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<\/a><\/p>\nTowers of concrete, steel and glass. We mourn for the traditional architectures of yesteryear, without realizing why.<\/p>\n
Why are these buildings the same everywhere?<\/p>\n
And why were they so different before? Is it just a matter of globalization, or is there something more?<\/p>\n Here\u2019s a little known fact: A lot of the world\u2019s architecture was the consequence of geography.<\/p>\n In some cases, it\u2019s easy to see, such as steep roofs in places with heavy snowfall.<\/p>\n But the depth of the influence of geography is hard to grasp. So today, we\u2019re going to take a trip across different world architectures to see how geography influenced them: Egypt, Ancient Greece, India, China, Japan, and Britain. As we do, we\u2019re not just going to learn why things are the way they are, we\u2019re also going to understand what elements we could bring back to our architectural styles today.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s a map of Britain\u2019s soils, along with some of its most notable architecture.<\/p>\n The island\u2019s geology changes strikingly, from oldest in the north to youngest in the south. Every type of stone gave birth to a different type of architecture.<\/p>\n Aberdeen is famous for its dark granite. We can also find granite in southwest England around Dartmoor, and sure enough, there, homes tend to be made of granite. Edinburgh has sandstone, evident in its sand-colored buildings. Golden limestone is common around Bristol, and old country houses are golden as a result. The soil in the surroundings of London is the result of sediment accumulation, so there\u2019s much less stone to go around. But there\u2019s clay, which can be made into bricks. Sure enough, London is full of brick buildings. The chalk in South and East England is too brittle for walls, but use timber frames, fill the wall with twigs, wet soil and straw, and then whitewash it with a solution made with chalk, and these homes can last centuries if well maintained. For the roof, use thatch.<\/p>\n Once the Industrial Revolution was in full swing, the cheapness of canal and train transportation meant bricks for walls and Welsh slate for roofs could be used everywhere, so they were.<\/p>\n So stone is important. But it\u2019s not all-encompassing. What else matters? Let\u2019s travel far back in time to Ancient Egypt to figure this out.<\/p>\n What do these have in common?<\/p>\n Big monuments<\/p>\n Bold geometric lines<\/p>\n Light brown color<\/p>\n Lots of rows of things, notably columns<\/p>\n For temples and tombs<\/p>\n Why?<\/p>\n The Egyptian government always had massive power because<\/a> it controlled the Nile and knew how much food it would grow, so it could tax it precisely. The farmers couldn\u2019t escape because the country is surrounded by desert and sea. So the government was extremely powerful and had lots of resources at its disposal.<\/p>\n If you want to project power, the best way to do that is to build big things.<\/p>\n But building technology is not very advanced. If you make a big column of stuff, it falls. How do you build a huge thing so that it doesn\u2019t break and fall apart? You pile matter into a mountain.<\/p>\n Stacked mass is the simplest way to create stable height. That\u2019s why we find it across the world, not just in Egypt.<\/p>\n Stacked mass has another benefit: If you can make an indoor space inside, It protects you from temperature swings because of the thermal mass stored in the stone\/dirt.<\/p>\n But these spaces must be small: All that mass risks collapsing on you. As a result, no grand indoor halls, only small rooms.<\/p>\n With flat roofs, because why would you slant them? It\u2019s difficult and expensive, and unnecessary in places with little rain like in Egypt.<\/p>\n The rooms you do have need plenty of columns to support them.<\/p>\n But you want to make lots of big columns, so everybody knows you\u2019re such a powerful ruler! So you\u2019re going to use your millions of minions to build many rows of these columns. Except how do you coordinate these minions? You need to standardize. Most columns, or rows of stuff, need to be as similar as possible.<\/p>\n You haven\u2019t learned yet how to do arches well, so the moment your windows are too big, your walls fall. So small windows.<\/p>\n Notice how it\u2019s also very axial: Lots of these buildings are constructed along a main line (axis).<\/p>\n Axial architecture is meant to wow you as you arrive and follow the line towards the entrance. These structures tend to be organized along cosmic lines, like cardinal directions, solstices, etc.