserving the tree.

When possible, building materials may be gleaned from the site itself; for example, if a new structure is being constructed in a wooded area, wood from the trees which were cut to make room for the building would be re-used as part of the building itself.

Lower volatile organic compounds:

Low-impact building materials are used wherever feasible: for example, insulation may be made from low VOC (volatile organic compound)-emitting materials such as recycled denim or cellulose insulation, rather than the building insulation materials that may contain carcinogenic or toxic materials such as formaldehyde.

To discourage insect damage, these alternate insulation materials may be treated with boric acid. Organic or milk-based paints may be used. However, a common fallacy is that "green" materials are always better for the health of occupants or the environment. Many harmful substances (including formaldehyde, arsenic, and asbestos) are naturally occurring and are not without their histories of use with the best of intentions.

A study of emissions from materials by the State of California has shown that there are some green materials that have substantial emissions whereas some more "traditional" materials actually were lower emitters. Thus, the subject of emissions must be carefully investigated before concluding that natural materials are always the healthiest alternatives for occupants and for the Earth.

Volatile organic compounds (VOC) can be found in any indoor environment coming from a variety of different sources. VOCs have a high vapor pressure and low water solubility, and are suspected of causing sick building syndrome type symptoms. This is because many VOCs have been known to cause sensory irritation and central nervous system symptoms characteristic to sick building syndrome, indoor concentrations of VOCs are higher than in the outdoor atmosphere, and when there are many VOCs present, they can cause additive and multiplicative effects.

Green products are usually considered to contain fewer VOCs and be better for human and environmental health. A case study conducted by the Department of Civil, Architectural, and Environmental Engineering at the University of Miami that compared three green products and their non-green counterparts found that even though both the green products and the non-green counterparts both emitted levels of VOCs, the amount and intensity of the VOCs emitted from the green products were much safer and comfortable for human exposure.

Materials sustainability standards:

Despite the importance of materials to overall building sustainability, quantifying and evaluating the sustainability of building materials has proven difficult. There is little coherence in the measurement and assessment of materials sustainability attributes, resulting in a landscape today that is littered with hundreds of competing, inconsistent and often imprecise eco-labels, standards and certifications.

This discord has led both to confusion among consumers and commercial purchasers and to the incorporation of inconsistent sustainability criteria in larger building certification programs such as LEED. Various proposals have been made regarding rationalization of the standardization landscape for sustainable building materials.

Sustainable design and plan:

Building:

Building Information Modelling BIM: Building Information Modelling BIM is used to help enable sustainable design by allowing architects and engineers to integrate and analyze building performance.. BIM services, including conceptual and topographic modelling, offer a new channel to green building with successive and immediate availability of internally coherent, and trustworthy project information. BIM enables designers to quantify the environmental impacts of systems and materials to support the decisions needed to design sustainable buildings.

Consulting:

A sustainable building consultant may be engaged early in the design process, to forecast the sustainability implications of building materials, orientation, glazing and other physical factors, so as to identify a sustainable approach that meets the specific requirements of a project.

Norms and standards have been formalized by performance-based rating systems e.g. LEED and Energy Star for homes. They define benchmarks to be met and provide metrics and testing to meet those benchmarks. It is up to the parties involved in the project to determine the best approach to meet those standards.

As sustainable building consulting is often associated with cost premium, organizations such as Architects Assist aim for equity of access to sustainable and resident design.

Building placement:

One central and often ignored aspect of sustainable architecture is building placement. Although the ideal environmental home or office structure is often envisioned as an isolated place, this kind of placement is usually detrimental to the environment.

First, such structures often serve as the unknowing frontlines of suburban sprawl.

Second, they usually increase the energy consumption required for transportation and lead to unnecessary auto emissions. Ideally, most building should avoid suburban sprawl in favor of the kind of light urban development articulated by the New Urbanist movement. 

Careful mixed use zoning can make commercial, residential, and light industrial areas more accessible for those traveling by foot, bicycle, or public transit, as proposed in the Principles of Intelligent Urbanism. The study of Permaculture, in its holistic application, can also greatly help in proper building placement that minimizes energy consumption and works with the surroundings rather than against them, especially in rural and forested zones.

Urban design:

Sustainable urbanism takes actions beyond sustainable architecture, and makes a broader view for sustainability. Typical solutions includes Eco-industrial park (EIP), Urban agriculture, etc. International program that are being supported includes Sustainable Urban Development Network  supported by UN-HABITAT, and Eco2 Cities, supported by the World Bank.

Concurrently, the recent movements of New Urbanism, New Classical Architecture and Complementary Architecture promote a sustainable approach towards construction, that appreciates and develops smart growth, architectural tradition and classical design. This in contrast to modernist and globally uniform architecture, as well as leaning against solitary housing estates and suburban sprawl. 

Both trends started in the 1980s. The Driehaus Architecture Prize is an award that recognizes efforts in New Urbanism and New Classical Architecture, and is endowed with a prize money twice as high as that of the modernist Pritzker Prize.

Waste management:

Waste takes the form of spent or useless materials generated from households and businesses, construction and demolition processes, and manufacturing and agricultural industries. These materials are loosely categorized as municipal solid waste, construction and demolition (C&D) debris, and industrial or agricultural by-products. 

​Sustainable architecture focuses on the on-site use of waste management, incorporating things such as grey water systems for use on garden beds, and composting toilets to reduce sewage. These methods, when combined with on-site food waste composting and off-site recycling, can reduce a house's waste to a small amount of packaging waste.

Criticism:
​
There are conflicting ethical, engineering, and political orientations depending on the viewpoints.

There is no doubt Green Technology has made its headway into the architectural community, the implementation of given technologies have changed the ways we see and perceive modern day architecture.

While green architecture has been proven to show great improvements of ways of living both environmentally and technologically the question remains, is all this sustainable? Many building codes have been demeaned to international standards. "LEED" (Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design) has been criticized for exercising flexible codes for building to follow.

Contractors do this to save as much money as they possibly can. For example, a building may have solar paneling but if the infrastructure of the building's core doesn't support that over a long period of time improvements would have to be made on a constant basis and the building itself would be vulnerable to disasters or enhancements.

With companies cutting paths to make shortcuts with sustainable architecture when building their structures it fuels to the irony that the "sustainable" architecture isn't sustainable at all.

Sustainability comes in reference to longevity and effectiveness.

Ethics and Politics also play into sustainable architecture and its ability to grow in urban environment. Conflicting viewpoints between engineering techniques and environmental impacts still are popular issues that resonate in the architectural community. With every revolutionary technology or innovation there comes criticisms of legitimacy and effectiveness when and how it is being utilized.

Many of the criticisms of sustainable architecture do not reflect every aspect of it but rather a broader spectrum across the international community.

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New7Wonders of the World Pictured below: From left to right, top to bottom: Chichen Itza, Christ the Redeemer, Great Wall of China, Machu Picchu, Petra, Taj Mahal, and Colosseum
New7Wonders of the World was a campaign started in 2000 to choose Wonders of the World from a selection of 200 existing monuments. 

The popularity poll via free Web-based voting and small amounts of telephone voting was led by Canadian-Swiss Bernard Weber and organized by the New 7 Wonders Foundation (N7W) based in Zurich, Switzerland, with winners announced on 7 July 2007 in Lisbon, at Estádio da Luz. 

The poll was considered unscientific partly because it was possible for people to cast multiple votes. According to John Zogby, founder and current President/CEO of the Utica, New York-based polling organization Zogby International, New 7 Wonders Foundation drove "the largest poll on record".

The program drew a wide range of official reactions. Some countries touted their finalist and tried to get more votes cast for it, while others downplayed or criticized the contest.

After supporting the New 7 Wonders Foundation at the beginning of the campaign by providing advice on nominee selection, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), by its bylaws having to record all and give equal status to world heritage sites, distanced itself from the undertaking in 2001 and again in 2007.

The seven winners were chosen from 21 candidates, which had been whittled down from 77 choices by a panel in 2006.

The New 7 Wonders Foundation, established in 2001, relied on private donations and the sale of broadcast rights and received no public funding. 

After the final announcement, New 7 Wonders said it did not earn anything from the exercise and barely recovered its investment. Although N7W describes itself as a not-for-profit organization, the company behind it—the New Open World Corporation (NOWC)—is a commercial business. All licensing and sponsorship money is paid to NOWC.

The foundation ran two subsequent programs: New 7 Wonders of Nature, the subject of voting until 2011, and New7Wonders Cities, which ended in 2014.

The campaigns and the organization are sometimes spelled as one word and sometimes as a single word.

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History of ArchitecturePictured below: The Architect's Dream, by Thomas Cole, 1840, oil on canvas, in the Toledo Museum of Art (Toledo, Ohio, USA)
The history of architecture traces the changes in architecture through various traditions, regions, overarching stylistic trends, and dates. The beginnings of all these traditions is thought to be humans satisfying the very basic need of shelter and protection. 

The term "architecture" generally refers to buildings, but in its essence is much broader, including fields we now consider specialized forms of practice, such as civil engineering, naval, military, and landscape architecture.

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Modern vs. Post Modern Architecture Pictured below:
Examples of (TOP) Modern Home Architecture and (BOTTOM) Postmodern Condo Architecture​
Modern architecture, or modernist architecture, was an architectural movement or architectural style based upon new and innovative technologies of construction, particularly the use of glass, steel, and reinforced concrete; the idea that form should follow function (functionalism); an embrace of minimalism; and a rejection of ornament. It emerged in the first half of the 20th century and became dominant after World War II until the 1980s, when it was gradually replaced as the principal style for institutional and corporate buildings by postmodern architecture.

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Postmodern architecture is a style or movement which emerged in the 1960s as a reaction against the austerity, formality, and lack of variety of modern architecture, particularly in the international style advocated by Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock.

The movement was introduced by the architect and urban planner Denise Scott Brown and architectural theorist Robert Venturi in their book Learning from Las Vegas. The style flourished from the 1980s through the 1990s, particularly in the work of Scott Brown & Venturi, Philip Johnson, Charles Moore and Michael Graves. In the late 1990s, it divided into a multitude of new tendencies, including high-tech architecture, neo-futurism and deconstructivism.

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Space ArchitecturePictured below: A 1990 artist rendering of Space Station Freedom, a project that eventually evolved into the International Space Station
Space architecture is the theory and practice of designing and building inhabited environments in outer space. This mission statement for space architecture was developed at the World Space Congress in Houston in 2002 by members of the Technical Aerospace Architecture Subcommittee of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA).

The architectural approach to spacecraft design addresses the total built environment. It is mainly based on the field of engineering (especially aerospace engineering), but also involves diverse disciplines such as physiology, psychology, and sociology. Like architecture on Earth, the attempt is to go beyond the component elements and systems and gain a broad understanding of the issues that affect design success. 

Space architecture borrows from multiple forms of niche architecture to accomplish the task of ensuring human beings can live and work in space. These include the kinds of design elements one finds in “tiny housing, small living apartments/houses, vehicle design, capsule hotels, and more.”

Much space architecture work has been in designing concepts for orbital space stations and lunar and Martian exploration ships and surface bases for the world's space agencies, chiefly NASA.

The practice of involving architects in the space program grew out of the Space Race, although its origins can be seen much earlier. The need for their involvement stemmed from the push to extend space mission durations and address the needs of astronauts including but beyond minimum survival needs.

Space architecture is currently represented in several institutions. The Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture (SICSA) is an academic organization with the University of Houston that offers a Master of Science in Space Architecture. SICSA also works design contracts with corporations and space agencies.

In Europe, The Vienna University of Technology and the International Space University are involved in space architecture research. The International Conference on Environmental Systems meets annually to present sessions on human spaceflight and space human factors.

Within the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, the Space Architecture Technical Committee has been formed. Despite the historical pattern of large government-led space projects and university-level conceptual design, the advent of space tourism threatens to shift the outlook for space architecture work.

Etymology:

The word space in space architecture is referring to the outer space definition, which is from English outer and space. Outer can be defined as "situated on or toward the outside; external; exterior" and originated around 1350–1400 in Middle English. 

Space is "an area, extent, expanse, lapse of time," the aphetic of Old French espace dating to 1300. Espace is from Latin spatium, "room, area, distance, stretch of time," and is of uncertain origin. In space architecture, speaking of outer space usually means the region of the universe outside Earth's atmosphere, as opposed to outside the atmospheres of all terrestrial bodies. This allows the term to include such domains as the lunar and Martian surfaces.

Architecture, the concatenation of architect and -ure, dates to 1563, coming from Middle French architecte. This term is of Latin origin, formerly architectus, which came from Greek arkhitekton. Arkitekton means "master builder" and is from the combination of arkhi- "chief" and tekton "builder". 

The human experience is central to architecture – the primary difference between space architecture and spacecraft engineering.

There is some debate over the terminology of space architecture. Some consider the field to be a specialty within architecture that applies architectural principles to space applications.

Others such as Ted Hall of the University of Michigan see space architects as generalists, with what is traditionally considered architecture (Earth-bound or terrestrial architecture) being a subset of a broader space architecture. 

Any structures that fly in space will likely remain for some time highly dependent on Earth-based infrastructure and personnel for financing, development, construction, launch, and operation. Therefore, it is a matter of discussion how much of these earthly assets are to be considered part of space architecture. The technicalities of the term space architecture are open to some level of interpretation.

Origins:

Ideas of people traveling to space were first published in science fiction stories, like Jules Verne's 1865 From the Earth to the Moon. In this story several details of the mission (crew of three, spacecraft dimensions, Florida launch site) bear striking similarity to the Apollo moon landings that took place more than 100 years later.

Verne's aluminum capsule had shelves stocked with equipment needed for the journey such as a collapsing telescope, pickaxes and shovels, firearms, oxygen generators, and even trees to plant. A curved sofa was built into the floor and walls and windows near the tip of the spacecraft were accessible by ladder. 

The projectile was shaped like a bullet because it was gun-launched from the ground, a method infeasible for transporting man to space due to the high acceleration forces produced. It would take rocketry to get humans to the cosmos.

​The first serious theoretical work published on space travel by means of rocket power was by Konstantin Tsiolkovsky in 1903. Besides being the father of astronautics he conceived such ideas as the space elevator (inspired by the Eiffel Tower), a rotating space station that created artificial gravity along the outer circumference, airlocks, space suits for extra-vehicular activity (EVA), closed ecosystems to provide food and oxygen, and solar power in space. 

Tsiolkovsky believed human occupation of space was the inevitable path for our species. In 1952 Wernher von Braun published his own inhabited space station concept in a series of magazine articles. His design was an upgrade of earlier concepts, but he took the unique step in going directly to the public with it. The spinning space station would have three decks and was to function as a navigational aid, meteorological station,

Earth observatory, military platform, and way point for further exploration missions to outer space. It is said that the space station depicted in 2001: A Space Odyssey traces its design heritage to Von Braun's work. Wernher von Braun went on to devise mission schemes to the Moon and Mars, each time publishing his grand plans in Collier's Weekly.

The flight of Yuri Gagarin on April 12, 1961 was humanity's maiden spaceflight. While the mission was a necessary first step, Gagarin was more or less confined to a chair with a small view port from which to observe the cosmos – a far cry from the possibilities of life in space.

Following space missions gradually improved living conditions and quality of life in low Earth orbit. Expanding room for movement, physical exercise regimens, sanitation facilities, improved food quality, and recreational activities all accompanied longer mission durations.

Architectural involvement in space was realized in 1968 when a group of architects and industrial designers led by Raymond Loewy, over objections from engineers, prevailed in convincing NASA to include an observation window in the Skylab orbital laboratory. This milestone represents the introduction of the human psychological dimension to spacecraft design. Space architecture was born.

Theory:

The subject of architectural theory has much application in space architecture. Some considerations, though, will be unique to the space context.

Ideology of building:
See also: Architectural design values

​In the first century BC, the Roman architect Vitruvius​ said all buildings should have three things: strength, utility, and beauty. Vitruvius's work De Architectura, the only surviving work on the subject from classical antiquity, would have profound influence on architectural theory for thousands of years to come.

Even in space architecture these are some of the first things we consider. However, the tremendous challenge of living in space has led to habitat design based largely on functional necessity with little or no applied ornament. In this sense space architecture as we know it shares the form follows function principle with modern architecture.

Some theorists link different elements of the Vitruvian triad. Walter Gropius writes:
'Beauty' is based on the perfect mastery of all the scientific, technological and formal prerequisites of the task ... The approach of Functionalism means to design the objects organically on the basis of their own contemporary postulates, without any romantic embellishment or jesting."

As space architecture continues to mature as a discipline, dialogue on architectural design values will open up just as it has for Earth.

Analogs:
​
A starting point for space architecture theory is the search for extreme environments in terrestrial settings where humans have lived, and the formation of analogs between these environments and space. For example, humans have lived in submarines deep in the ocean, in bunkers beneath the Earth's surface, and on Antarctica, and have safely entered burning buildings, radioactively contaminated zones, and the stratosphere with the help of technology. 

Aerial refueling enables Air Force One to stay airborne virtually indefinitely. Nuclear powered submarines generate oxygen using electrolysis and can stay submerged for months at a time. Many of these analogs can be very useful design references for space systems.

In fact space station life support systems and astronaut survival gear for emergency landings bear striking similarity to submarine life support systems and military pilot survival kits, respectively.

Space missions, especially human ones, require extensive preparation. In addition to terrestrial analogs providing design insight, the analogous environments can serve as testbeds to further develop technologies for space applications and train astronaut crews.

The Flashline Mars Arctic Research Station is a simulated Mars base, maintained by the Mars Society, on Canada's remote Devon Island. The project aims to create conditions as similar as possible to a real Mars mission and attempts to establish ideal crew size, test equipment "in the field", and determine the best extra-vehicular activity suits and procedures. 

To train for EVAs in microgravity, space agencies make broad use of underwater and simulator training. The Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory, NASA's underwater training facility, contains full-scale mockups of the Space Shuttle cargo bay and International Space Station modules. Technology development and astronaut training in space-analogous environments are essential to making living in space possible.

In space:

Fundamental to space architecture is designing for physical and psychological wellness in space. What often is taken for granted on Earth – air, water, food, trash disposal – must be designed for in fastidious detail. Rigorous exercise regimens are required to alleviate muscular atrophy and other effects of space on the body.

That space missions are (optimally) fixed in duration can lead to stress from isolation. This problem is not unlike that faced in remote research stations or military tours of duty, although non-standard gravity conditions can exacerbate feelings of unfamiliarity and homesickness.

Furthermore, confinement in limited and unchanging physical spaces appears to magnify interpersonal tensions in small crews and contribute to other negative psychological effects. These stresses can be mitigated by establishing regular contact with family and friends on Earth, maintaining health, incorporating recreational activities, and bringing along familiar items such as photographs and green plants. 

The importance of these psychological measures can be appreciated in the 1968 Soviet 'DLB Lunar Base' design: "...it was planned that the units on the Moon would have a false window, showing scenes of the Earth countryside that would change to correspond with the season back in Moscow. The exercise bicycle was equipped with a synchronized film projector, that allowed the cosmonaut to take a 'ride' out of Moscow with return."