<\/p>\n If you\u2019re aligned with the stars, your architecture is cosmic, it has meaning tied to the sun, the moon and the stars, so you as a ruler surely must be cosmically ordained.<\/p>\n Since you have constructed lots of big buildings and columns, you now have all these surfaces. What can you do with them? Maybe depict your grandiosity and how cozy you are with the gods. And since you have plenty of money and workers available, you can arrange this:<\/p>\n Notice how there\u2019s plenty of carving? Stone is normally hard to carve. But not all stone. Most Egyptian architecture is made of limestone and sandstone, which is relatively soft.<\/p>\n Why? It\u2019s what Egypt had available. Carrying big blocks of stone is not easy, so Egyptians mostly quarried them close to the Nile and used the river to transport them.<\/p>\n And Egypt used to be a shallow ocean\u2014Tethys<\/a>. This is why today it has some of the biggest depressions on Earth, enough to make them into seas again<\/a>.<\/p>\n As a shallow seabed, it teemed with life, so its floor got covered by those sediments: shells. As they compressed, they became limestone. As sand compressed, it became sandstone. They are both a similar white-brownish color.<\/p>\n Both are easy to work with copper tools<\/a>, and hold up well when compressed, so they\u2019re ideal to cut and stack as blocks to form shapes. Which is why Egyptian blocks are so geometrically accurate, unlike those in Mycenae:<\/p>\n The grandiosity, the connection with the seasons and the cosmos\u2026 all of this fits well with the Ancient Egyptian mindset\u2014a civilization that lasted thousands of years with very little change, because the geography is so stable:<\/p>\n The Nile\u2019s annual flooding, which was measurable, cyclical, drove all work, and generated the most wealth (and the food needed to survive!)<\/p>\n Isolated from other civilizations through desert and sea<\/p>\n Strong governmental control because it\u2019s so easy to tax the Nile\u2019s production, so state stability<\/p>\n And that\u2019s how you get the Egyptian Aesthetic:<\/p>\n Mostly limestone and sandstone, and their ochre colors<\/p>\n Their tech was ideal for compression, not spanning, so no windows, no big indoor spaces<\/p>\n But lots of resources, so just pile up stuff and create many of the same thing<\/p>\n Focus it all on your grandiosity: big piles of stuff, long lines of columns\/decorations, all along a strong, impressive line, aligned with the cosmos to create a sense of godlike legitimacy<\/p>\n Flat roofs: just protect against the Sun and its heat, not rain<\/p>\n Market yourself through messaging on the walls, mostly through carving, adding color when possible<\/p>\n It all fits the philosophy of the place: not dynamism, progress, or experimentation, but permanence, continuity, and repetition.<\/p>\n Share<\/a><\/p>\n While Egypt is flat and desertic, on the other side of the Mediterranean, Greece is extremely mountainous.<\/p>\n This is because Africa subsided for a long time below Eurasia, and pushed the mountains up on the European and Asian side.<\/a><\/p>\n With so many mountains, Greece has abundant workable stone, including limestone, but also another type that was uncommon in Egypt\u2014marble.<\/p>\n Marble starts as limestone: shells and tiny marine organisms that are compressed together, with other particles that cement them and some void that forms between them. That makes it easy to carve, but you can\u2019t use too much detail or your edges will round or chip.<\/p>\n When limestone goes deeper down inside the Earth, it gets more compressed and heated. These particles fuse into interlocked crystals. These are much harder to separate, so the stone is harder and breaks more cleanly, as crystals remain together. You can polish these crystals into a very smooth surface, and their varying angles will scatter light in different directions, making the stone shiny and luminous.<\/p>\n Naturally, the Greeks played with the ability to finely shape the marble and with its light. For example, notice the vertical lines on these columns? They\u2019re called flutes.<\/p>\n In hard Mediterranean light, small changes in depth create strong shadows. Since the flutes surround the columns, the sun will hit different flutes differently, creating different shadows. Together, all these alternating lights and shadow lights give a sense of vertical elegance to the temples, multiplying the effect of the columns themselves.<\/p>\n Marble allows you to play with light and shadow much more than other types of stone.