​The challenge of getting anything at all to space, due to launch constraints, has had a profound effect on the physical shapes of space architecture. All space habitats to date have used modular architecture design. Payload fairing dimensions (typically the width but also the height) of modern launch vehicles limit the size of rigid components launched into space.

This approach to building large scale structures in space involves launching multiple modules separately and then manually assembling them afterward. Modular architecture results in a layout similar to a tunnel system where passage through several modules is often required to reach any particular destination. It also tends to standardize the internal diameter or width of pressurized rooms, with machinery and furniture placed along the circumference.

These types of space stations and surface bases can generally only grow by adding additional modules in one or more direction. Finding adequate working and living space is often a major challenge with modular architecture. As a solution, flexible furniture (collapsible tables, curtains on rails, deployable beds) can be used to transform interiors for different functions and change the partitioning between private and group space.

For more discussion of the factors that influence shape in space architecture, see the Varieties section.

Eugène Viollet-le-Duc advocated different architectural forms for different materials. This is especially important in space architecture. The mass constraints with launching push engineers to find ever lighter materials with adequate material properties. Moreover, challenges unique to the orbital space environment, such as rapid thermal expansion due to abrupt changes in solar exposure, and corrosion caused by particle and atomic oxygen bombardment, require unique materials solutions.

Just as the industrial age produced new materials and opened up new architectural possibilities, advances in materials technology will change the prospects of space architecture. Carbon-fiber is already being incorporated into space hardware because of its high strength-to-weight ratio.

Investigations are underway to see whether carbon-fiber or other composite materials will be adopted for major structural components in space. The architectural principle that champions using the most appropriate materials and leaving their nature unadorned is called truth to materials.

A notable difference between the orbital context of space architecture and Earth-based architecture is that structures in orbit do not need to support their own weight. This is possible because of the microgravity condition of objects in free fall. In fact much space hardware, such as the Space Shuttle ''s robotic arm, is designed only to function in orbit and would not be able to lift its own weight on the Earth's surface. 

Microgravity also allows an astronaut to move an object of practically any mass, albeit slowly, provided he or she is adequately constrained to another object. Therefore, structural considerations for the orbital environment are dramatically different from those of terrestrial buildings, and the biggest challenge to holding a space station together is usually launching and assembling the components intact.

Construction on extraterrestrial surfaces still needs to be designed to support its own weight, but its weight will depend on the strength of the local gravitational field.

Ground infrastructure:

Human spaceflight currently requires a great deal of supporting infrastructure on Earth. All human orbital missions to date have been government-orchestrated. The organizational body that manages space missions is typically a national space agency, NASA in the case of the United States and Roscosmos for Russia. These agencies are funded at the federal level.

At NASA, flight controllers are responsible for real-time mission operations and work onsite at NASA Centers. Most engineering development work involved with space vehicles is contracted-out to private companies, who in turn may employ subcontractors of their own, while fundamental research and conceptual design is often done in academia through research funding.

Varieties:

Suborbital:

Structures that cross the boundary of space but do not reach orbital speeds are considered suborbital architecture. For spaceplanes, the architecture has much in common with airliner architecture, especially those of small business jets.

SpaceShip:
Main articles: 
​On June 21, 2004, Mike Melvill reached space funded entirely by private means. The vehicle, SpaceShipOne, was developed by Scaled Composites as an experimental precursor to a privately operated fleet of spaceplanes for suborbital space tourism.

The operational spaceplane model, SpaceShipTwo (SS2), will be carried to an altitude of about 15 kilometers by a B-29 Superfortress-sized carrier aircraft, WhiteKnightTwo. From there SS2 will detach and fire its rocket motor to bring the craft to its apogee of approximately 110 kilometers.

Because SS2 is not designed to go into orbit around the Earth, it is an example of suborbital or aerospace architecture.

The architecture of the SpaceShipTwo vehicle is somewhat different from what is common in previous space vehicles. Unlike the cluttered interiors with protruding machinery and many obscure switches of previous vehicles, this cabin looks more like something out of science fiction than a modern spacecraft.

Both SS2 and the carrier aircraft are being built from lightweight composite materials instead of metal. When the time for weightlessness has arrived on a SS2 flight, the rocket motor will be turned off, ending the noise and vibration. Passengers will be able to see the curvature of the Earth. Numerous double-paned windows that encircle the cabin will offer views in nearly all directions. Cushioned seats will recline flat into the floor to maximize room for floating. An always-pressurized interior will be designed to eliminate the need for space suits.

Orbital:

Orbital architecture is the architecture of structures designed to orbit around the Earth or another astronomical object. Examples of currently-operational orbital architecture are the International Space Station and the re-entry vehicles Space Shuttle, Soyuz spacecraft, and Shenzhou spacecraft.

Historical craft include the Mir space station, Skylab, and the Apollo spacecraft. Orbital architecture usually addresses the condition of weightlessness, a lack of atmospheric and magnetospheric protection from solar and cosmic radiation, rapid day/night cycles, and possibly risk of orbital debris collision. In addition, re-entry vehicles must also be adapted both to weightlessness and to the high temperatures and accelerations experienced during atmospheric reentry.

International Space Station:

The International Space Station (ISS) is the only permanently inhabited structure currently in space. It is the size of an American football field and has a crew of six. With a living volume of 358 m³, it has more interior room than the cargo beds of two American 18-wheeler trucks. 

However, because of the microgravity environment of the space station, there are not always well-defined walls, floors, and ceilings and all pressurized areas can be utilized as living and working space.

​The International Space Station is still under construction. Modules were primarily launched using the Space Shuttle until its deactivation and were assembled by its crew with the help of the working crew on board the space station. ISS modules were often designed and built to barely fit inside the shuttle's payload bay, which is cylindrical with a 4.6 meter diameter.

​Life aboard the space station is distinct from terrestrial life in some very interesting ways. Astronauts commonly "float" objects to one another; for example they will give a clipboard an initial nudge and it will coast to its receiver across the room. In fact, an astronaut can become so accustomed to this habit that they forget that it doesn't work anymore when they return to Earth.

The diet of ISS spacefarers is a combination of participating nations' space food. Each astronaut selects a personalized menu before flight. Many food choices reflect the cultural differences of the astronauts, such as bacon and eggs vs. fish products for breakfast (for the US and Russia, respectively). 

More recently such delicacies as Japanense beef curry, kimchi, and swordfish (Riviera style) have been featured on the orbiting outpost. As much of ISS food is dehydrated or sealed in pouches MRE-style, astronauts are quite excited to get relatively fresh food from shuttle and Progress resupply missions.

Food is stored in packages that facilitate eating in microgravity by keeping the food constrained to the table. Spent packaging and trash must be collected to load into an available spacecraft for disposal. Waste management is not nearly as straight forward as it is on Earth.

The ISS has many windows for observing Earth and space, one of the astronauts' favorite leisure activities. Since the Sun rises every 90 minutes, the windows are covered at "night" to help maintain the 24-hour sleep cycle.

When a shuttle is operating in low Earth orbit, the ISS serves as a safety refuge in case of emergency. The inability to fall back on the safety of the ISS during the latest Hubble Space Telescope Servicing Mission (because of different orbital inclinations) was the reason a backup shuttle was summoned to the launch pad. So, ISS astronauts operate with the mindset that they may be called upon to give sanctuary to a Shuttle crew should something happen to compromise a mission.

The International Space Station is a colossal cooperative project between many nations. The prevailing atmosphere on board is one of diversity and tolerance. This does not mean that it is perfectly harmonious. Astronauts experience the same frustrations and interpersonal quarrels as their Earth-based counterparts.

A typical day on the station might start with wakeup at 6:00 am inside a private soundproof booth in the crew quarters. Astronauts would probably find their sleeping bags in an upright position tied to the wall, because orientation does not matter in space. The astronaut's thighs would be lifted about 50 degrees off the vertical. 

This is the neutral body posture in weightlessness – it would be excessively tiring to "sit" or "stand" as is common on Earth. Crawling out of his booth, an astronaut may chat with other astronauts about the day's science experiments, mission control conferences, interviews with Earthlings, and perhaps even a space walk or space shuttle arrival.

Bigelow Aerospace (out of business since March 2020):
See also: TransHab and BA 330

Bigelow Aerospace took the unique step in securing two patents NASA held from development of the Transhab concept in regard to inflatable space structures. The company now has sole rights to commercial development of the inflatable module technology. 

On July 12, 2006 the Genesis I experimental space habitat was launched into low Earth orbit. Genesis I demonstrated the basic viability of inflatable space structures, even carrying a payload of life science experiments. The second module, Genesis II, was launched into orbit on June 28, 2007 and tested out several improvements over its predecessor.

Among these are reaction wheel assemblies, a precision measurement system for guidance, nine additional cameras, improved gas control for module inflation, and an improved on-board sensor suite.

While Bigelow architecture is still modular, the inflatable configuration allows for much more interior volume than rigid modules. The BA-330, Bigelow's full-scale production model, has more than twice the volume of the largest module on the ISS. Inflatable modules can be docked to rigid modules and are especially well suited for crew living and working quarters.

In 2009 NASA began considering attaching a Bigelow module to the ISS, after abandoning the Transhab concept more than a decade before. The modules will likely have a solid inner core for structural support. Surrounding usable space could be partitioned into different rooms and floors. The Bigelow Expandable Activity Module (BEAM) was transported to ISS arriving on April 10, 2016, inside the unpressurized cargo trunk of a SpaceX Dragon during the SpaceX CRS-8 cargo mission.

Bigelow Aerospace may choose to launch many of their modules independently, leasing their use to a wide variety of companies, organizations, and countries that can't afford their own space programs.

Possible uses of this space include microgravity research and space manufacturing. Or we may see a private space hotel composed of numerous Bigelow modules for rooms, observatories, or even a recreational padded gymnasium.

There is the option of using such modules for habitation quarters on long-term space missions in the Solar System. One amazing aspect of spaceflight is that once a craft leaves an atmosphere, aerodynamic shape is a non-issue. For instance it's possible to apply a Trans Lunar Injection to an entire space station and send it to fly by the Moon. Bigelow has expressed the possibility of their modules being modified for lunar and Martian surface systems as well.

Lunar:
See also: Moonbase

Lunar architecture exists both in theory and in practice. Today the archeological artifacts of temporary human outposts lay untouched on the surface of the Moon. Five Apollo Lunar Module descent stages stand upright in various locations across the equatorial region of the Near Side, hinting at the extraterrestrial endeavors of mankind.

The leading hypothesis on the origin of the Moon did not gain its current status until after lunar rock samples were analyzed. The Moon is the furthest any humans have ever ventured from their home, and space architecture is what kept them alive and allowed them to function as humans.

Apollo:

On the cruise to the Moon, Apollo astronauts had two "rooms" to choose from – the Command Module (CM) or the Lunar Module (LM).

This can be seen in the film Apollo 13 where the three astronauts were forced to use the LM as an emergency life boat. Passage between the two modules was possible through a pressurized docking tunnel, a major advantage over the Soviet design, which required donning a spacesuit to switch modules.

The Command Module featured five windows made of three thick panes of glass. The two inner panes, made of aluminosilicate, ensured no cabin air leaked into space. The outer pane served as a debris shield and part of the heat shield needed for atmospheric reentry.

The CM was a sophisticated spacecraft with all the systems required for successful flight but with an interior volume of 6.17 m3 could be considered cramped for three astronauts. It had its design weaknesses such as no toilet (astronauts used much-hated 'relief tubes' and fecal bags). The coming of the space station would bring effective life support systems with waste management and water reclamation technologies.

The Lunar Module had two stages. A pressurized upper stage, termed the Ascent stage, was the first true spaceship as it could only operate in the vacuum of space. The Descent stage carried the engine used for descent, landing gear and radar, fuel and consumables, the famous ladder, and the Lunar Rover during later Apollo missions.

The idea behind staging is to reduce mass later in a flight, and is the same strategy used in an Earth-launched multistage rocket. The LM pilot stood up during the descent to the Moon.

Landing was achieved via automated control with a manual backup mode. There was no airlock on the LM so the entire cabin had to be evacuated (air vented to space) in order to send an astronaut out to walk on the surface. To stay alive, both astronauts in the LM would have to get in their space suits at this point. The Lunar Module worked well for what it was designed to do.

However, a big unknown remained throughout the design process – the effects of lunar dust. Every astronaut who walked on the Moon tracked in lunar dust, contaminating the LM and later the CM during Lunar Orbit Rendezvous. These dust particles can't be brushed away in a vacuum, and have been described by John Young of Apollo 16 as being like tiny razor blades.

It was soon realized that for humans to live on the Moon, dust mitigation was one of many issues that had to be taken seriously.

Constellation program:

The Exploration Systems Architecture Study that followed the Vision for Space Exploration of 2004 recommended the development of a new class of vehicles that have similar capabilities to their Apollo predecessors with several key differences.

In part to retain some of the Space Shuttle program workforce and ground infrastructure, the launch vehicles were to use Shuttle-derived technologies. Secondly, rather than launching the crew and cargo on the same rocket, the smaller Ares I was to launch the crew with the larger Ares V to handle the heavier cargo.

The two payloads were to rendezvous in low Earth orbit and then head to the Moon from there. The Apollo Lunar Module could not carry enough fuel to reach the polar regions of the Moon but the Altair lunar lander was intended to access any part of the Moon.

While the Altair and surface systems would have been equally necessary for Constellation program to reach fruition, the focus was on developing the Orion spacecraft to shorten the gap in US access to orbit following the retirement of the Space Shuttle in 2010.

Even NASA has described Constellation architecture as 'Apollo on steroids'. Nonetheless, a return to the proven capsule design is a move welcomed by many.

Martian:
See also: Mars habitat and Colonization of Mars

Martian architecture is architecture designed to sustain human life on the surface of Mars, and all the supporting systems necessary to make this possible. The direct sampling of water ice on the surface, and evidence for geyser-like water flows within the last decade have made Mars the most likely extraterrestrial environment for finding liquid water, and therefore alien life, in the Solar System.

Moreover, some geologic evidence suggests that Mars could have been warm and wet on a global scale in its distant past. Intense geologic activity has reshaped the surface of the Earth, erasing evidence of our earliest history. Martian rocks can be even older than Earth rocks, though, so exploring Mars may help us decipher the story of our own geologic evolution including the origin of life on Earth. 

Mars has an atmosphere, though its surface pressure is less than 1% of Earth's. Its surface gravity is about 38% of Earth's. Although a human expedition to Mars has not yet taken place, there has been significant work on Martian habitat design. Martian architecture usually falls into one of two categories: architecture imported from Earth fully assembled and architecture making use of local resources.

Von Braun and other early proposals:

Wernher von Braun was the first to come up with a technically comprehensive proposal for a manned Mars expedition. Rather than a minimal mission profile like Apollo, von Braun envisioned a crew of 70 astronauts aboard a fleet of ten massive spacecraft. Each vessel would be constructed in low Earth orbit, requiring nearly 100 separate launches before one was fully assembled. Seven of the spacecraft would be for crew while three were designated as cargo ships.

There were even designs for small "boats" to shuttle crew and supplies between ships during the cruise to the Red Planet, which was to follow a minimum-energy Hohmann transfer trajectory. This mission plan would involve one-way transit times on the order of eight months and a long stay at Mars, creating the need for long-term living accommodations in space.

Upon arrival at the Red Planet, the fleet would brake into Mars orbit and would remain there until the seven human vessels were ready to return to Earth. Only landing gliders, which were stored in the cargo ships, and their associated ascent stages would travel to the surface.

​Inflatable habitats would be constructed on the surface along with a landing strip to facilitate further glider landings. All necessary propellant and consumables were to be brought from Earth in von Braun's proposal.

Some crew remained in the passenger ships during the mission for orbit-based observation of Mars and to maintain the ships. The passenger ships had habitation spheres 20 meters in diameter. Because the average crew member would spend much time in these ships (around 16 months of transit plus rotating shifts in Mars orbit), habitat design for the ships was an integral part of this mission.

Von Braun was aware of the threat posed by extended exposure to weightlessness. He suggested either tethering passenger ships together to spin about a common center of mass or including self-rotating, dumbbell-shaped "gravity cells" to drift alongside the flotilla to provide each crew member with a few hours of artificial gravity each day. 

At the time of von Braun's proposal, little was known of the dangers of solar radiation beyond Earth and it was cosmic radiation that was thought to present the more formidable challenge. 

The discovery of the Van Allen belts in 1958 demonstrated that the Earth was shielded from high energy solar particles. For the surface portion of the mission, inflatable habitats suggest the desire to maximize living space. It is clear von Braun considered the members of the expedition part of a community with much traffic and interaction between vessels.

The Soviet Union conducted studies of human exploration of Mars and came up with slightly less epic mission designs (though not short on exotic technologies) in 1960 and 1969. The first of which used electric propulsion for interplanetary transit and nuclear reactors as the power plants.

On spacecraft that combine human crew and nuclear reactors, the reactor is usually placed at a maximum distance from the crew quarters, often at the end of a long pole, for radiation safety. An interesting component of the 1960 mission was the surface architecture. A "train" with wheels for rough terrain was to be assembled of landed research modules, one of which was a crew cabin. The train was to traverse the surface of Mars from south pole to north pole, an extremely ambitious goal even by today's standards. 

Other Soviet plans such as the TMK eschewed the large costs associated with landing on the Martian surface and advocated piloted (manned) flybys of Mars. Flyby missions, like the lunar Apollo 8, extend the human presence to other worlds with less risk than landings.

Most early Soviet proposals called for launches using the ill-fated N1 rocket. They also usually involved fewer crew than their American counterparts. Early Martian architecture concepts generally featured assembly in low Earth orbit, bringing all needed consumables from Earth, and designated work vs. living areas. The modern outlook on Mars exploration is not the same.

Recent initiatives:

In every serious study of what it would take to land humans on Mars, keep them alive, and then return them to Earth, the total mass required for the mission is simply stunning. The problem lies in that to launch the amount of consumables (oxygen, food and water) even a small crew would go through during a multi-year Mars mission, it would take a very large rocket with the vast majority of its own mass being propellant.

This is where multiple launches and assembly in Earth orbit come from. However even if such a ship stocked full of goods could be put together in orbit, it would need an additional (large) supply of propellant to send it to Mars.

​The delta-v, or change in velocity, required to insert a spacecraft from Earth orbit to a Mars transfer orbit is many kilometers per second. When we think of getting astronauts to the surface of Mars and back home we quickly realize that an enormous amount of propellant is needed if everything is taken from the Earth. This was the conclusion reached in the 1989 '90-Day Study' initiated by NASA in response to the Space Exploration Initiative.

​​Several techniques have changed the outlook on Mars exploration. The most powerful of which is in-situ resource utilization. Using hydrogen imported from Earth and carbon dioxide from the Martian atmosphere, the Sabatier reaction can be used to manufacture methane (for rocket propellant) and water (for drinking and for oxygen production through electrolysis).

Another technique to reduce Earth-brought propellant requirements is aerobraking. Aerobraking involves skimming the upper layers of an atmosphere, over many passes, to slow a spacecraft down. It's a time-intensive process that shows most promise in slowing down cargo shipments of food and supplies.

NASA's Constellation program does call for landing humans on Mars after a permanent base on the Moon is demonstrated, but details of the base architecture are far from established. It is likely that the first permanent settlement will consist of consecutive crews landing prefabricated habitat modules in the same location and linking them together to form a base.