<\/p>\n Columns shouldn\u2019t be perfectly straight, though, because the base carries more weight than the top, and the center tends to bulge because it\u2019s not as supported as the top of the bottom, so the Greeks used entasis<\/a>:<\/p>\n Notice the pediment, the triangular shape on top of the columns three pictures back? Why triangular? Because it had to hold a slanted roof to evacuate rain\u2014something that was not needed in Egypt because it basically never rains there, given the difference in latitudes.<\/p>\n Thankfully, Greece also has access to plenty of clay that could be fired for roof tiles, something that temples had at the time, which many people don\u2019t realize because roofs crumble more than columns, so most Greek architecture doesn\u2019t show them anymore.<\/p>\n You need something to support that roof and pediment\u2014the lintel<\/a>, that horizontal beam that spans across columns.<\/p>\n And since we\u2019re in the mountains here in Greece, the ground is uneven, so you need to place your temple on top of a platform to even it out, the stepped platform.<\/p>\n We have now rebuilt from first principles the most iconic aspects of Greek architecture.<\/p>\n Notice another detail about this type of architecture:<\/p>\n Marble can be cut with extreme precision. When two marble blocks are perfectly dressed, the contact surface is large, the friction is high, and compression loads transfer cleanly, preventing blocks from sliding.<\/p>\n Stonemasons realized they could make do without cement, which added a paste that was less elegant, uneven, and was actually bad for earthquakes\u2014of which there are a fair amount in the region, if you recall the tectonics. With sufficient precision, dry contact is stronger than cement.<\/p>\n You can\u2019t just pile blocks and hope they don\u2019t move at all, though, especially during earthquakes, so masons carved a hole in the blocks and placed iron clamps to hold them together.<\/p>\n The post-and-lintel structure (columns with a beam on top of them) doesn\u2019t allow for big indoor spaces, so these temples were not designed to hold lots of people, just the statue of the temple\u2019s god and a few other artifacts.<\/p>\n As a result, congregations happened outdoors. Altars were in front of the temples, and that\u2019s where animal sacrifices were held.<\/p>\n Why have a temple at all then? First, because it provided shade on hot days and cover on rainy days. Second, it was a way to convey wealth and success. This meant that the external appearance of the temple was more important than the inside. Hence the flutes and the entasis, and also all other kinds of decorations.<\/p>\n Early on, the style of column tops was pretty basic (Doric), but as time went by, the Greeks explored ways to decorate them further without jeopardizing temple integrity. With the Ionic, and later Corinthian styles, they achieved thinner columns and added more flutes and decorations. The same was true of the friezes<\/a> above the columns.<\/p>\n These styles evolved relatively fast, because architecture was one of the ways to compete with other Greek city-states, and there were many.<\/p>\n With so many mountains, Greece couldn\u2019t connect overland easily, and ended up with lots of small valleys developing semi-independent cities<\/a> in each.<\/p>\n You can see some of them if you zoom in on the region:<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a>Mountain architecture includes steep roofs in areas with heavy snowfall, so that the snow doesn\u2019t stay on the roof, adding weight and humidity and destroying it. Source<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a>Piles of stuff. This is why pyramids are so common across the world\u2019s history. Not because of aliens.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a>They have another advantage: Wind can circulate through columns<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a>Why waste a precious wall when you can fill it with marketing messages?<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a>There are many limestones and sandstones. Here are just two examples to give you a sense. Source<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/a>Cyclopean masonry, backside of the Lion Gate, Mycenae, Greece<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a>A gentle slope between the center of the column and the top made the columns stronger but also more elegant.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a>https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=lUbGem5-pMY<\/p>\n<\/a>A temple with an altar at the front. Probably not the Parthenon, since its front was paved with marble<\/p>\n<\/a>Greek capitals (the name given to the tops of columns). Source<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n