In some of these modern, economy models of the Mars mission, we see the crew size reduced to a minimal 4 or 6. Such a loss in variety of social relationships can lead to challenges in forming balanced social responses and forming a complete sense of identity. 

It follows that if long-duration missions are to be carried out with very small crews, then intelligent selection of crew is of primary importance. Role assignments is another open issue in Mars mission planning. The primary role of 'pilot' is obsolete when landing takes only a few minutes of a mission lasting hundreds of days, and when that landing will be automated anyway. Assignment of roles will depend heavily on the work to be done on the surface and will require astronauts to assume multiple responsibilities.

As for surface architecture inflatable habitats, perhaps even provided by Bigelow Aerospace, remain a possible option for maximizing living space. In later missions, bricks could be made from a Martian regolith mixture for shielding or even primary, airtight structural components. The environment on Mars offers different opportunities for space suit design, even something like the skin-tight Bio-Suit.

A number of specific habitat design proposals have been put forward, to varying degrees of architectural and engineering analysis. One recent proposal—and the winner of NASA's 2015 Mars Habitat Competition—is Mars Ice House. The design concept is for a Mars surface habitat, 3d-printed in layers out of water ice on the interior of an Earth-manufactured inflatable pressure-retention membrane.

The completed structure would be semi-transparent, absorbing harmful radiation in several wavelengths, while admitting approximately 50 percent of light in the visible spectrum. The habitat is proposed to be entirely set up and built from an autonomous robotic spacecraft and bots, although human habitation with approximately 2–4 inhabitants is envisioned once the habitat is fully built and tested.
​
Robotic:

It is widely accepted that robotic reconnaissance and trail-blazer missions will precede human exploration of other worlds. Making an informed decision on which specific destinations warrant sending human explorers requires more data than what the best Earth-based telescopes can provide.

For example, landing site selection for the Apollo landings drew on data from three different robotic programs: the Ranger program, the Lunar Orbiter program, and the Surveyor program. Before a human was sent, robotic spacecraft mapped the lunar surface, proved the feasibility of soft landings, filmed the terrain up close with television cameras, and scooped and analysed the soil.

A robotic exploration mission is generally designed to carry a wide variety of scientific instruments, ranging from cameras sensitive to particular wavelengths, telescopes, spectrometers, radar devices, accelerometers, radiometers, and particle detectors to name a few.

The function of these instruments is usually to return scientific data but it can also be to give an intuitive "feel" of the state of the spacecraft, allowing a subconscious familiarization with the territory being explored, through telepresence. A good example of this is the inclusion of HDTV cameras on the Japanese lunar orbiter SELENE. While purely scientific instruments could have been brought in their stead, these cameras allow the use of an innate sense to perceive the exploration of the Moon.

The modern, balanced approach to exploring an extraterrestrial destination involves several phases of exploration, each of which needs to produce rationale for progressing to the next phase. The phase immediately preceding human exploration can be described as anthropocentric sensing, that is, sensing designed to give humans as realistic a feeling as possible of actually exploring in person. More, the line between a human system and a robotic system in space is not always going to be clear.

As a general rule, the more formidable the environment, the more essential robotic technology is. Robotic systems can be broadly considered part of space architecture when their purpose is to facilitate the habitation of space or extend the range of the physiological senses into space.

Future:

The future of space architecture hinges on the expansion of human presence in space. Under the historical model of government-orchestrated exploration missions initiated by single political administrations, space structures are likely to be limited to small-scale habitats and orbital modules with design life cycles of only several years or decades. 

The designs, and thus architecture, will generally be fixed and without real time feedback from the spacefarers themselves. The technology to repair and upgrade existing habitats, a practice widespread on Earth, is not likely to be developed under short term exploration goals.

If exploration takes on a multi-administration or international character, the prospects for space architecture development by the inhabitants themselves will be broader. Private space tourism is a way the development of space and a space transportation infrastructure can be accelerated. Virgin Galactic has indicated plans for an orbital craft, SpaceShipThree.

The demand for space tourism is one without bound. It is not difficult to imagine lunar parks or cruises by Venus. Another impetus to become a spacefaring species is planetary defense.

The classic space mission is the Earth-colliding asteroid interception mission. Using nuclear detonations to split or deflect the asteroid is risky at best. Such a tactic could actually make the problem worse by increasing the amount of asteroid fragments that do end up hitting the Earth. 

Robert Zubrin writes: "If bombs are to be used as asteroid deflectors, they cannot just be launched willy-nilly. No, before any bombs are detonated, the asteroid will have to be thoroughly explored, its geology assessed, and subsurface bomb placements carefully determined and precisely located on the basis of such knowledge. A human crew, consisting of surveyors, geologists, miners, drillers, and demolition experts, will be needed on the scene to do the job right."

​If such a crew is to be summoned to a distant asteroid, there may be less risky ways to divert the asteroid. Another promising asteroid mitigation strategy is to land a crew on the asteroid well ahead of its impact date and to begin diverting some its mass into space to slowly alter its trajectory. This is a form of rocket propulsion by virtue of Newton's third law with the asteroid's mass as the propellant.

Whether exploding nuclear weapons or diversion of mass is used, a sizable human crew may need to be sent into space for many months if not years to accomplish this mission. Questions such as what the astronauts will live in and what the ship will be like are questions for the space architect.

When motivations to go into space are realized, work on mitigating the most serious threats
can begin. One of the biggest threats to astronaut safety in space is sudden radiation events from solar flares. The violent solar storm of August 1972, which occurred between the Apollo 16 and Apollo 17 missions, could have produced fatal consequences had astronauts been caught exposed on the lunar surface. 

The best known protection against radiation in space is shielding; an especially effective shield is water contained in large tanks surrounding the astronauts. Unfortunately water has a mass of 1000 kilograms per cubic meter. A more practical approach would be to construct solar "storm shelters" that spacefarers can retreat to during peak events. 

For this to work, however, there would need to be a space weather broadcasting system in place to warn astronauts of upcoming storms, much like a tsunami warning system warns coastal inhabitants of impending danger. Perhaps one day a fleet of robotic spacecraft will orbit close to the Sun, monitoring solar activity and sending precious minutes of warning before waves of dangerous particles arrive at inhabited regions of space.

Nobody knows what the long-term human future in space will be. Perhaps after gaining experience with routine spaceflight by exploring different worlds in the Solar System and deflecting a few asteroids, the possibility of constructing non-modular space habitats and infrastructure will be within capability. 

​Such possibilities include mass drivers on the Moon, which launch payloads into space using only electricity, and spinning space colonies with closed ecological systems. A Mars in the early stages of terraformation, where inhabitants only need simple oxygen masks to walk out on the surface, may be seen. In any case, such futures require space architecture.

Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about Space Architecture:
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 High-tech ArchitecturePictured below: Lloyd’s Building ​in London, England is a perfect example of high tech architecture.

High-tech architecture, also known as structural expressionism, is a type of Late Modern architectural style that emerged in the 1970s, incorporating elements of high tech industry and technology into building design.

High-tech architecture grew from the modernist style, utilizing new advances in technology and building materials. It emphasizes transparency in design and construction, seeking to communicate the underlying structure and function of a building throughout its interior and exterior.

High-tech architecture makes extensive use of aluminium, steel, glass, and to a lesser extent concrete (the technology for which had developed earlier), as these materials were becoming more advanced and available in a wider variety of forms at the time the style was developing - generally, advancements in a trend towards lightness of weight.

High-tech architecture focuses on creating adaptable buildings through choice of materials, internal structural elements, and programmatic design. It seeks to avoid links to the past, and as such eschews building materials commonly used in older styles of architecture.

Common elements include hanging or overhanging floors, a lack of internal load-bearing walls, and reconfigurable spaces. Some buildings incorporate prominent, bright colors in an attempt to evoke the sense of a drawing or diagram. High-tech utilizes a focus on factory aesthetics and a large central space serviced by many smaller maintenance areas to evoke a feeling of openness, honesty, and transparency.

​Early high-tech buildings were referred to by historian Reyner Banham as "serviced sheds" due to their exposure of mechanical services in addition to the structure. Most of these early examples used exposed structural steel as their material of choice.

As hollow structural sections, (developed by Stewarts and Lloyds and known in the UK as Rectangular Hollow Section (RHS)) had only become widely available in the early 1970s, high-tech architecture saw much experimentation with this material.

The style's premier practitioners include the following: 
Background:

High-tech architecture was originally developed in Britain, (British High Tech architecture) with many of its most famous early proponents being British. However, the movement has roots in a number of earlier styles and draws inspiration from a number of architects from earlier periods.

Many of the ideals communicated through high-tech architecture were derived from the early modernists of the 1920s. The concepts of transparency, honesty in materials, and a fascination with the aesthetics of industry can all be traced to modern architects.

High-tech architecture, much like modernism, shares a belief in a "spirit of the age" that should be incorporated and applied throughout each building. The influence of Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, and Mies van de Rohe is extensive throughout many of the principles and designs of high-tech architecture.

Some of the earliest practitioners of high-tech architecture included the British architecture group Archigram, whose members frequently designed advanced futuristic buildings and cities. On the most influential of these was Peter Cook's Plug-in City, a theoretical mega structure designed around the detach-ability and replacement of each of its individual units.

The concept of removable and interchangeable elements of buildings would later become a widespread characteristic within the high-tech style. Less direct precursors included Buckminster Fuller and Frei Otto, whose focus on minimizing construction resources generated an emphasis on tensile structures, another important element in many high-tech designs. 

Louis Kahn's concept of "served" and "servant" spaces, particularly when implemented in the form of service towers, later became a widespread feature of high-tech architecture.

Other projects and designs that contained or inspired elements common across the high-tech style include the Archigram member Mike Webb's concept of bowellism, the Fun Palace by Cedric Price, and the Walking City by Ron Herron, also a member of Archigram.

These theoretical designs, along with many others, were circulated widely in British and American architectural circles due to their examination by Reyner Banham. These conceptual plans laid out the ideas and elements that would later go on to be hugely influential in the works of prominent high-tech architects like Norman Foster and Nicholas Grimshaw.

Characteristics:
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High-tech buildings often incorporate a range of materials reminiscent of industrial production. Steel, aluminium, glass, and concrete are all commonly found in high-tech structures, as these elements evoke a feeling of being mass-produced and widely available.

Not all high-tech designs are made to accommodate truly mass-produced materials, but nonetheless seek to convey a sense of factory creation and broad distribution. Tensile structures, cross beams, and exposed support and maintenance elements are all important components found in high-tech designs.

A focus on strong, simplistic, and transparent elements all connect high-tech as a style to the principles of engineering. The engineer Anthony Hunt was hugely influential in both the design, choice of materials, and ultimate expression of many of the earliest high-tech buildings in Britain, and as such many of these designs are suffused with a focus on the aesthetics of engineering and construction.

Buildings built in the high-tech style often share a number of characteristic layout elements. These include an open floor plan, a large central area serviced by many smaller maintenance spaces, and repeated elements which either can be or appear to be able to be detached and replaced as needed. Spaces or elements dedicated to service and mechanical components like air conditioners, water processors, and electrical equipment are left exposed and visible to the viewer.

Often these spaces are placed in large service towers external to the building, as in the Lloyd's building in London by Richard Rogers. The Lloyd's building also has offices designed to be changed and configured as needed by the shifting and removal of partitions - creating a flexible and adaptable interior environment that can be changed to meet the needs of the building's occupants.

This theme of reconfigurable spaces is an important component of high-tech buildings. The HSBC Building in Hong Kong, designed by Norman Foster, is another excellent example of a high-tech building designed to be changed over time according to the needs of its users. Its use of suspended floor panels and the design of its social spaces as individual towers both place emphasis on the new approach to creating and servicing an office building.

The high-tech style is often interpreted as glorifying technology and emphasizing the functional purpose of each element of the building. These designs incorporate elements that obviously display the technical nature of the components within them, creating a sense of honest, open transparency.

The Centre Pompidou in Paris, by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers, exemplifies the technicality and focus on the exposure of service elements. The externalization of functional components is a key concept of high-tech architecture, though this technique may also be applied to generate an aesthetic of dynamic light and shadow across the facade of a building.

Color also plays an important role in the decoration of high-tech buildings, as various colors can be used to represent different service elements or to give the building the appearance of a set of architectural diagrams.

As of 2016, recent Structural Impressionism has two major trends: braced systems and diagrid systems. Both structural systems have the structural support elements visible from the outside, unlike many postmodern architecture buildings where most structural elements are hidden in the interior. The braced systems have strong exterior columns connected by "heavy" cross bracing elements. The diagrid system consists of a lattice of "light" diagonal elements and horizontal rings forming triangles, without vertical columns.

Goals:

High-tech architecture attempts to embody a series of ideals that its practitioners felt were reflective of the "spirit of the age". Concerns over adaptability, sustainability, and the changing industrial world drove a shift in the way that many architects around the world approached the challenge of designing buildings.

Norman Foster's HSBC Building was specifically designed to be built over a public plaza, so as not to take up more land in space conscious Hong Kong. Minoru Yamasaki's World Trade Center had centered around a five-acre, raised public plaza, completely devoid of cars, so pedestrians could walk freely through the complex.

Additionally, the World Trade Center had led to the construction of a brand new PATH station, serving the rail commuters coming from New Jersey into New York. This approach to building, with the architect having just as much responsibility to the city surrounding their building as the building itself, was a key theme of many structures designed in the high-tech style.

The appropriate utilization and distribution of space is often an integral component of high-tech theory, and as such these ideals are often found in concert with practical concerns over habitability and practicality of design.

At the core of many high-tech buildings is the concept of the "omniplatz". This is the idea that a building and the spaces within it should not necessarily be absolutely defined, but rather perform a range of desired functions. As such, a room in a high-tech building could be used as a factory floor, a storage room, or a financial trading center all with minimal re-distribution of structural elements.

The external services of a high-tech building, in this understanding of the style, exist solely to make the central space habitable and do not define its function. This can lead to an effect wherein the maintenance elements of a building can be understood and interpreted without issue, but the function of the interior space is difficult to guess. The Lloyd's building is an excellent example of this, wherein its service towers quite clearly communicate their function but the usage of the central atrium is difficult to determine from the exterior.

While the goal of many high-tech buildings is to honestly and transparently communicate their form and function, practical considerations may prevent the absolute expression of this principle. The Centre Pompidou, for example, has several elements that are built up or covered over due to concerns over fire safety and structural soundness. In many cases high-tech buildings exhibit compromises between radical honesty in design and considerations of safety in implementation. High-tech architecture balances art and engineering as its primary themes, and as such incurs trade-offs between the aesthetics of the two disciplines.

High-tech architecture has generated some criticism for its forays into home building and design, an issue it shares in common with Modernism. Many of the houses designed by high-tech architects were never inhabited by anyone other than themselves or their close relatives. Many outside observers found the high-tech style's focus on industry and expression of services to be antithetical to comfort and home living. Norman Foster's housing at Milton Keynes was never particularly popular, and other high-tech designs were seen as uncomfortable or awkward to live in.

High-tech architecture was most commonly employed in the construction of factories, corporate offices, or art galleries, all spaces that could effectively leverage the aesthetic of industry and find good use for the flexible spaces the style created. The application of technological themes throughout high-tech buildings intends to convey an ethos of science and progress.

While transparency and honesty of materials is heavily valued, high-tech designs strive to evoke an ever dynamic sense of movement and change. Adaptability, flexibility, and openness are all key aims of the high-tech style. To obviously and creatively display the functional nature of service elements and to clearly communicate the changeable nature of the spaces created inside them are important goals of the vast majority of high-tech buildings.

For examples of  High-tech Architecture, click here.








Structural Integrity and Failure Caused Surfside, Florida condominium collapse on 6/24/2021)Pictured below: Champlain Towers South shortly after the collapse
Structural integrity and failure:

Structural integrity and failure is an aspect of engineering that deals with the ability of a structure to support a designed structural load (weight, force, etc.) without breaking and includes the study of past structural failures in order to prevent failures in future designs.

Structural integrity is the ability of an item—either a structural component or a structure consisting of many components—to hold together under a load, including its own weight, without breaking or deforming excessively. It assures that the construction will perform its designed function during reasonable use, for as long as its intended life span.

Items are constructed with structural integrity to prevent catastrophic failure, which can result in injuries, severe damage, death, and/or monetary losses.

Structural failure refers to the loss of structural integrity, or the loss of load-carrying capacity in either a structural component or the structure itself.

Structural failure is initiated when a material is stressed beyond its strength limit, causing fracture or excessive deformations; one limit state that must be accounted for in structural design is ultimate failure strength.

In a well designed system, a localized failure should not cause immediate or even progressive collapse of the entire structure.
​
Introduction:

Structural integrity is the ability of a structure to withstand its intended loading without failing due to fracture, deformation, or fatigue. It is a concept often used in engineering to produce items that will serve their designed purposes and remain functional for a desired service life.

To construct an item with structural integrity, an engineer must first consider a material’s mechanical properties, such as toughness, strength, weight, hardness, and elasticity, and then determine the size and shape necessary for the material to withstand the desired load for a long life. Since members can neither break nor bend excessively, they must be both stiff and tough. A very stiff material may resist bending, but unless it is sufficiently tough, it may have to be very large to support a load without breaking. On the other hand, a highly elastic material will bend under a load even if its high toughness prevents fracture.

Furthermore, each component’s integrity must correspond to its individual application in any load-bearing structure. Bridge supports need a high yield strength, whereas the bolts that hold them need good shear and tensile strength. Springs need good elasticity, but lathe tooling needs high rigidity. In addition, the entire structure must be able to support its load without its weakest links failing, as this can put more stress on other structural elements and lead to cascading failures.

History:

The need to build structures with integrity goes back as far as recorded history. Houses needed to be able to support their own weight, plus the weight of the inhabitants. Castles needed to be fortified to withstand assaults from invaders. Tools needed to be strong and tough enough to do their jobs. However, the science of fracture mechanics as it exists today was not developed until the 1920s, when Alan Arnold Griffith studied the brittle fracture of glass.

Starting in the 1940s, the infamous failures of several new technologies made a more scientific method for analyzing structural failures necessary. During World War II, over 200 welded-steel ships broke in half due to brittle fracture, caused by stresses created from the welding process, temperature changes, and by the stress concentrations at the square corners of the bulkheads.

In the 1950s, several De Havilland Comets exploded in mid-flight due to stress concentrations at the corners of their squared windows, which caused cracks to form and the pressurized cabins to explode. Boiler explosions, caused by failures in pressurized boiler tanks, were another common problem during this era, and caused severe damage.

The growing sizes of bridges and buildings led to even greater catastrophes and loss of life. This need to build constructions with structural integrity led to great advances in the fields of material sciences and fracture mechanics.

Types of failure;

​Structural failure can occur from many types of problems, most of which are unique to different industries and structural types. However, most can be traced to one of five main causes.
  • The first is that the structure is not strong and tough enough to support the load, due to either its size, shape, or choice of material. If the structure or component is not strong enough, catastrophic failure can occur when the structure is stressed beyond its critical stress level.
  • The second type of failure is from fatigue or corrosion, caused by instability in the structure’s geometry, design or material properties. These failures usually begin when cracks form at stress points, such as squared corners or bolt holes too close to the material's edge. These cracks grow as the material is repeatedly stressed and unloaded (cyclic loading), eventually reaching a critical length and causing the structure to suddenly fail under normal loading conditions.
  • The third type of failure is caused by manufacturing errors, including improper selection of materials, incorrect sizing, improper heat treating, failing to adhere to the design, or shoddy workmanship. This type of failure can occur at any time and is usually unpredictable.
  • The fourth type of failure is from the use of defective materials. This type of failure is also unpredictable, since the material may have been improperly manufactured or damaged from prior use.
  • The fifth cause of failure is from lack of consideration of unexpected problems. This type of failure can be caused by events such as vandalism, sabotage, or natural disasters. It can also occur if those who use and maintain the construction are not properly trained and overstress the structure.

Notable failures:
Further information: List of structural failures and collapses

Bridges:
See also: List of bridge disasters

Dee bridge:
Main article: Dee bridge disaster

​The Dee bridge was designed by Robert Stephenson, using cast iron girders reinforced with wrought iron struts. On 24 May 1847, it collapsed as a train passed over it, killing five people. Its collapse was the subject of one of the first formal inquiries into a structural failure. This inquiry concluded that the design of the structure was fundamentally flawed, as the wrought iron did not reinforce the cast iron, and that the casting had failed due to repeated flexing.

First Tay Rail Bridge:
Main article: Tay Bridge disaster

The Dee bridge disaster was followed by a number of cast iron bridge collapses, including the collapse of the first Tay Rail Bridge on 28 December 1879. Like the Dee bridge, the Tay collapsed when a train passed over it, killing 75 people. The bridge failed because it was constructed from poorly made cast iron, and because designer Thomas Bouch failed to consider wind loading on it. Its collapse resulted in cast iron being replaced by steel construction, and a complete redesign in 1890 of the Forth Railway Bridge, making it the first entirely steel bridge in the world.

First Tacoma Narrows Bridge:
Main article: Tacoma Narrows Bridge (1940)

The 1940 collapse of the original Tacoma Narrows Bridge is sometimes characterized in physics textbooks as a classic example of resonance, although this description is misleading.

The catastrophic vibrations that destroyed the bridge were not due to simple mechanical resonance, but to a more complicated oscillation between the bridge and winds passing through it, known as aeroelastic flutter. 

Robert H. Scanlan, a leading contributor to the understanding of bridge aerodynamics, wrote an article about this misunderstanding. This collapse, and the research that followed, led to an increased understanding of wind/structure interactions. Several bridges were altered following the collapse to prevent a similar event occurring again. The only fatality was a dog named Tubby.

I-35W Bridge:
Main article: I-35W Mississippi River bridge
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The I-35W Mississippi River bridge (officially known simply as Bridge 9340) was an eight-lane steel truss arch bridge that carried Interstate 35W across the Mississippi River in Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States. The bridge was completed in 1967, and its maintenance was performed by the Minnesota Department of Transportation.

The bridge was Minnesota's fifth–busiest, carrying 140,000 vehicles daily. The bridge catastrophically failed during the evening rush hour on 1 August 2007, collapsing to the river and riverbanks beneath. Thirteen people were killed and 145 were injured.

Following the collapse, the Federal Highway Administration advised states to inspect the 700 U.S. bridges of similar construction after a possible design flaw in the bridge was discovered, related to large steel sheets called gusset plates which were used to connect girders together in the truss structure. 

Officials expressed concern about many other bridges in the United States sharing the same design and raised questions as to why such a flaw would not have been discovered in over 40 years of inspections.

Buildings:
See also the categories Building collapses and Collapsed buildings and structures

Thane building collapse:
Main article: 2013 Thane building collapse

On 4 April 2013, a building collapsed on tribal land in Mumbra, a suburb of Thane in Maharashtra, India. It has been called the worst building collapse in the area: 74 people died, including 18 children, 23 women, and 33 men, while more than 100 people survived.

The building was under construction and did not have an occupancy certificate for its 100 to 150 low- to middle-income residents; its only occupants were the site construction workers and their families. The building was reported to have been illegally constructed because standard practices were not followed for safe, lawful construction, land acquisition and resident occupancy.

By 11 April, a total of 15 suspects were arrested including builders, engineers, municipal officials, and other responsible parties. Governmental records indicate that there were two orders to manage the number of illegal buildings in the area: a 2005 Maharashtra state order to use remote sensing and a 2010 Bombay High Court order. Complaints were also made to state and municipal officials.

On 9 April, the Thane Municipal Corporation began a campaign to demolish illegal buildings in the area, focusing on “dangerous” buildings, and set up a call center to accept and track the resolutions of complaints about illegal buildings. The forest department, meanwhile, promised to address encroachment of forest land in the Thane District.

Savar building collapse:
Main article: 2013 Savar building collapse

On 24 April 2013, Rana Plaza, an eight-story commercial building, collapsed in Savar, a sub-district in the Greater Dhaka Area, the capitol of Bangladesh. The search for the dead ended on 13 May with the death toll of 1,134. Approximately 2,515 injured people were rescued from the building alive.

It is considered to be the deadliest garment-factory accident in history, as well as the deadliest accidental structural failure in modern human history.

The building contained clothing factories, a bank, apartments, and several other shops. The shops and the bank on the lower floors immediately closed after cracks were discovered in the building. Warnings to avoid using the building after cracks appeared the day before had been ignored. Garment workers were ordered to return the following day and the building collapsed during the morning rush-hour.

Sampoong Department Store collapse:
Main article: Sampoong Department Store collapse

On 29 June 1995, the five-story Sampoong Department Store in the Seocho District of Seoul, South Korea collapsed resulting in the deaths of 502 people, with another 1,445 being trapped.

In April 1995, cracks began to appear in the ceiling of the fifth floor of the store's south wing due to the presence of an air-conditioning unit on the weakened roof of the poorly built structure. On the morning of 29 June, as the number of cracks in the ceiling increased dramatically, store managers closed the top floor and shut off the air conditioning, but failed to shut the building down or issue formal evacuation orders as the executives themselves left the premises as a precaution.

Five hours before the collapse, the first of several loud bangs was heard emanating from the top floors, as the vibration of the air conditioning caused the cracks in the slabs to widen further. Amid customer reports of vibration in the building, the air conditioning was turned off but, the cracks in the floors had already grown to 10 cm wide. At about 5:00 p.m. local time, the fifth-floor ceiling began to sink, and at 5:57 p.m., the roof gave way, sending the air conditioning unit crashing through into the already-overloaded fifth floor.

Ronan Point:
Main article: Ronan Point

On 16 May 1968, the 22-story residential tower Ronan Point in the London Borough of Newham collapsed when a relatively small gas explosion on the 18th floor caused a structural wall panel to be blown away from the building.

The tower was constructed of precast concrete, and the failure of the single panel caused one entire corner of the building to collapse. The panel was able to be blown out because there was insufficient reinforcement steel passing between the panels. This also meant that the loads carried by the panel could not be redistributed to other adjacent panels, because there was no route for the forces to follow. As a result of the collapse, building regulations were overhauled to prevent disproportionate collapse and the understanding of precast concrete detailing was greatly advanced.

Many similar buildings were altered or demolished as a result of the collapse.

Oklahoma City bombing:
Main article: Oklahoma City bombing

On 19 April 1995, the nine-story concrete framed Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma was struck by a truck bomb causing partial collapse, resulting in the deaths of 168 people. The bomb, though large, caused a significantly disproportionate collapse of the structure.

The bomb blew all the glass off the front of the building and completely shattered a ground floor reinforced concrete column (see brisance). At second story level a wider column spacing existed, and loads from upper story columns were transferred into fewer columns below by girders at second floor level.

The removal of one of the lower story columns caused neighboring columns to fail due to the extra load, eventually leading to the complete collapse of the central portion of the building. The bombing was one of the first to highlight the extreme forces that blast loading from terrorism can exert on buildings, and led to increased consideration of terrorism in structural design of buildings.

Versailles wedding hall:
Main article: Versailles wedding hall disaster

The Versailles wedding hall (Hebrew: אולמי ורסאי‎), located in Talpiot, Jerusalem, is the site of the worst civil disaster in Israel's history. At 22:43 on Thursday night, 24 May 2001 during the wedding of Keren and Asaf Dror, a large portion of the third floor of the four-story building collapsed, killing 23 people.

World Trade Center Towers 1, 2, and 7:
Main article: Collapse of the World Trade Center

In the September 11 attacks, two commercial airliners were deliberately crashed into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City. The impact and resulting fires caused both towers to collapse within less than two hours. The impacts severed exterior columns and damaged core columns, redistributing the loads that these columns had carried.

This redistribution of loads was greatly influenced by the hat trusses at the top of each building. The impacts dislodged some of the fireproofing from the steel, increasing its exposure to the heat of the fires. Temperatures became high enough to weaken the core columns to the point of creep and plastic deformation under the weight of higher floors.

The heat of the fires also weakened the perimeter columns and floors, causing the floors to sag and exerting an inward force on exterior walls of the building. WTC Building 7 also collapsed later that day; the 47 story skyscraper collapsed within seconds due to a combination of a large fire inside the building and heavy structural damage from the collapse of the North Tower.

Champlain Towers:
Main article: Surfside condominium building collapse

On June 24, 2021, Champlain Towers South, a 12-story condominium building in Surfside, Florida partially collapsed, causing injuries and at least 24 deaths, and initially leaving 145 missing. The collapse was captured on video. 

One person was rescued from the rubble, and about 35 people were rescued on June 24 from the un-collapsed portion of the building. Long-term degradation of reinforced concrete support structures in the underground parking garage due to water penetration and corrosion of the reinforcing steel is being considered as a factor in—or the cause of—the collapse.

The issues had been reported in 2018 and noted as "much worse" in April 2021. A $15 million program of remedial works had been approved at the time of the collapse. As of July 11, 2021, 90 have been confirmed dead, while 31 remain unaccounted for.

Aircraft:
Main article: Loss of structural integrity on an aircraft
See also: Category:Airliner accidents and incidents caused by in-flight structural failure
​
Repeat structural failures on the same type of aircraft occurred in 1954, when two de Havilland Comet C1 jet airliners crashed due to decompression caused by metal fatigue, and in 1963–64, when the vertical stabilizer on four Boeing B-52 bombers broke off in mid-air.

Other:
Warsaw Radio Mast:
Main article: Warsaw radio mast

On 8 August 1991 at 16:00 UTC Warsaw radio mast, the tallest man-made object ever built before the erection of Burj Khalifa collapsed as consequence of an error in exchanging the guy-wires on the highest stock. The mast first bent and then snapped at roughly half its height. It destroyed at its collapse a small mobile crane of Mostostal Zabrze. As all workers left the mast before the exchange procedures, there were no fatalities, in contrast to the similar collapse of WLBT Tower in 1997.

Hyatt Regency walkway:
Main article: Hyatt Regency walkway collapse
​
On 17 July 1981, two suspended walkways through the lobby of the Hyatt Regency in Kansas City, Missouri, collapsed, killing 114 and injuring more than 200 people at a tea dance. The collapse was due to a late change in design, altering the method in which the rods supporting the walkways were connected to them, and inadvertently doubling the forces on the connection.

​The failure highlighted the need for good communication between design engineers and contractors, and rigorous checks on designs and especially on contractor-proposed design changes. The failure is a standard case study on engineering courses around the world, and is used to teach the importance of ethics in engineering.

See also:







Architectural TechnologyPictured below: The Roy and Diana Vagelos Education Center, Columbia University*
* -- Above Picture: The medical center at Columbia University has added to the school’s roster of notable architecture with a design by New York firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro. The Roy and Diana Vagelos Education Center’s 14-story cubic façade—built upward rather than out to accommodate Manhattan’s modest acreage allowance—is nearly all glass, showcasing a stellar view of the Hudson River and symbolizing a relationship and connection with the surrounding community. Inside, state-of-the-art classrooms and practice labs provide the most modern facilities for some of the most advanced medical students in the world. Diller Scofidio + Renfro also recently revealed the new McMurtry Building for the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University.
___________________________________________________________________________

Architectural technology, or building technology, is the application of technology to the design of buildings. It is a component of architecture and building engineering and is sometimes viewed as a distinct discipline or sub-category.

New materials and technologies generated new design challenges and construction methods throughout the evolution of building, especially since the advent of industrialisation in the 19th century. Architectural technology is related to the different elements of a building and their interactions; it is closely aligned with advances in building science.

Architectural technology can be summarized as the "technical design and expertise used in the application and integration of construction technologies in the building design process." or as "The ability to analyze, synthesize and evaluate building design factors in order to produce efficient and effective technical design solutions which satisfy performance, production and procurement criteria."

​History:

Many specialists and professionals consider Vitruvius' theories as the foundations of architectural technology. Vitruvius' attempt to classify building types, styles, materials and construction methods influenced the creation of many disciplines such as civil engineering, structural engineering, architectural technology and other practices which, now and since the 19th century, form a conceptual framework for architectural design.

According to Stephen Emmitt, "The relationship between building technology and design can be traced back to the Enlightenment and the industrial revolution, a period when advances in technology and science were seen as the way forward, and times of solid faith in progress...

As technologies multiply in number and complexity the building profession started to fragment".

Until the twentieth century, the materials used for building were limited to brick, stone, timber and steel to form structures, slate and tiles for roof coverings, lead and sometimes copper for waterproofing details and decorative roofing effects.

The Romans used concrete, but it was virtually unknown as a building material until the invention of reinforced concrete in 1849. Modern construction is much more complex, with walls, floors and roofs all built up from many elements to include structure, insulation and waterproofing often as separate layers or elements.

Architectural technology in practice:

Architectural technology is a discipline that spans architecture, building science and engineering. It is informed by both practical constraints, and building regulations, as well as standards relating to safety, environmental performance, fire resistance, etc. It is practiced by architects, architectural technologists, structural engineers, architectural/building engineers and others who develop the design/concept into a buildable reality. Specialist manufacturers who develop products used to construct buildings, are also involved in the discipline.

In practice, architectural technology is developed, understood and integrated into a building by producing architectural drawings and schedules. Computer technology is now used on all but the simplest building types. During the twentieth century, the use of computer aided design (CAD) became mainstream, allowing for highly accurate drawings that can be shared electronically, so that for example the architectural plans can be used as the basis for designing electrical and air handling services. 

As the design develops, that information can be shared with the whole design team. That process is currently taken to a logical conclusion with the widespread use of Building Information Modeling (BIM), which uses a three dimensional model of the building, created with input from all the disciplines to build up an integrated design.

See also:






​
Architectural Engineering Pictured below:  The Roles of an Architectural Engineer
Architectural engineering, also known as building engineering or architecture engineering, is an engineering discipline that deals with:
From reduction of greenhouse gas emissions to the construction of resilient buildings, architectural engineers are at the forefront of addressing several major challenges of the 21st century. They apply the latest scientific knowledge and technologies to the design of buildings.

Architectural engineering as a relatively new licensed profession emerged in the 20th century as a result of the rapid technological developments. Architectural engineers are at the forefront of two major historical opportunities that today's world is immersed in:
  1. that of rapidly advancing computer-technology,
  2. the parallel revolution arising from the need to create a sustainable planet.
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Distinguished from architecture as an art of design, architectural engineering, is the art and science of engineering and construction as practiced in respect of buildings.
​
Related engineering and design fields:

Structural Engineering:
Main article: Structural engineering

Structural engineering involves the analysis and design of the built environment (buildings, bridges, equipment supports, towers and walls). Those concentrating on buildings are sometimes informally referred to as "building engineers".

Structural engineers require expertise in strength of materials, structural analysis, and in predicting structural load such as from weight of the building, occupants and contents, and extreme events such as wind, rain, ice, and seismic design of structures which is referred to as earthquake engineering.

Architectural Engineers sometimes incorporate structural as one aspect of their designs; the structural discipline when practiced as a specialty works closely with architects and other engineering specialists.

Mechanical, electrical, and plumbing (MEP):

Mechanical engineering and electrical engineering engineers are specialists when engaged in the building design fields. This is known as mechanical, electrical, and plumbing (MEP) throughout the United States, or building services engineering in the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia. 

Mechanical engineers often design and oversee the heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC), plumbing, and rainwater systems. Plumbing designers often include design specifications for simple active fire protection systems, but for more complicated projects, fire protection engineers are often separately retained.

Electrical engineers are responsible for the building's power distribution, telecommunication, fire alarm, signalization, lightning protection and control systems, as well as lighting systems.

The architectural engineer (PE) in the United States:
Main article: Architectural engineer (PE)

In many jurisdictions of the United States, the architectural engineer is a licensed engineering professional. Usually a graduate of an EAC/ABET-accredited architectural engineering university program preparing students to perform whole-building design in competition with architect-engineer teams; or for practice in one of structural, mechanical or electrical fields of building design, but with an appreciation of integrated architectural requirements.

Although some states require a BS degree from an EAC/ABET-accredited engineering program, with no exceptions, about two thirds of the states accept BS degrees from ETAC/ABET-accredited architectural engineering technology programs to become licensed engineering professionals.

Architectural engineering technology graduates, with applied engineering skills, often gain further learning with an MS degree in engineering and/or NAAB-accredited Masters of Architecture to become licensed as both an engineer and architect.

This path requires the individual to pass state licensing exams in both disciplines. States handle this situation differently on experienced gained working under a licensed engineer and/or registered architect prior to taking the examinations. This education model is more in line with the educational system in the United Kingdom where an accredited MEng or MS degree in engineering for further learning is required by the Engineering Council to be registered as a Chartered Engineer.

The National Council of Architectural Registration Boards (NCARB) facilitate the licensure and credentialing of architects but requirements for registration often vary between states.

In the state of New Jersey, a registered architect is allowed to sit for the PE exam and a professional engineer is allowed to take the design portions of the Architectural Registration Exam (ARE), to become a registered architect. It is becoming more common for highly educated architectural engineers in the United States to become licensed as both engineer and architect.

Formal architectural engineering education, following the engineering model of earlier disciplines, developed in the late 19th century, and became widespread in the United States by the mid-20th century. With the establishment of a specific "architectural engineering" NCEES Professional Engineering registration examination in the 1990s, and first offering in April 2003, architectural engineering became recognized as a distinct engineering discipline in the United States. Up to date NCEES account allows engineers to apply to other states PE license "by comity".

In most license-regulated jurisdictions, architectural engineers are not entitled to practice architecture unless they are also licensed as architects. Practice of structural engineering in high-risk locations, e.g., due to strong earthquakes, or on specific types of higher importance buildings such as hospitals, may require separate licensing as well. Regulations and customary practice vary widely by state or city.

The architect as architectural engineer:
See also: Architect § Professional requirements

In some countries, the practice of architecture includes planning, designing and overseeing the building's construction, and architecture, as a profession providing architectural services, is referred to as "architectural engineering".

In Japan, a "first-class architect" plays the dual role of architect and building engineer, although the services of a licensed "structural design first-class architect"(構造設計一級建築士) are required for buildings over a certain scale.

In some languages, such as Korean and Arabic, "architect" is literally translated as "architectural engineer". In some countries, an "architectural engineer" (such as the ingegnere edile in Italy) is entitled to practice architecture and is often referred to as an architect.

These individuals are often also structural engineers. In other countries, such as Germany, Austria, Iran, and most of the Arab countries, architecture graduates receive an engineering degree (Dipl.-Ing. – Diplom-Ingenieur).

In Spain, an "architect" has a technical university education and legal powers to carry out building structure and facility projects.

In Brazil, architects and engineers used to share the same accreditation process (Conselho Federal de Engenheiros, Arquitetos e Agrônomos (CONFEA) – Federal Council of Engineering, Architecture and Agronomy). Now the Brazilian architects and urbanists have their own accreditation process (CAU – Architecture and Urbanism Council). Besides traditional architecture design training, Brazilian architecture courses also offer complementary training in engineering disciplines such as structural, electrical, hydraulic and mechanical engineering.

After graduation, architects focus in architectural planning, yet they can be responsible to the whole building, when it concerns to small buildings (except in electric wiring, where the architect autonomy is limited to systems up to 30kVA, and it has to be done by an Electrical Engineer), applied to buildings, urban environment, built cultural heritage, landscape planning, interior-scape planning and regional planning.

In Greece licensed architectural engineers are graduates from architecture faculties that belong to the Polytechnic University, obtaining an "Engineering Diploma". They graduate after 5 years of studies and are fully entitled architects once they become members of the Technical Chamber of Greece (TEE – Τεχνικό Επιμελητήριο Ελλάδος). 

The Technical Chamber of Greece has more than 100,000 members encompassing all the engineering disciplines as well as architecture. A prerequisite for being a member is to be licensed as a qualified engineer or architect and to be a graduate of an engineering and architecture schools of a Greek university, or of an equivalent school from abroad.

The Technical Chamber of Greece is the authorized body to provide work licenses to engineers of all disciplines as well as architects, graduated in Greece or abroad. The license is awarded after examinations. The examinations take place three to four times a year. The Engineering Diploma equals a master's degree in ECTS units (300) according to the Bologna Accords.

Education:
Further information: Engineer's degree

The architectural, structural, mechanical and electrical engineering branches each have well established educational requirements that are usually fulfilled by completion of a university program.
​
Architectural engineering as a single integrated field of study:
Main article: Building engineering education

Its multi-disciplinary engineering approach is what differentiates architectural engineering from architecture (the field of the architect): which is an integrated, separate and single, field of study when compared to other engineering disciplines.

Through training in and appreciation of architecture, the field seeks integration of building systems within its overall building design. Architectural engineering includes the design of building systems including: 
​In some university programs, students are required to concentrate on one of the systems; in others, they can receive a generalist architectural or building engineering degree.

See also:





​

Environmental Technology and its Impact on ArchitecturePictured below: Spherical Urban Greenhouses. This urban greenhouse will serve as a sanctuary for Amazon employees in Seattle, Washington.
Environmental technology (envirotech), green technology (greentech) or clean technology (cleantech) is the application of one or more of environmental science, green chemistry, environmental monitoring and electronic devices to monitor, model and conserve the natural environment and resources, and to curb the negative impacts of human involvement.

The term is also used to describe sustainable energy generation technologies such as photovoltaics, wind turbines, etc. Sustainable development is the core of environmental technologies. The term environmental technologies is also used to describe a class of electronic devices that can promote sustainable management of resources.

Purification and waste management:
Main article: Recycling

Examples:
Water purification:

​Water purification: The whole idea/concept of having dirt/germ/pollution free water flowing throughout the environment. Many other phenomena lead from this concept of purification of water. Water pollution is the main enemy of this concept, and various campaigns and activists have been organized around the world to help purify water.

Air purification:

Air purification: Basic and common green plants can be grown indoors to keep the air fresh because all plants remove CO2 and convert it into oxygen. The best examples are: Dypsis lutescens, Sansevieria trifasciata, and Epipremnum aureum. Besides using the plants themselves, some species of bacteria can also be added to the leaves of these plants to help remove toxic gases, such as toluene.

Sewage treatment:

Sewage treatment is conceptually similar to water purification. Sewage treatments are very important as they purify water per levels of pollution. The most polluted water is not used for anything, and the least polluted water is supplied to places where water is used affluently. It may lead to various other concepts of environmental protection, sustainability, etc.

Environmental remediation:

Environmental remediation is the removal of pollutants or contaminants for the general protection of the environment. This is accomplished by various chemical, biological, and bulk methods.

Solid waste management:

Solid waste management is the purification, consumption, reuse, disposal and treatment of solid waste that is undertaken by the government or the ruling bodies of a city/town.

Sustainable energy:
​Main article: Sustainable energy

Concerns over pollution and greenhouse gases have spurred the search for sustainable alternatives to our current fuel use. The global reduction of greenhouse gases requires the adoption of energy conservation as well as sustainable generation. That environmental harm reduction involves global changes such as:
  • reducing air pollution and methane from biomass
  • virtually eliminating fossil fuels for vehicles, heat, and electricity, left in the ground.
  • widespread use of public transport, battery and fuel cell vehicles
  • more wind/solar/water generated electricity
  • reducing peak demands with carbon taxes and time of use pricing.

Since fuel used by industry and transportation account for the majority of world demand, by investing in conservation and efficiency (using less fuel), pollution and greenhouse gases from these two sectors can be reduced around the globe.

Advanced energy efficient electric motor (and electric generator) technology that are cost effective to encourage their application, such as variable speed generators and efficient energy use, can reduce the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) and sulfur dioxide (SO2) that would otherwise be introduced to the atmosphere, if electricity were generated using fossil fuels. 

Greasestock is an event held yearly in Yorktown Heights, New York which is one of the largest showcases of environmental technology in the United States. Some scholars have expressed concern that the implementation of new environmental technologies in highly-developed national economies may cause economic and social disruption in less-developed economies.

Examples of Green Technology:
Renewable energy:
Main article: Renewable energy

Renewable energy is the energy that can be replenished easily. For years we have been using sources such as wood, sun, water, etc. for means for producing energy. Energy that can be produced by natural objects like the sun, wind, etc. is considered to be renewable.

Technologies that have been in usage include wind power, hydropower, solar energy, geothermal energy, and biomass/bioenergy.

Energy conservation:

Energy conservation is the utilization of devices that require smaller amounts of energy in order to reduce the consumption of electricity. Reducing the use of electricity causes less fossil fuels to be burned to provide that electricity.

eGain forecasting:

eGain forecasting is a method using forecasting technology to predict the future weather's impact on a building. By adjusting the heat based on the weather forecast, the system eliminates redundant use of heat, thus reducing the energy consumption and the emission of greenhouse gases.

Education:

Courses aimed at developing graduates with some specific skills in environmental systems or environmental technology are becoming more common and fall into three broads classes:
  • Environmental Engineering or Environmental Systems courses oriented towards a civil engineering approach in which structures and the landscape are constructed to blend with or protect the environment;
  • Environmental chemistry, sustainable chemistry or environmental chemical engineering courses oriented towards understanding the effects (good and bad) of chemicals in the environment. Such awards can focus on mining processes, pollutants and commonly also cover biochemical processes;
  • Environmental technology courses oriented towards producing electronic, electrical or electrotechnology graduates capable of developing devices and artefacts able to monitor, measure, model and control environmental impact, including monitoring and managing energy generation from renewable sources, and developing novel energy generation technologies.

See also:
​






Outline of Architecture Pictured below: Building and architecture outline icons in set collection for design.The building and dwelling vector isometric symbol stock web illustration. stock illustration
Paris - France, England, Belgium, Russia, Scandinavia
The following outline is an overview and topical guide to architecture:

Architecture – the process and the product of designing and constructing buildings. Architectural works with a certain indefinable combination of design quality and external circumstances may become cultural symbols and / or be considered works of art.

Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about this Outline of  Architecture:
​
​What type of thing is architecture?:

Architecture can be described as all of the following:
  • Academic discipline – focused study in one academic field or profession. A discipline incorporates expertise, people, projects, communities, challenges, studies, inquiry, and research areas that are strongly associated with the given discipline.
  • Buildings – buildings and similar structures, the product of architecture, are referred to as architecture.
  • One of the arts – as an art form, architecture is an outlet of human expression, that is usually influenced by culture and which in turn helps to change culture. Architecture is a physical manifestation of the internal human creative impulse.
    • Fine art – in Western European academic traditions, fine art is art developed primarily for aesthetics, distinguishing it from applied art that also has to serve some practical function. The word "fine" here does not so much denote the quality of the artwork in question, but the purity of the discipline according to traditional Western European canons.
  • Science – systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe. A science is a branch of science, or a discipline of science. It's a way of pursuing knowledge, not only the knowledge itself.
    • Applied science – branch of science that applies existing scientific knowledge to develop more practical applications, such as technology or inventions.

Definitions of architecture:

Architecture is variously defined in conflicting ways, highlighting the difficulty of describing the scope of the subject precisely:
  • A general term to describe buildings and other physical structures.
  • The art and science, or the action and process, of designing and constructing buildings.
  • The design activity of the architect, the profession of designing buildings.
  • A building designed by an architect, the end product of architectural design.
  • A building whose design transcends mere function, a unifying or coherent form or structure.
  • The expression of thought in building.
  • A group or body of buildings in a particular style.
  • A particular style or way of designing buildings.

Some key quotations on the subject of architecture:
​Roles in architecture:

Professionals involved in planning, designing, and constructing buildings include: People engaged in architecture:
Architectural styles:
Main article: List of architectural styles

Architectural style – a specific way of building, characterized by the features that make it notable. A style may include such elements as form, method of construction, materials, and regional character. Influential contemporary and relatively recent styles include :
Specialist sub-classifications of architecture:

Terms used to describe different architectural concerns, origins and objectives.:
  • Architecture parlante ("speaking architecture") – buildings or architectural elements that explain their own function or identity by means of an inscription or literal representation.
  • Religious architecture – the design and construction of places of worship.
  • Responsive architecture – designing buildings that measure their environmental conditions (via sensors) to adapt their form, shape, color or character responsively (via actuators).
  • Sustainable architecture – environmentally conscious design techniques in the field of architecture.
  • Vernacular architecture – traditional local building styles, typically not designed by professional architects although vernacular elements are adopted by many architects.

Architectural theory:
Main article: Architectural theory
  • Architectural design values – the various values that influence architects and designers in making design decisions.
  • Mathematics and architecture – have always been close, because architecture relies upon mathematical precision, and because both fields share a search for order and beauty.
  • Pattern language – a term coined by architect Christopher Alexander, a structured method of describing good design practices within a field of expertise.
  • Proportion – the relationship between elements and the whole.
  • Space syntax – a set of theories and techniques for the analysis of spatial configurations.
  • Architecture criticism – published or broadcast critique, assessing the architect's success in meeting his own aims and objectives and those of others.

Architectural terms:   ​







Architecture Schools in the United States Pictured below: Cal Poly Architectural Courses: creating shelters for the homeless: "​It Takes a Village: See life through the eyes of budding architects as they dream up — and build — creative shelters that find a home in Design Village". By Robyn Kontra Tanner // Photos by Joe Johnston
The Vision (California State Polytechnic University School of Architecture) -- See above Photo and first Video:

In early April, students and their instructors made the trek up to Poly Canyon to pick out their plots and envision their Design Village structures. Newly formed teams measured the slope of the land, assessed the plethora of gopher holes and noted the direction of the sun and the wind.

Though instructors urged students not to dwell on the overall form first, some couldn’t help imagining a bold concept. Students took inspiration from flowers, reptiles, sundials and even a cornucopia.

Click here for the rest of the above article.

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Wikipedia:

​Architecture education and schools in the United States refers to university schools and colleges with the purpose of educating students in the field of architecture.

​Professional degrees

There are three types of professional degrees in architecture in the United States:
Non-professional degrees include (require a Master of Architecture for licensure):
  • Bachelor of Arts in Architecture (BA)
  • Bachelor of Science in Architecture (BS)
  • Bachelor of Fine Arts in Architecture (BFA Arch)
  • Bachelor of Environmental Design (B.Envd or B.E.D.)

A non-professional degree typically takes four years to complete and may be part of the later completion of professional degree (A "4+2" plan comprises a 4-year BA or BS in Architecture followed by a 2-year Master of Architecture).

The 5-year BArch and 6-year MArch are regarded as virtual equals in the registration and accreditation processes.

A professional Bachelor of Architecture degree takes five years to complete. (There is a 3-year B.Arch program offered by Florida Atlantic University articulated with an AA degree in architecture.) There are also M.Arch programs for those with undergraduate degrees in areas outside architecture; these program typically take six or seven semester (3 or 3+1⁄2 years) to complete.

Other programs (such as those offered at University of Cincinnati, Drexel University, Boston Architectural College and NewSchool of Architecture and Design) combine the required educational courses with the work component necessary to sit for the professional licensing exams.

Programs such as this often afford students the ability to immediately test for licensure upon graduation, as opposed to having to put in several years working in the field after graduation before being able to get licensed, as is common in more traditional programs.

Some architecture schools, such as Florida International University, offer the Master of Architecture degree in an accelerated five-year or six-year format without the need of a bachelor's degree. There is currently an ongoing debate to upgrade the 3.5 year M.Arch title to D.Arch both for current students and retroactively for 3.5 year M.Arch graduates.

Rankings:

Each year, the journal DesignIntelligence ranks both undergraduate and graduate architecture programs that are accredited by the National Architectural Accrediting Board. These rankings, collectively called "America's Best Architecture & Design Schools" are obtained by surveying hundreds of practicing architecture leaders with direct and recent experience hiring and supervising architects.

They are asked what programs they consider to be best preparing students for professional success overall. They are also asked to cite the programs they consider to be the best in educating and training for specific skills. These skills rankings are also published in "America's Best Architecture & Design Schools."

Founded in 1912 to advance the quality of architectural education, the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) represents all accredited programs and their faculty across the United States and Canada, as well as nonaccredited and international affiliate members around the world.

The ACSA collects detailed information from these schools for its "Guide to Architecture Schools," which exists both as a book and as a free online searchable database at archschools.org. These publications are the only complete directories of all accredited professional architecture programs in North America and are used as a reference for prospective students, graduate students, educators, administrators, counselors, and practitioners.

The ACSA Guide to Architecture Schools features detailed program descriptions, an index of specialized and related degree programs, an overview of the profession of architecture and the education process, advice on how to select the right school, and scholarship and financial aid information.

In addition, "America's Best Architecture & Design Schools" each year presents Architect Registration Examination pass rates by school, a historical review of top architecture schools, how current architecture students rank their schools, and a directory of accredited programs.

These particular alphabetical lists do not compute with a DI.net average of the past decade, leaving out a series of other brilliant institutions and including others that have just recently made the lists. The following schools have consistently been ranked within the top 17 of all undergraduate architecture schools in the nation.

In alphabetical order, the top 17 schools are: 
The following schools are top 10 graduate schools, in order, according to "America's Best Architecture & Design Schools 2014":
  1. Harvard University,
  2. Yale University,
  3. Columbia University,
  4. Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
  5. Cornell University tied with Rice University,
  6. University of Michigan, Kansas State University,
  7. University of California, Berkeley,
  8. University of Texas at Austin.

List of architecture schools in the United States

Click here for a List of Architectural Schools in the United States.

​See also:







American Institute of Architects (AIA), including a List of Prominent ArchitectsPictured below: Just steps from the White House, AIA’s prime downtown location is the perfect place to host your next event. Book one of our spaces hourly, for the full day, or an evening reception. Our space is yours for as long as you need it.
Click here for a List of Prominent Architects.

The American Institute of Architects (AIA) is a professional organization for architects in the United States.

Headquartered in Washington, D.C., the AIA offers education, government advocacy, community redevelopment, and public outreach to support the architecture profession and improve its public image. The AIA also works with other members of the design and construction community to help coordinate the building industry.

The AIA is currently headed by Lakisha Ann Woods, CAE, as EVP/Chief Executive Officer and Dan Hart, FAIA, as 2022 AIA President

​Organization:

Membership:

More than 95,000 licensed architects and associated professionals are members. AIA members adhere to a code of ethics and professional conduct intended to assure clients, the public, and colleagues of an architect's dedication to the highest standards in professional practice.

There are five levels of membership in the AIA:
  • Architect members (AIA) are licensed to practice architecture by a licensing authority in the United States.
  • Associate members (Assoc. AIA) are not licensed to practice architecture, but they are working under the supervision of an architect in a professional or technical capacity, have earned professional degrees in architecture, are faculty members in a university program in architecture, or are interns earning credit toward licensure.
  • International associate members hold an architecture license or the equivalent from a licensing authority outside the United States.
  • Emeritus members have been AIA members for 15 successive years and are at least 70 years of age or are incapacitated and unable to work in the architecture profession.
  • Allied members are individuals whose professions are related to the building and design community, such as engineers, landscape architects, or planners; or senior executive staff from building and design-related companies, including publishers, product manufacturers, and research firms. Allied membership is a partnership with the AIA and the American Architectural Foundation.

There is no National AIA membership category for students, but they can become members of the American Institute of Architecture Students and many local and state chapters of the AIA have student membership categories.

The AIA's most prestigious honor is the designation (FAIA) of a member as a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects. This membership is awarded to members who have made contributions of national significance to the profession. Slightly more than 2,600, or 2% of all members, have been elevated to the AIA College of Fellows. Foreign architects of prominence may be elected to the college as Honorary Fellows of the AIA.

Structure:

The AIA is governed by a board of directors and has a staff of more than 200 employees. Although the AIA functions as a national organization, its 217 local and state chapters provide members with programming and direct services to support them throughout their professional lives.

The chapters cover the entirety of the United States and its territories. Components also operate in the United Kingdom, Continental Europe, the Middle East, Japan, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Canada.

Service:

By speaking with a united voice, AIA architects influence government practices that affect the practice of the profession and the quality of American life. The AIA monitors legislative and regulatory actions and uses the collective power of its membership to participate in decision making by federal, state, and local policy makers.

To serve the public, the AIA's community-based programs work with federal legislators and local governments to elevate the design of public spaces, protect the nation's infrastructure, and develop well-designed affordable housing for all Americans.

The American Institute of Architects announced in June 2013 at CGI America (an annual event of the Clinton Global Initiative) the creation of "Designing Recovery," a design contest in partnership with the charities Make It Right, SBP, and Architecture for Humanity. 

Sponsored by Dow Building Solutions, a total of $30,000 in prize money was divided equally among three winning designs in New Orleans, Louisiana, Joplin, Missouri, and New York City. Entrants submitted single-family housing designs with the objective of "improving the quality, diversity and resiliency of the housing in each community." Organizers made the portfolio of designs (even from non-winners) available to communities recovering from natural disasters.

Professionalism:

The AIA serves its members with professional development opportunities, contract documents that are the model for the design and construction industry, professional and design information services, personal benefits, and client-oriented resources.

In contributing to their profession and communities, AIA members also participate in professional interest areas from design to regional and urban development and professional academies that are both the source and focus of new ideas and responses. To aid younger professionals, an Intern Development Program, Architect Registration Exam preparation courses, and employment referral services are frequently offered by local components.

The AIA holds an annual conference in late spring / early summer that draws the largest gathering of architects in the world.

Public education:

The AIA attempts to meet the needs and interests of the nation's architects and the public by raising public awareness of the value of architecture and the importance of good design. To mark the AIA's 150th anniversary and to showcase how AIA members have helped shape the built environment, the AIA and Harris Interactive released findings from a public poll that asked Americans to name their favorite 150 works of architecture.

Two of the AIA's public outreach efforts, the Blueprint for America nationwide community service initiative marking its 150th anniversary and the Sustainability 2030 Toolkit, a resource created to encourage mayors and community leaders to advocate environmentally friendly building design both earned an Award of Excellence in the 2007 Associations Advance America Awards, a national competition sponsored by the American Society of Association Executives and the Center for Association Leadership.

Honors and awards:

The AIA has long recognized individuals and organizations for their outstanding achievements in support of the architecture profession and the AIA.

Honors Program:
Institute Honors:

For new and restoration projects anywhere in the world:
This award, recognizing architectural design of enduring significance, is conferred on a project that has stood the test of time for 25 to 35 years. The project must have been designed by an architect licensed in the United States at the time of the project's completion.

For Professional Achievement:
  • Associates Award
  • Collaborative Achievement Award
  • Edward C. Kemper Award
  • Thomas Jefferson Awards for Public Architecture
  • Whitney M. Young Jr. Award
  • Young Architects Award
  • College of Fellows honor – Benjamin Latrobe Prize for Architectural Research
  • AIA Committee on the Environment AIA/COTE Top Ten Green Projects

Cosponsored programs:
  • AIA/ALA Library Building Awards
  • AIA Housing Awards
  • AIA/HUD Secretary's Housing and Community Design Awards

Membership Honors:
  • Honorary Membership (Hon. AIA)
  • Fellow of the American Institute of Architects (FAIA)
  • Honorary Fellowship (Hon. FAIA)

Magazine:

Architect: The Journal of the American Institute of Architects is the official magazine of the AIA, published independently by Washington, D.C.-based business-to-business media company Hanley Wood, LLC. Architect hands out the annual Progressive Architecture Award, in addition to the R+D Awards (for research and development). Architect formerly conducted an Annual Design Review, which it described as "a unique barometer of the business of architecture."

Previously, the official publication of the American Institute of Architects was Architecture, which was preceded in turn by the Journal of the American Institute of Architects. Both of these publications are currently defunct. The successor, Architect Magazine, is not owned by but is affiliated with AIA, and uses their name on their masthead.

Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about the American Institute of Architects:







America's Favorite Architecture Pictured below (L-R):
TOP ROW: Empire State Building;  Washington National Cathedral; St. Louis Gateway Arch
BOTTOM ROW: Golden Gate Bridge; Statue of Liberty
"America's Favorite Architecture" is a list of buildings and other structures identified as the most popular works of architecture in the United States.

In 2006 and 2007, the American Institute of Architects (AIA) sponsored research to identify the most popular works of architecture in the United States. Harris Interactive conducted the study by first polling a sample of the AIA membership and later polling a sample of the public.

In the first phase of the study, 2,448 AIA members were interviewed and asked to identify their "favorite" structures. Each was asked to name up to 20 structures in each of 15 defined categories. The 248 structures that were named by at least six of the AIA members were then included in a list of structures to be included in the next phase, a survey of the general public.

The survey of the public involved a total of 2,214 people, each of whom rated many photographs of buildings and other structures drawn from the list of 248 structures that had been created by polling the architects. The public's preferences were ranked using a "likeability" scale developed for the study.

As part of the commemoration of the organization's 150th anniversary in 2007, the AIA announced the list of the 150 highest-ranked structures as "America's Favorite Architecture". 

New York City is the location of 32 structures on the list, more than any other place. Of the 10 top-ranked structures, 6 are in Washington, DC, which is the location of 17 of the 150 structures on the complete list. Chicago has 16 structures on the list.

Click here for the list of the 150 top-ranked structures.
  1. ​Empire State Building, New York, NY
  2. The White House, Washington, DC
  3. Washington National Cathedral, Washington, DC
  4. Jefferson Memorial, Washington, DC
  5. Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco, CA
  6. United States Capitol, Washington, DC
  7. Lincoln Memorial, Washington, DC
  8. Biltmore Estate, Asheville NC
  9. Chrysler Building, New York, NY
  10. Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Washington, DC
  11. St. Patrick's Cathedral, New York, NY
  12. Washington Monument, Washington, DC
  13. Grand Central Terminal, New York, NY
  14. Gateway Arch, St. Louis, MO
  15. Supreme Court of the United States, Washington, DC
  16. St. Regis, New York, NY
  17. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
  18. Hotel Del Coronado, Coronado, CA
  19. World Trade Center (original towers), New York, NY
  20. Brooklyn Bridge, New York, NY
  21. Philadelphia City Hall, Philadelphia, PA
  22. Bellagio Hotel and Casino, Las Vega, NV
  23. Cathedral of St. John the Divine, New York, NY
  24. Philadelphia Museum of Art, New York, NY
  25. Trinity Church, Boston, MA
  26. Ahwahnee Hotel, Yosemite Valley, CA
  27. Monticello, Charlottesville, VA
  28. Library of Congress, Washington, DC
  29. Fallingwater, Mill Run, PA
  30. Taliesin, Spring Green WI
  31. Wrigley Field, Chicago, IL
  32. Wanamaker's Department Store, Philadelphia, PA
  33. Rose Center for Earth and Space, New York, NY
  34. National Gallery of Art (West Building), Washington, DC
  35. Allegheny County Courthouse, Pittsburgh, PA
  36. Old Faithful Inn, Yellowstone National Park, WY
  37. Washington Union Station Washington, DC
  38. Tribune Tower, Chicago, IL
  39. Delano Hotel, Miami Beach, FL
  40. Union Station, St. Louis, MO
  41. Hearst Residence, San Simeon, CA
  42. Willis (formerly Sears) Tower, Chicago, IL
  43. Thomas Crane Public Library, Quincy, MA
  44. Woolworth Building, New York, NY
  45. Cincinnati Union Terminal, Cincinnati, OH
  46. Waldorf Astoria, New York, NY
  47. New York Public Library, New York, NY
  48. Carnegie Hall, New York, NY
  49. San Francisco City Hall, San Francisco, CA
  50. Virginia State Capitol, Richmond, VA
  51. Cadet Chapel, Air Force Academy, Colorado Springs, CO
  52. Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago, IL
  53. Apple, 5th Avenue, New York, NY
  54. Fisher Fine Arts Library, Philadelphia, PA
  55. Mauna Kea Beach Hotel, Kohala Coast, HI
  56. Rockefeller Center, New York, NY
  57. Denver International Airport, Denver, CO
  58. Ames Free Library, North Easton, MA
  59. Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, WI
  60. Thorncrown Chapel, Eureka Springs, AR
  61. Transamerica Pyramid, San Francisco, CA
  62. 333 Wacker Drive, Chicago, IL
  63. Smithsonian National Air & Space Museum, Washington, DC
  64. Faneuil Hall, Boston, MA
  65. Crystal Cathedral, Garden Grove, CA
  66. Gamble House, Pasadena, CA
  67. Nebraska State Capitol, Lincoln, NE
  68. New York Times Building, New York, NY
  69. Salt Lake City Public Library, Salt Lake City, UT
  70. Walt Disney World Dolphin and Swan Hotels, Lake Buena Vista, FL
  71. Hearst Tower, New York, NY
  72. Flatiron Building, New York, NY
  73. Lake Point Tower, Chicago, NY
  74. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY
  75. Union Station, Los Angeles, CA
  76. Willard Hotel, Washington, DC
  77. Sever Hall, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA
  78. Broadmoor Hotel, Colorado Springs, CO
  79. Ronald Reagan Building, Washington, DC
  80. Phillips Exeter Academy Library, Exeter, NH
  81. The Plaza Hotel, New York, NY
  82. Sofitel Chicago Water Tower, Chicago, IL
  83. Glessner House, Chicago, IL
  84. Yankee Stadium (1923) (demolished), New York, NY
  85. Harold Washington Library, Chicago, IL
  86. Lincoln Center, New York, NY
  87. The Dakota Apartments, New York, NY
  88. Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL
  89. Fairmont Hotel, San Francisco, CA
  90. Boston Public Library, Boston, MA
  91. Hollywood Bowl, Los Angeles, CA
  92. Texas State Capitol, Austin, TX
  93. Fontainebleau, Miami, FL
  94. Legal Research Building, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI
  95. Getty Center, Los Angeles, CA
  96. High Museum, Atlanta, GA
  97. Federal Building and United States Courthouse, Islip, NY
  98. Humana Building, Louisville, KY
  99. Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles, CA
  100. Radio City Music Hall, New York, NY
  101. Paul Brown Stadium, Cincinnati, OH
  102. United Airlines Terminal 1, O'Hare Airport, Chicago, IL
  103. Hyatt Regency Atlanta, Atlanta, GA
  104. Oracle Park, San Francisco, CA
  105. Time Warner Center, New York, NY
  106. Washington Metro, Washington, DC
  107. IDS Center (IDS Tower), Minneapolis, MN
  108. Seattle Central Library, Seattle, WA
  109. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA
  110. Union Station, Chicago, IL
  111. United Nations Headquarters, New York, NY
  112. National Building Museum, Washington, DC
  113. Fenway Park, Boston, MA
  114. Dana–Thomas House, Springfield, IL
  115. TWA Flight Center, JFK Airport, New York, NY
  116. The Athenaeum, New Harmony, IN
  117. Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN
  118. American Airlines Center, Dallas, TX
  119. Arizona Biltmore Resort and Spa, Phoenix, AZ
  120. Los Angeles Central Library, Los Angeles, CA
  121. San Francisco International Airport, San Francisco, CA
  122. Camden Yards, Baltimore, MD
  123. Taliesin West, Scottsdale, AZ
  124. United States Holocaust Museum, Washington, DC
  125. Citicorp Center, New York, NY
  126. V. C. Morris Gift Shop, San Francisco, CA
  127. Union Station, Kansas, MO
  128. Rookery Building, Chicago, IL
  129. Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art, Minneapolis, MN
  130. Douglas House, Harbor Springs, MI
  131. Aline Barnsdall Hollyhock House, Los Angeles, CA
  132. Pennzoil Place, Houston, TX
  133. Royalton Hotel, New York, NY
  134. Astrodome, Houston, TX
  135. T-Mobile Park, Seattle, WA
  136. Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, NY
  137. 30th Street Station, Philadelphia, PA
  138. Robie House, Chicago, IL
  139. Williams (formerly Transco) Tower, Houston, TX
  140. Stahl House (Case Study House #22), Los Angeles, CA
  141. ​Apple, SoHo, New York, NY
  142. John Hancock Tower, Boston, MA
  143. Pennsylvania Station (demolished), New York, NY
  144. Hyatt Regency, San Francisco, CA
  145. Carson, Pirie, Scott and Company Building, Chicago, IL
  146. Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY
  147. Auditorium Building, Chicago, IL
  148. Brown Palace Hotel, Denver, CO
  149. Ingalls Rink, Yale University, New Haven, CT
  150. Battle Hall, UT Austin, Austin, TX

Criticisms:

When it was released, critics observed that the list of "favorites" did not reflect the judgments of architectural “experts”. Upon the list's release, AIA president R.K. Stewart acknowledged that the rankings did not represent architects' professional judgments, but instead reflected people's "emotional connections" to buildings. 

Buildings named by critics as being some that architects consider to be highly significant, but that did not achieve top 150 ranking in the public survey, included the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, designed by Louis Kahn; the Inland Steel and John Hancock buildings in Chicago; Washington Dulles International Airport in Chantilly, Virginia, designed by Eero Saarinen; and the Seagram Building in New York City, designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. 

John King of the San Francisco Chronicle pointed out that in 1991 the AIA had named Eero Saarinen's design for Dulles Airport as one of ten "all-time works of American architects." King noted that the public's ratings were based on seeing just one photo of each building, and pointed out that "There's more to architecture than a picture can convey."

Structures ranked below the top 150:

The 98 buildings that were listed by architects as significant, but did not rank in the top 150 in the public vote, were:
See also:







Honeymoon Resort at Madonna Inn, San Luis Obispo, CA (Click Here for Website) Pictured below:
​Top -- Front Entrance to Madonna Inn (Courtesy of Rian Castillo from Vestavia Hills, USA - madonna inn, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=33536611
Bottom: Honeymoon Suite (room that Ev & I stayed at for our honeymoon)
[Your Webhost: I first became aware of Madonna Inn while attending college at California State Polytechnic University in San Luis Obispo (1961-1965). In fact, I dated a lady who waitressed at the Inn's main restaurant. Later when Ev and I were on our honeymoon, in September, 1973, we spent it at the Inn's "honeymoon suite" (bottom picture above)! The Inn's architecture is incredible!]

The Madonna Inn is a motel in San Luis Obispo, California. Opened for business in 1958, it quickly became a landmark on the Central Coast of California. It is noted for its unique decor, pink dining room, and themed rooms. It was created by Alex Madonna, a successful construction magnate and entrepreneur (d. April 2004), and his wife Phyllis. 

The inn includes a restaurant and bakery and is located on the west side of US Route 101 and situated on the lower eastern portion of Cerro San Luis Obispo.

Description:

The property is adorned with a pseudo-Swiss-Alps exterior and lavish common rooms accented by pink roses, Western murals, and hammered copper. The predominant exterior color is pink, which extends to the lamp posts and trash cans. 

Each of the 110 guest rooms and suites is uniquely designed and themed, though some tourists stop just to peek at the famous rock waterfall urinal located in the men's restroom, a feature designed by Hollywood set designer Harvey Allen Warren.

The boulders used for the Inn weigh up to 209 short tons (190 t) for the exterior and 15 short tons (14 t) for the interior. A 45 short tons (41 t) boulder is shared as a fireplace for the adjoining Madonna (#141) and Old World (#192) suites.

In 1973, there were five buildings on the 1,500-acre (610 ha) site:
Aiming to cater to a range of tastes, rooms were given unusual names, amenities, and themes such as:
  • "Yahoo" (#132),
  • "Love Nest" (#183),
  • "Old Mill" (#206),
  • "Kona Rock" (#131),
  • "Irish Hills" (#156),
  • "Cloud Nine" (#161),
  • "Just Heaven" (#184),
  • "Hearts & Flowers" (#155),
  • "Rock Bottom" (#143),
  • "Austrian Suite" (#160),
  • "Cabin Still" (#133),
  • "Old World Suite" (#192),
  • "Caveman Room" (#137),
  • "Elegance" (#201),
  • "Daisy Mae" (#138),
  • "Safari Room" (#193),
  • "Highway Suite" (#145),
  • "Jungle Rock" (#139),
  • "American Home" (#204),
  • "Bridal Falls" (#140),
  • and "the Carin" (#218).

Some rooms are grouped in themes. For example, the rooms "Ren" (#167), "Dez" (#168), and "Vous" (#169) are a play on the French word rendezvous, and "Merry" (#164), "Go" (#165), and "Round" (#166), for an amusement park carousel.

Most of the themes were conceived by Alex and Phyllis Madonna, and some rooms were designed by Disney artist Alice Turney Williams.

​History:

The Madonna Inn opened as a motel inn on December 24, 1958 upon the completion of its first twelve rooms. The Madonnas were so excited to have their first guest, they refunded his $7 room rental. 

Demand was sufficient to expand to forty rooms in 1959, and the Inn facility was constructed in 1960. Reportedly, when the architect Richard Neutra stayed at the Inn, he asked Alex Madonna about the design: "Alex, you didn't have an architect here, did you? It's just as well you didn't because you couldn't have captured all the details if you had to draw them out. I don't know how you would draw these things and then accomplish them."

In May 1966, the Inn's original units were burned to the ground in a fire. It reopened a year later, and by the end of the decade, all of the rooms had been rebuilt in manner for which they are known today. There are 110 rooms.

In 1975, critic Paul Goldberger wrote an article about the Madonna Inn for The New York Times, bringing it to national prominence. By 1982, the Madonna Inn was already well-known, and Alex Madonna was quoted as saying, "Anybody can build one room and a thousand like it. It's more economical. Most places try to give you as little as possible. I try to give people a decent place to stay where they receive more than they are entitled to for what they're paying. I want people to come in with a smile and leave with a smile. It's fun."

Hanna-Barbera Productions sued the Madonna Inn in 1983, alleging copyright infringement over the Inn's "Flintstone Room" (#139) and its decorations, which included images of Fred and Wilma Flintstone and the exclamation "Yabba Dabba Doo". Room #139 is now the "Jungle Rock" junior suite. According to a 2013 interview with Clint Pearce, president of Madonna Enterprises, the "Caveman Room" (#137) was originally the "Flintstone Room".

​In popular culture:
Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about the Madonna Inn:







Skyscrapers of the World, including Early Skyscrapers as well as a List of the Tallest Buildings * -- The Burj Khallifa is the World's Tallest Building: Taking the fastest elevator in the world up to the 128 floor of the Burj Khalifa, Dubai.  You feel like you are about to take off, and in a few seconds the doors open to breathtaking views from the sky lounge area where you are treated to a refreshing juice, dates, and small bites.

Pictured below: Top 10 tallest buildings in the world, ranked: Who’s on top?
A skyscraper is a tall continuously habitable building having multiple floors. Modern sources currently define skyscrapers as being at least 100 meters (330 ft) or 150 meters (490 ft) in height, though there is no universally accepted definition.

Skyscrapers are very tall high-rise buildings. Historically, the term first referred to buildings with between 10 and 20 stories when these types of buildings began to be constructed in the 1880s. Skyscrapers may host offices, hotels, residential spaces, and retail spaces.

One common feature of skyscrapers is having a steel frame that supports curtain walls. These curtain walls either bear on the framework below or are suspended from the framework above, rather than resting on load-bearing walls of conventional construction. Some early skyscrapers have a steel frame that enables the construction of load-bearing walls taller than of those made of reinforced concrete.

Modern skyscrapers' walls are not load-bearing, and most skyscrapers are characterized by large surface areas of windows made possible by steel frames and curtain walls. However, skyscrapers can have curtain walls that mimic conventional walls with a small surface area of windows.

Modern skyscrapers often have a tubular structure, and are designed to act like a hollow cylinder to resist wind, seismic, and other lateral loads. To appear more slender, allow less wind exposure and transmit more daylight to the ground, many skyscrapers have a design with setbacks, which in some cases is also structurally required.

As of February 2022, fourteen cities in the world have more than 100 skyscrapers that are 150 m (492 ft) or taller: :
  • Hong Kong with 518 skyscrapers; 
  • Shenzhen, China with 343 skyscrapers; 
  • New York City, USA with 300 skyscrapers; 
  • Dubai, UAE with 237 skyscrapers; 
  • Mumbai, India with 208 skyscrapers; 
  • Shanghai, China with 180 skyscrapers; 
  • Tokyo, Japan with 165 skyscrapers; 
  • Guangzhou, China with 152 skyscrapers; 
  • Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia with 148 skyscrapers; 
  • Chongqing, China with 135 skyscrapers; 
  • Chicago, United States with 135 skyscrapers; 
  • Wuhan, China with 109 skyscrapers; 
  • Bangkok, Thailand with 108 skyscrapers;
  • and Jakarta, Indonesia with 108 skyscrapers.
​
Definition:

​The term "skyscraper" was first applied to buildings of steel-framed construction of at least 10 stories in the late 19th century, a result of public amazement at the tall buildings being built in major American cities like Chicago, New York City, Philadelphia, Detroit, and St. Louis.

The first steel-frame skyscraper was the Home Insurance Building, originally 10 stories with a height of 42 m or 138 ft, in Chicago in 1885; two additional stories were added. 

Some point to Philadelphia's 10-story Jayne Building (1849–50) as a proto-skyscraper, or to New York's seven-floor Equitable Life Building, built in 1870.

Steel skeleton construction has allowed for today's supertall skyscrapers now being built worldwide. The nomination of one structure versus another being the first skyscraper, and why, depends on what factors are stressed.

The structural definition of the word skyscraper was refined later by architectural historians, based on engineering developments of the 1880s that had enabled construction of tall multi-storey buildings. This definition was based on the steel skeleton—as opposed to constructions of load-bearing masonry, which passed their practical limit in 1891 with Chicago's Monadnock Building.

"What is the chief characteristic of the tall office building? It is lofty. It must be tall. The force and power of altitude must be in it, the glory and pride of exaltation must be in it. It must be every inch a proud and soaring thing, rising in sheer exaltation that from bottom to top it is a unit without a single dissenting line." — Louis Sullivan's The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered (1896)

Some structural engineers define a high-rise as any vertical construction for which wind is a more significant load factor than earthquake or weight. Note that this criterion fits not only high-rises but some other tall structures, such as towers.

Different organizations from the United States and Europe define skyscrapers as buildings at least 150 metres in height or taller, with "supertall" skyscrapers for buildings higher than 300 m (984 ft) and "megatall" skyscrapers for those taller than 600 m (1,969 ft).

The tallest structure in ancient times was the 146 m (479 ft) Great Pyramid of Giza in ancient Egypt, built in the 26th century BC. It was not surpassed in height for thousands of years, the 160 m (520 ft) Lincoln Cathedral having exceeded it in 1311–1549, before its central spire collapsed. 

The latter in turn was not surpassed until the 555-foot (169 m) Washington Monument in 1884. However, being uninhabited, none of these structures actually comply with the modern definition of a skyscraper.

High-rise apartments flourished in classical antiquity. Ancient Roman insulae in imperial cities reached 10 and more stories. Beginning with Augustus (r. 30 BC-14 AD), several emperors attempted to establish limits of 20–25 m for multi-story buildings but were met with only limited success. 

Lower floors were typically occupied by shops or wealthy families, with the upper rented to the lower classes. Surviving Oxyrhynchus Papyri indicate that seven-storey buildings existed in provincial towns such as in 3rd century AD Hermopolis in Roman Egypt.

The skylines of many important medieval cities had large numbers of high-rise urban towers, built by the wealthy for defense and status. The residential Towers of 12th century Bologna numbered between 80 and 100 at a time, the tallest of which is the 97.2 m (319 ft) high Asinelli Tower.

A Florentine law of 1251 decreed that all urban buildings be immediately reduced to less than 26 m. Even medium-sized towns of the era are known to have proliferations of towers, such as the 72 up to 51 m height in San Gimignano.

The medieval Egyptian city of Fustat housed many high-rise residential buildings, which Al-Muqaddasi in the 10th century described as resembling minarets. Nasir Khusraw in the early 11th century described some of them rising up to 14 stories, with roof gardens on the top floor complete with ox-drawn water wheels for irrigating them. 

Cairo in the 16th century had high-rise apartment buildings where the two lower floors were for commercial and storage purposes and the multiple storeys above them were rented out to tenants. An early example of a city consisting entirely of high-rise housing is the 16th-century city of Shibam in Yemen.

Shibam was made up of over 500 tower houses, each one rising 5 to 11 stories high, with each floor being an apartment occupied by a single family. The city was built in this way in order to protect it from Bedouin attacks. Shibam still has the tallest mudbrick buildings in the world, with many of them over 30 m (98 ft) high.

An early modern example of high-rise housing was in 17th-century Edinburgh, Scotland, where a defensive city wall defined the boundaries of the city. Due to the restricted land area available for development, the houses increased in height instead. Buildings of 11 stories were common, and there are records of buildings as high as 14 stories. Many of the stone-built structures can still be seen today in the old town of Edinburgh.

The oldest iron framed building in the world, although only partially iron framed, is The Flaxmill (also locally known as the "Maltings"), in Shrewsbury, England. Built in 1797, it is seen as the "grandfather of skyscrapers", since its fireproof combination of cast iron columns and cast iron beams developed into the modern steel frame that made modern skyscrapers possible. In 2013 funding was confirmed to convert the derelict building into offices.

Early skyscrapers:
Main article: Early skyscrapers

​In 1857, Elisha Otis introduced the safety elevator at the E.V. Haughwout Building in New York City, allowing convenient and safe transport to buildings' upper floors. Otis later introduced the first commercial passenger elevators to the Equitable Life Building in 1870, considered by some architectural historians to be the first skyscraper.

Another crucial development was the use of a steel frame instead of stone or brick, otherwise the walls on the lower floors on a tall building would be too thick to be practical. An early development in this area was Oriel Chambers in Liverpool, England. It was only five floors high. 

The Royal Academy of Arts states, "critics at the time were horrified by its "large agglomerations of protruding plate glass bubbles". In fact, it was a precursor to Modernist architecture, being the first building in the world to feature a metal-framed glass curtain wall, a design element which creates light, airy interiors and has since been used the world over as a defining feature of skyscrapers".

Further developments led to what many individuals and organizations consider the world's first skyscraper, the ten-story Home Insurance Building in Chicago, built in 1884–1885. While its original height of 42.1 m (138 ft) does not even qualify as a skyscraper today, it was record setting. The building of tall buildings in the 1880s gave the skyscraper its first architectural movement, broadly termed the Chicago School, which developed what has been called the Commercial Style.

The architect, Major William Le Baron Jenney, created a load-bearing structural frame. In this building, a steel frame supported the entire weight of the walls, instead of load-bearing walls carrying the weight of the building. This development led to the "Chicago skeleton" form of construction. In addition to the steel frame, the Home Insurance Building also utilized fireproofing, elevators, and electrical wiring, key elements in most skyscrapers today.

Burnham and Root's 45 m (148 ft) Rand McNally Building in Chicago, 1889, was the first all-steel framed skyscraper, while Louis Sullivan's 41 m (135 ft) Wainwright Building in St. Louis, Missouri, 1891, was the first steel-framed building with soaring vertical bands to emphasize the height of the building and is therefore considered to be the first early skyscraper.

In 1889, the Mole Antonelliana in Italy was 167 m (549 ft) tall.

Most early skyscrapers emerged in the land-strapped areas of Chicago and New York City toward the end of the 19th century. A land boom in Melbourne, Australia between 1888 and 1891 spurred the creation of a significant number of early skyscrapers, though none of these were steel reinforced and few remain today. Height limits and fire restrictions were later introduced.

In the late 1800s, London builders found building heights limited due to issues with existing buildings. High-rise development in London is restricted at certain sites if it would obstruct protected views of St Paul's Cathedral and other historic buildings. This policy, 'St Paul’s Heights', has officially been in operation since 1937.

Concerns about aesthetics and fire safety had likewise hampered the development of skyscrapers across continental Europe for the first half of the 20th century. Some notable exceptions are:
After an early competition between Chicago and New York City for the world's tallest building, New York took the lead by 1895 with the completion of the 103 m (338 ft) tall American Surety Building, leaving New York with the title of the world's tallest building for many years.

Modern skyscrapers:

Modern skyscrapers are built with steel or reinforced concrete frameworks and curtain walls of glass or polished stone. They use mechanical equipment such as water pumps and elevators. Since the 1960s, according to the CTBUH, the skyscraper has been reoriented away from a symbol for North American corporate power to instead communicate a city or nation's place in the world.

Skyscraper construction entered a three-decades-long era of stagnation in 1930 due to the Great Depression and then World War II.

Shortly after the war ended, the Soviet Union began construction on a series of skyscrapers in Moscow. Seven, dubbed the "Seven Sisters", were built between 1947 and 1953; and one, the Main building of Moscow State University, was the tallest building in Europe for nearly four decades (1953–1990).

Other skyscrapers in the style of Socialist Classicism were erected in East Germany (Frankfurter Tor), Poland (PKiN), Ukraine (Hotel Ukrayina), Latvia (Academy of Sciences) and other Eastern Bloc countries. 

Western European countries also began to permit taller skyscrapers during the years immediately following World War II. Early examples include Edificio España (Spain) and Torre Breda (Italy).

From the 1930s onward, skyscrapers began to appear in various cities in East and Southeast Asia as well as in Latin America. Finally, they also began to be constructed in cities in Africa, the Middle East, South Asia and Oceania from the late 1950s.

​Skyscraper projects after World War II typically rejected the classical designs of the early skyscrapers, instead embracing the uniform international style; many older skyscrapers were redesigned to suit contemporary tastes or even demolished—such as New York's Singer Building, once the world's tallest skyscraper.

German architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe became one of the world's most renowned architects in the second half of the 20th century. He conceived the glass façade skyscraper and, along with Norwegian Fred Severud, designed the Seagram Building in 1958, a skyscraper that is often regarded as the pinnacle of modernist high-rise architecture.

Skyscraper construction surged throughout the 1960s. The impetus behind the upswing was a series of transformative innovations which made it possible for people to live and work in "cities in the sky".

​In the early 1960s Bangladeshi-American structural engineer Fazlur Rahman Khan, considered the "father of tubular designs" for high-rises, discovered that the dominating rigid steel frame structure was not the only system apt for tall buildings, marking a new era of skyscraper construction in terms of multiple structural systems. 

Khan's central innovation in skyscraper design and construction was the concept of the "tube" structural system, including the "framed tube", "trussed tube", and "bundled tube". His "tube concept", using all the exterior wall perimeter structure of a building to simulate a thin-walled tube, revolutionized tall building design. 

These systems allow greater economic efficiency, and also allow skyscrapers to take on various shapes, no longer needing to be rectangular and box-shaped. 

The first building to employ the tube structure was the Chestnut De-Witt apartment building, considered to be a major development in modern architecture. These new designs opened an economic door for contractors, engineers, architects, and investors, providing vast amounts of real estate space on minimal plots of land. 

Over the next fifteen years, many towers were built by Fazlur Rahman Khan and the "Second Chicago School", including the hundred-story John Hancock Center and the massive 442 m (1,450 ft) Willis Tower. Other pioneers of this field include Hal Iyengar, William LeMessurier, and Minoru Yamasaki, the architect of the World Trade Center.

Many buildings designed in the 70s lacked a particular style and recalled ornamentation from earlier buildings designed before the 50s. These design plans ignored the environment and loaded structures with decorative elements and extravagant finishes. 

This approach to design was opposed by Fazlur Khan and he considered the designs to be whimsical rather than rational. Moreover, he considered the work to be a waste of precious natural resources. Khan's work promoted structures integrated with architecture and the least use of material resulting in the smallest impact on the environment. 

​The next era of skyscrapers will focus on the environment including performance of structures, types of material, construction practices, absolute minimal use of materials/natural resources, embodied energy within the structures, and more importantly, a holistically integrated building systems approach.

Modern building practices regarding supertall structures have led to the study of "vanity height". Vanity height, according to the CTBUH, is the distance between the highest floor and its architectural top (excluding antennae, flagpole or other functional extensions).

Vanity height first appeared in New York City skyscrapers as early as the 1920s and 1930s but supertall buildings have relied on such uninhabitable extensions for on average 30% of their height, raising potential definitional and sustainability issues. 

The current era of skyscrapers focuses on sustainability, its built and natural environments, including the performance of structures, types of materials, construction practices, absolute minimal use of materials and natural resources, energy within the structure, and a holistically integrated building systems approach. LEED is a current green building standard.

Architecturally, with the movements of Postmodernism, New Urbanism and New Classical Architecture, that established since the 1980s, a more classical approach came back to global skyscraper design, that remains popular today. Examples are:
Other contemporary styles and movements in skyscraper design include such features as: 
3 September is the global commemorative day for skyscrapers, called "Skyscraper Day".
New York City developers competed among themselves, with successively taller buildings claiming the title of "world's tallest" in the 1920s and early 1930s, culminating with the completion of the 318.9 m (1,046 ft) Chrysler Building in 1930 and the 443.2 m (1,454 ft) Empire State Building in 1931, the world's tallest building for forty years.

The first completed 417 m (1,368 ft) tall World Trade Center tower became the world's tallest building in 1972. However, it was overtaken by the Sears Tower (now Willis Tower) in Chicago within two years. The 442 m (1,450 ft) tall Sears Tower stood as the world's tallest building for 24 years, from 1974 until 1998, until it was edged out by 452 m (1,483 ft) Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur, which held the title for six years.

Design and construction:
Main article: Skyscraper design and construction
​
The design and construction of skyscrapers involves creating safe, habitable spaces in very tall buildings. The buildings must support their weight, resist wind and earthquakes, and protect occupants from fire. Yet they must also be conveniently accessible, even on the upper floors, and provide utilities and a comfortable climate for the occupants.

The problems posed in skyscraper design are considered among the most complex encountered given the balances required between economics, engineering, and construction management.

One common feature of skyscrapers is a steel framework from which curtain walls are suspended, rather than load-bearing walls of conventional construction. Most skyscrapers have a steel frame that enables them to be built taller than typical load-bearing walls of reinforced concrete.

Skyscrapers usually have a particularly small surface area of what are conventionally thought of as walls. Because the walls are not load-bearing most skyscrapers are characterized by surface areas of windows made possible by the concept of steel frame and curtain wall.

However, skyscrapers can also have curtain walls that mimic conventional walls and have a small surface area of windows.

The concept of a skyscraper is a product of the industrialized age, made possible by cheap fossil fuel derived energy and industrially refined raw materials such as steel and concrete. The construction of skyscrapers was enabled by steel frame construction that surpassed brick and mortar construction starting at the end of the 19th century and finally surpassing it in the 20th century together with reinforced concrete construction as the price of steel decreased and labor costs increased.

The steel frames become inefficient and uneconomic for supertall buildings as usable floor space is reduced for progressively larger supporting columns. Since about 1960, tubular designs have been used for high rises. This reduces the usage of material (more efficient in economic terms – Willis Tower uses a third less steel than the Empire State Building) yet allows greater height. It allows fewer interior columns, and so creates more usable floor space. It further enables buildings to take on various shapes.

Elevators are characteristic to skyscrapers. In 1852 Elisha Otis introduced the safety elevator, allowing convenient and safe passenger movement to upper floors. Another crucial development was the use of a steel frame instead of stone or brick, otherwise the walls on the lower floors on a tall building would be too thick to be practical. Today major manufacturers of elevators include Otis, ThyssenKrupp, Schindler, and KONE.

Advances in construction techniques have allowed skyscrapers to narrow in width, while increasing in height. Some of these new techniques include mass dampers to reduce vibrations and swaying, and gaps to allow air to pass through, reducing wind shear.

Basic design considerations:

Good structural design is important in most building design, but particularly for skyscrapers since even a small chance of catastrophic failure is unacceptable given the high price. This presents a paradox to civil engineers: the only way to assure a lack of failure is to test for all modes of failure, in both the laboratory and the real world.

But the only way to know of all modes of failure is to learn from previous failures. Thus, no engineer can be absolutely sure that a given structure will resist all loadings that could cause failure but can only have large enough margins of safety such that a failure is acceptably unlikely. When buildings do fail, engineers question whether the failure was due to some lack of foresight or due to some unknowable factor.

Loading and vibration:

The load a skyscraper experiences is largely from the force of the building material itself. In most building designs, the weight of the structure is much larger than the weight of the material that it will support beyond its own weight.

In technical terms, the dead load, the load of the structure, is larger than the live load, the weight of things in the structure (people, furniture, vehicles, etc.). As such, the amount of structural material required within the lower levels of a skyscraper will be much larger than the material required within higher levels.

This is not always visually apparent. The Empire State Building's setbacks are actually a result of the building code at the time (1916 Zoning Resolution), and were not structurally required. On the other hand, John Hancock Center's shape is uniquely the result of how it supports loads.

Vertical supports can come in several types, among which the most common for skyscrapers can be categorized as steel frames, concrete cores, tube within tube design, and shear walls.

The wind loading on a skyscraper is also considerable. In fact, the lateral wind load imposed on supertall structures is generally the governing factor in the structural design. Wind pressure increases with height, so for very tall buildings, the loads associated with wind are larger than dead or live loads.

Other vertical and horizontal loading factors come from varied, unpredictable sources, such as earthquakes.

Steel frame:

By 1895, steel had replaced cast iron as skyscrapers' structural material. Its malleability allowed it to be formed into a variety of shapes, and it could be riveted, ensuring strong connections. 

The simplicity of a steel frame eliminated the inefficient part of a shear wall, the central portion, and consolidated support members in a much stronger fashion by allowing both horizontal and vertical supports throughout.

Among steel's drawbacks is that as more material must be supported as height increases, the distance between supporting members must decrease, which in turn increases the amount of material that must be supported. This becomes inefficient and uneconomic for buildings above 40 storeys tall as usable floor spaces are reduced for supporting column and due to more usage of steel.

Tube structural systems:
See also: Tube (structure)

A new structural system of framed tubes was developed by Fazlur Rahman Khan in 1963. The framed tube structure is defined as "a three-dimensional space structure composed of three, four, or possibly more frames, braced frames, or shear walls, joined at or near their edges to form a vertical tube-like structural system capable of resisting lateral forces in any direction by cantilevering from the foundation". 

Closely spaced interconnected exterior columns form the tube. Horizontal loads (primarily wind) are supported by the structure as a whole. Framed tubes allow fewer interior columns, and so create more usable floor space, and about half the exterior surface is available for windows.

Where larger openings like garage doors are required, the tube frame must be interrupted, with transfer girders used to maintain structural integrity. Tube structures cut down costs, at the same time allowing buildings to reach greater heights.

Concrete tube-frame construction was first used in the DeWitt-Chestnut Apartment Building, completed in Chicago in 1963, and soon after in the John Hancock Center and World Trade Center.

The tubular systems are fundamental to tall building design. Most buildings over 40-storeys constructed since the 1960s now use a tube design derived from Khan's structural engineering principles, examples including the construction of the World Trade Center, Aon Center, Petronas Towers, Jin Mao Building, and most other supertall skyscrapers since the 1960s. The strong influence of tube structure design is also evident in the construction of the current tallest skyscraper, the Burj Khalifa.

Trussed tube and X-bracing:

Pictured below: (By Luthador - computer diagrams, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19913498): ​Changes of structure with height; the tubular systems are fundamental for supertall buildings.
Khan pioneered several other variations of the tube structure design. One of these was the concept of X-bracing, or the trussed tube, first employed for the John Hancock Center. This concept reduced the lateral load on the building by transferring the load into the exterior columns. This allows for a reduced need for interior columns thus creating more floor space.

This concept can be seen in the John Hancock Center, designed in 1965 and completed in 1969. One of the most famous buildings of the structural expressionist style, the skyscraper's distinctive X-bracing exterior is actually a hint that the structure's skin is indeed part of its 'tubular system'.

This idea is one of the architectural techniques the building used to climb to record heights (the tubular system is essentially the spine that helps the building stand upright during wind and earthquake loads). This X-bracing allows for both higher performance from tall structures and the ability to open up the inside floorplan (and usable floor space) if the architect desires.

The John Hancock Center was far more efficient than earlier steel-frame structures. Where the Empire State Building (1931), required about 206 kilograms of steel per square meter and 28 Liberty Street (1961) required 275, the John Hancock Center required only 145. The trussed tube concept was applied to many later skyscrapers, including the Onterie Center, Citigroup Center and Bank of China Tower.

​Bundled tube: An important variation on the tube frame is the bundled tube, which uses several interconnected tube frames. The Willis Tower in Chicago used this design, employing nine tubes of varying height to achieve its distinct appearance. The bundled tube structure meant that "buildings no longer need be boxlike in appearance: they could become sculpture."

Tube in tube: Tube-in-tube system takes advantage of core shear wall tubes in addition to exterior tubes. The inner tube and outer tube work together to resist gravity loads and lateral loads and to provide additional rigidity to the structure to prevent significant deflections at the top. This design was first used in One Shell Plaza. Later buildings to use this structural system include the Petronas Towers.

Outrigger and belt truss: The outrigger and belt truss system is a lateral load resisting system in which the tube structure is connected to the central core wall with very stiff outriggers and belt trusses at one or more levels. 

BHP House was the first building to use this structural system followed by the First Wisconsin Center, since renamed U.S. Bank Center, in Milwaukee. The center rises 601 feet, with three belt trusses at the bottom, middle and top of the building. The exposed belt trusses serve aesthetic and structural purposes. Later buildings to use this include Shanghai World Financial Center.

Concrete tube structures: The last major buildings engineered by Khan were the One Magnificent Mile and Onterie Center in Chicago, which employed his bundled tube and trussed tube system designs respectively. In contrast to his earlier buildings, which were mainly steel, his last two buildings were concrete. His earlier DeWitt-Chestnut Apartments building, built in 1963 in Chicago, was also a concrete building with a tube structure. Trump Tower in New York City is also another example that adapted this system.

Shear wall frame interaction system: Khan developed the shear wall frame interaction system for mid high-rise buildings. This structural system uses combinations of shear walls and frames designed to resist lateral forces. 

The first building to use this structural system was the 35-stories Brunswick Building. The Brunswick building was completed in 1965 and became the tallest reinforced concrete structure of its time. The structural system of Brunswick Building consists of a concrete shear wall core surrounded by an outer concrete frame of columns and spandrels.

Apartment buildings up to 70 stories high have successfully used this concept.

The elevator conundrum:

The invention of the elevator was a precondition for the invention of skyscrapers, given that most people would not (or could not) climb more than a few flights of stairs at a time.

The elevators in a skyscraper are not simply a necessary utility, like running water and electricity, but are in fact closely related to the design of the whole structure: a taller building requires more elevators to service the additional floors, but the elevator shafts consume valuable floor space.

If the service core, which contains the elevator shafts, becomes too big, it can reduce the profitability of the building. Architects must therefore balance the value gained by adding height against the value lost to the expanding service core.

Many tall buildings use elevators in a non-standard configuration to reduce their footprint.

Buildings such as the former World Trade Center Towers and Chicago's John Hancock Center use sky lobbies, where express elevators take passengers to upper floors which serve as the base for local elevators. This allows architects and engineers to place elevator shafts on top of each other, saving space. Sky lobbies and express elevators take up a significant amount of space, however, and add to the amount of time spent commuting between floors.

​Other buildings, such as the Petronas Towers, use double-deck elevators, allowing more people to fit in a single elevator, and reaching two floors at every stop. It is possible to use even more than two levels on an elevator, although this has never been done. The main problem with double-deck elevators is that they cause everyone in the elevator to stop when only person on one level needs to get off at a given floor.

​Buildings with sky lobbies include the World Trade Center, Petronas Twin Towers, Willis Tower and Taipei 101. The 44th-floor sky lobby of the John Hancock Center also featured the first high-rise indoor swimming pool, which remains the highest in the United States.

Economic rationale:

​Skyscrapers are usually situated in city centers where the price of land is high. Constructing a skyscraper becomes justified if the price of land is so high that it makes economic sense to build upward as to minimize the cost of the land per the total floor area of a building.

Thus the construction of skyscrapers is dictated by economics and results in skyscrapers in a certain part of a large city unless a building code restricts the height of buildings.

Skyscrapers are rarely seen in small cities and they are characteristic of large cities, because of the critical importance of high land prices for the construction of skyscrapers. Usually only office, commercial and hotel users can afford the rents in the city center and thus most tenants of skyscrapers are of these classes.

Today, skyscrapers are an increasingly common sight where land is expensive, as in the centers of big cities, because they provide such a high ratio of rentable floor space per unit area of land.

One problem with skyscrapers is car parking. In the largest cities most people commute via public transport, but in smaller cities many parking spaces are needed. Multi-story car parks are impractical to build very tall, so much land area is needed.

Another disadvantage of very high skyscrapers is the loss of usable floorspace, as many elevator shafts are needed to enable performant vertical travelling. This led to the introduction of express lifts and sky lobbies where transfer to slower distribution lifts can be done.

Environmental impact:
Further information: Bird-skyscraper collisions

​Constructing a single skyscraper requires large quantities of materials like steel, concrete, and glass, and these materials represent significant embodied energy. Skyscrapers are thus material and energy intensive buildings, but skyscrapers can have long lifespans, for example, the Empire State Building in New York City, United States was completed in 1931 and remains in active use.

Skyscrapers have considerable mass, requiring a stronger foundation than a shorter, lighter building. In construction, building materials must be lifted to the top of a skyscraper during construction, requiring more energy than would be necessary at lower heights.

Furthermore, a skyscraper consumes much electricity because potable and non-potable water have to be pumped to the highest occupied floors, skyscrapers are usually designed to be mechanically ventilated, elevators are generally used instead of stairs, and electric lights are needed in rooms far from the windows and windowless spaces such as elevators, bathrooms and stairwells.

Skyscrapers can be artificially lit and the energy requirements can be covered by renewable energy or other electricity generation with low greenhouse gas emissions. Heating and cooling of skyscrapers can be efficient, because of centralized HVAC systems, heat radiation blocking windows and small surface area of the building.

There is Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification for skyscrapers. For example, the Empire State Building received a gold Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design rating in September 2011 and the Empire State Building is the tallest LEED certified building in the United States, proving that skyscrapers can be environmentally friendly.

The 30 St Mary Axe in London, the United Kingdom is another example of an environmentally friendly skyscraper.

In the lower levels of a skyscraper a larger percentage of the building floor area must be devoted to the building structure and services than is required for lower buildings:
  • More structure – because it must be stronger to support more floors above
  • The elevator conundrum creates the need for more lift shafts—everyone comes in at the bottom and they all have to pass through the lower part of the building to get to the upper levels.
  • Building services – power and water enter the building from below and have to pass through the lower levels to get to the upper levels.

In low-rise structures, the support rooms (chillers, transformers, boilers, pumps and air handling units) can be put in basements or roof space—areas which have low rental value.

There is, however, a limit to how far this plant can be located from the area it serves. The farther away it is the larger the risers for ducts and pipes from this plant to the floors they serve and the more floor area these risers take. In practice this means that in highrise buildings this plant is located on 'plant levels' at intervals up the building.

Operational energy:

The building sector accounts for approximately 50% of greenhouse gas emissions, with operational energy accounting for 80-90% of building related energy use. Operational energy use is affected by the magnitude of conduction between the interior and exterior, convection from infiltrating air, and radiation through glazing.

The extent to which these factors affect the operational energy vary depending on the microclimate of the skyscraper, with increased wind speeds as the height of the skyscraper increases, and a decrease in the dry bulb temperature as the altitude increases.

For example, when moving from 1.5 meters to 284 meters, the dry bulb temperature decreased by 1.85oC while the wind speeds increased from 2.46 meters per seconds to 7.75 meters per second, which led to a 2.4% decrease in summer cooling in reference to the Freedom Tower in New York City.

However, for the same building it was found that the annual energy use intensity was 9.26% higher because of the lack of shading at high altitudes which increased the cooling loads for the remainder of the year while a combination of temperature, wind, shading, and the effects of reflections led to a combined 13.13% increase in annual energy use intensity. 

In a study performed by Leung and Ray in 2013, it was found that the average energy use intensity of a structure with between 0 and 9 floors was approximately 80 kBtu/ft/yr, while the energy use intensity of a structure with more than 50 floors was about 117 kBtu/ft/yr.

The slight decrease in energy use intensity over 30-39 floors can be attributed to the fact that the increase in pressure within the heating, cooling, and water distribution systems levels out at a point between 40 and 49 floors and the energy savings due to the microclimate of higher floors are able to be seen. There is a gap in data in which another study looking at the same information but for taller buildings is needed.

Elevators:

A portion of the operational energy increase in tall buildings is related to the usage of elevators because the distance traveled and the speed at which they travel increases as the height of the building increases. Between 5 and 25% of the total energy consumed in a tall building is from the use of elevators. As the height of the building increases it is also more inefficient because of the presence of higher drag and friction losses.

Embodied energy:

The embodied energy associated with the construction of skyscrapers varies based on the materials used. Embodied energy is quantified per unit of material. Skyscrapers inherently have higher embodied energy than low-rise buildings due to the increase in material used as more floors are built. A comparison of the total embodied energy of different floor types and the unit embodied energy per floor type for buildings with between 20 and 70 stories.

For all floor types except for steel-concrete floors, it was found that after 60 stories, there was a decrease in unit embodied energy but when considering all floors, there was exponential growth due to a double dependence on height. The first of which is the relationship between an increase in height leading to an increase in the quantity of materials used, and the second being the increase in height leading to an increase in size of elements to increase the structural capacity of the building.

A careful choice in building materials can likely reduce the embodied energy without reducing the number of floors constructed within the bounds presented.

Embodied carbon:

Similar to embodied energy, the embodied carbon of a building is dependent on the materials chosen for its construction. The total embodied carbon for different structure types for increasing numbers of stories and the embodied carbon per square meter of gross floor area for the same structure types as the number of stories increases.

Both methods of measuring the embodied carbon show that there is a point where the embodied carbon is lowest before increasing again as the height increases. For the total embodied carbon it is dependent on the structure type, but is either around 40 stories, or approximately 60 stories. For the square meter of gross floor area, the lowest embodied carbon was found at either 40 stories, or approximately 70 stories.

Air pollution:

In urban areas, the configuration of buildings can lead to exacerbated wind patterns and an uneven dispersion of pollutants. When the height of buildings surrounding a source of air pollution is increased, the size and occurrence of both "dead-zones" and "hotspots" were increased in areas where there were almost no pollutants and high concentrations of pollutants, respectively.

This progression shows how as the height of Building F increases, the dispersion of pollutants decreases, but the concentration within the building cluster increases. The variation of velocity fields can be affected by the construction of new buildings as well, rather than solely the increase in height as shown in the figure. 

As urban centers continue to expand upward and outward, the present velocity fields will continue to trap polluted air close to the tall buildings within the city. Specifically within major cities, a majority of air pollution is derived from transportation, whether it be cars, trains, planes, or boats.

As urban sprawl continues and pollutants continue to be emitted, the air pollutants will continue to be trapped within these urban centers. Different pollutants can be detrimental to human health in different ways. For example, particulate matter from vehicular exhaust and power generation can cause asthma, bronchitis, and cancer, while nitrogen dioxide from motor engine combustion processes can cause neurological disfunction and asphyxiation.

LEED/green building rating:

Like with all other buildings, if special measures are taken to incorporate sustainable design methods early on in the design process, it is possible to obtain a green building rating, such as a Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification.

An integrated design approach is crucial in making sure that design decisions that positively impact the whole building are made at the beginning of the process. Because of the massive scale of skyscrapers, the decisions made by the design team must take all factors into account, including the buildings impact on the surrounding community, the effect of the building on the direction in which air and water move, and the impact of the construction process, must be taken into account.

There are several design methods that could be employed in the construction of a skyscraper that would take advantage of the height of the building. The microclimates that exist as the height of the building increases can be taken advantage of to increase the natural ventilation, decrease the cooling load, and increase daylighting.

Natural ventilation can be increased by utilizing the stack effect, in which warm air moves upward and increases the movement of the air within the building. If utilizing the stack effect, buildings must take extra care to design for fire separation techniques, as the stack effect can also exacerbate the severity of a fire. 

Skyscrapers are considered to be internally dominated buildings because of their size as well as the fact that a majority are used as some sort of office building with high cooling loads.

Due to the microclimate created at the upper floors with the increased wind speed and the decreased dry bulb temperatures, the cooling load will naturally be reduced because of infiltration through the thermal envelope. By taking advantage of the naturally cooler temperatures at higher altitudes, skyscrapers can reduce their cooling loads passively.

On the other side of this argument, is the lack of shading at higher altitudes by other buildings, so the solar heat gain will be larger for higher floors than for floors at the lower end of the building. Special measures should be taken to shade upper floors from sunlight during the overheated period to ensure thermal comfort without increasing the cooling load.

​History of the tallest skyscrapers:
Main articles: 
At the beginning of the 20th century, New York City was a center for the Beaux-Arts architectural movement, attracting the talents of such great architects as Stanford White and Carrere and Hastings.

As better construction and engineering technology became available as the century progressed, New York City and Chicago became the focal point of the competition for the tallest building in the world.

Each city's striking skyline has been composed of numerous and varied skyscrapers, many of which are icons of 20th-century architecture:
  • The E. V. Haughwout Building in Manhattan was the first building to successfully install a passenger elevator, doing so on 23 March 1857.
  • The Equitable Life Building in Manhattan, was the first office building to feature passenger elevators.
  • The Home Insurance Building in Chicago, which was built in 1884, was the first tall building with a steel skeleton.
  • The Singer Building, an expansion to an existing structure in Lower Manhattan, New York City, was the world's tallest building when completed in 1908. Designed by Ernest Flagg, it was 612 feet (187 m) tall.
  • The Metropolitan Life Insurance Company Tower, across Madison Square Park from the Flatiron Building, was the world's tallest building when completed in 1909. It was designed by the architectural firm of Napoleon LeBrun & Sons and stood 700 feet (210 m) tall.
  • The Woolworth Building, a neo-Gothic "Cathedral of Commerce" overlooking New York City Hall, was designed by Cass Gilbert. At 792 feet (241 m), it became the world's tallest building upon its completion in 1913, an honor it retained until 1930.
  • 40 Wall Street, a 71-story, 927-foot-tall (283 m) neo-Gothic tower designed by H. Craig Severance, was the world's tallest building for a month in May 1930.
  • The Chrysler Building in New York City took the lead in late May 1930 as the tallest building in the world, reaching 1,046 feet (319 m). Designed by William Van Alen, an Art Deco style masterpiece with an exterior crafted of brick, the Chrysler Building continues to be a favorite of New Yorkers to this day.
  • The Empire State Building, nine streets south of the Chrysler in Manhattan, topped out at 1,250 feet (381 m) and 102 stories in 1931. The first building to have more than 100 floors, it was designed by Shreve, Lamb and Harmon in the contemporary Art Deco style and takes its name from the nickname of New York State. The antenna mast added in 1951 brought pinnacle height to 1,472 feet (449 m), lowered in 1984 to 1,454 feet (443 m).
  • The World Trade Center officially surpassed the Empire State Building in 1970, was completed in 1973, and consisted of two tall towers and several smaller buildings. For a short time the first of the two towers was the world's tallest building, until surpassed by the second. Upon completion, the towers stood for 28 years, until the September 11 attacks destroyed the buildings in 2001.
  • The Willis Tower (formerly Sears Tower) was completed in 1974. It was the first building to employ the "bundled tube" structural system, designed by Fazlur Khan. It was surpassed in height by the Petronas Towers in 1998, but remained the tallest in some categories until Burj Khalifa surpassed it in all categories in 2010. It is currently the second tallest building in the United States, after One World Trade Center, which was built to replace the destroyed Trade Towers.

Momentum in setting records passed from the United States to other nations with the opening of the Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in 1998. The record for the world's tallest building has remained in Asia since the opening of Taipei 101 in Taipei, Taiwan, in 2004.

A number of architectural records, including those of the world's tallest building and tallest free-standing structure, moved to the Middle East with the opening of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

This geographical transition is accompanied by a change in approach to skyscraper design.

For much of the 20th century large buildings took the form of simple geometrical shapes. This reflected the "international style" or modernist philosophy shaped by Bauhaus architects early in the century. The last of these, the Willis Tower and World Trade Center towers in New York, erected in the 1970s, reflect the philosophy.

Tastes shifted in the decade which followed, and new skyscrapers began to exhibit postmodernist influences. This approach to design avails itself of historical elements, often adapted and re-interpreted, in creating technologically modern structures. The Petronas

Twin Towers recall Asian pagoda architecture and Islamic geometric principles. Taipei 101 likewise reflects the pagoda tradition as it incorporates ancient motifs such as the ruyi symbol.

The Burj Khalifa draws inspiration from traditional Islamic art. Architects in recent years have sought to create structures that would not appear equally at home if set in any part of the world, but that reflect the culture thriving in the spot where they stand.

The following list measures height of the roof, not the pinnacle. The more common gauge is the "highest architectural detail"; such ranking would have included Petronas Towers, built in 1996:
​Future developments:
See also: 
Proposals for such structures have been put forward, including the Burj Mubarak Al Kabir in Kuwait and Azerbaijan Tower in Baku. Kilometer-plus structures present architectural challenges that may eventually place them in a new architectural category. 

The first building under construction and planned to be over one kilometer tall is the Jeddah Tower.

Wooden skyscrapers:
Main article: List of tallest wooden buildings

Several wooden skyscraper designs have been designed and built. A 14-story housing project in Bergen, Norway known as 'Treet' or 'The Tree' became the world's tallest wooden apartment block when it was completed in late 2015. The Tree's record was eclipsed by Brock Commons, an 18-storey wooden dormitory at the University of British Columbia in Canada, when it was completed in September 2016.

A 40-story residential building 'Trätoppen' has been proposed by architect Anders Berensson to be built in Stockholm, Sweden. Trätoppen would be the tallest building in Stockholm, though there are no immediate plans to begin construction. 

The tallest currently-planned wooden skyscraper is the 70-storey W350 Project in Tokyo, to be built by the Japanese wood products company Sumitomo Forestry Co. to celebrate its 350th anniversary in 2041. 

An 80-story wooden skyscraper, the River Beech Tower, has been proposed by a team including architects Perkins + Will and the University of Cambridge. The River Beech Tower, on the banks of the Chicago River in Chicago, Illinois, would be 348 feet shorter than the W350 Project despite having 10 more stories.

Wooden skyscrapers are estimated to be around a quarter of the weight of an equivalent reinforced-concrete structure as well as reducing the building carbon footprint by 60–75%. Buildings have been designed using cross-laminated timber (CLT) which gives a higher rigidity and strength to wooden structures. CLT panels are prefabricated and can therefore save on building time.

See also:

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