History of architecture

• 1. Introduction

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  The history of architecture begins not with a building but with a nest. All great apes weave bundles of branches together for sleeping, and orangutans build the most complex of these, complete with roofs, blankets, pillows, and what researchers call bunks. Chimpanzees adjust theirs to the weather, adding thicker bedding when it is cool and stronger supports when it is windy or wet. From this animal instinct for shelter, some scholars argue, grew the whole of human creativity in construction. The need was simple. Shelter and protection. What followed was anything but. How did people move from anchoring a tent with sandstone circles to raising stone towers meant to link earth and heaven? Why did entire cities rise on hillsides nine thousand years before the common era? And how did a single concave moulding, or a row of slim columns, come to define the look of whole civilizations? This is the story of how humans learned to build, and why the way they built reveals so much about what they believed.

• 2. Before The First House

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  Adriaan Kortlandt, a Dutch ethologist, once proposed that early hominins ringed their sleeping grounds with thorny bushes to keep predators away. He backed the idea with tests showing that lions grew averse to food placed near thorny branches. The argument fits a long view in which nest-building mattered more to human evolution than tool use, because hominins had to build not just in special circumstances but as a form of signalling. Highly prehensile hands, retained from arboreal ancestors, served expert nest construction. Early hominins like Ardipithecus and Australopithecus kept such features and may have built nests in trees where they could. The development of a home base around two million years ago may have encouraged the building of shelters and protected caches. Yet many early hominins likely still slept in open conditions, unless a rock shelter offered itself. Those shelters could be used almost as found, with little more added than a nest and a hearth. Later, established bases were personalized, with rock art at Lascaux or with the structures the Neanderthals built inside the Bruniquel Cave. Because such shelters were perishable, physical proof is scarce beyond hearths and foundation stones. In 2000, archaeologists at Meiji University in Tokyo claimed to have found two pentagonal alignments of post holes near the village of Chichibu, reading them as huts around 500,000 years old built by Homo erectus.

• 3. Anchored In Stone And Bone

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  Terra Amata, in France, holds the earliest confirmed purpose-built structures, dated to about 400,000 years ago, alongside the earliest evidence of artificial fire. Where materials survived, the record grows richer. Near Wadi Halfa in Sudan, the Arkin 8 site preserves circles of sandstone roughly 100,000 years old, likely the anchor stones for tents. In eastern Jordan, post hole markings in the soil point to houses of poles and thatched brush around 20,000 years ago. Mammoth bone proved especially durable as a building material. The Mal'ta-Buret' culture raised mammoth-bone dwellings between 24,000 and 15,000 years ago, and similar structures stood at Mezhirich around 15,000 years ago. At Mezhirich, engraved mammoth tusks may have formed the facade of a dwelling, a sign that the buildings of the Upper Paleolithic increasingly carried aesthetic intent. That impulse to decorate a home would deepen once people stopped moving.

• 4. When Farming Built Cities

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  The Neolithic period, roughly 10,000 to 2000 BC, brought some of the major innovations of human history, and architecture sat near the center of them. The domestication of plants and animals reshaped economies and the relationship between people and the world. Communities grew larger and more permanent, material culture expanded, and new social and ritual solutions let people live together at a new scale. New kinds of individual structures, and the way they combined into settlements, supplied the buildings this life required. Neolithic cultures appear in the Levant soon after 10,000 BC, then spread east and west, reaching southeast Europe by 7000 BC and Central Europe by about 5500 BC. The roll call of early settlements is striking. Göbekli Tepe in Turkey around 9000 BC. Jericho, Neolithic from around 8350 BC. Çatalhöyük around 7500 BC. Mehrgarh in Pakistan around 7000 BC. Skara Brae in the Orkney Islands of Scotland from 3500 BC. Most remarkable of all, more than 3,000 settlements of the Cucuteni-Trypillian culture flourished across present-day Romania, Moldova, and Ukraine from 5400 to 2800 BC, some with populations up to 15,000 residents.

• 5. Mountains Made By Hand

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  The word ziggurat is an anglicized form of the Akkadian ziqqurratum, drawn from the verb zaqaru, meaning to be high. These solid stepped towers of mud brick were described as mountains linking earth and heaven, raised to lift a temple to a commanding position over a flat river valley. The Ziggurat of Ur, excavated by Leonard Woolley, measures 64 by 46 meters at its base and stood originally some 12 meters high across three stories. It was built under Ur-Nammu around 2100 BC and rebuilt under Nabonidus between 555 and 539 BC, when its height was raised to probably seven stories. Mesopotamian builders favored mud brick, and Assyrian palaces followed a traditional plan with a large public court, apartments on the east, and banqueting halls on the south, all adorned for the glorification of the king. Ivory furniture filled some of these palaces. The great city of Uruk held religious precincts with temples larger and more ambitious than any buildings known before them. Egypt answered with stone. Around 3100 BC, at the dawn of the pharaonic state, formal styles took shape, and the dead drove the design. Egyptians believed the soul, the ka, needed an intact body to live forever, so the mastaba was born, an adobe structure with a flat roof and underground rooms for the coffin about 30 meters down. Imhotep, a priest and architect, stacked five mastabas to build the first Egyptian pyramid, the step Pyramid of Djoser at Saqqara. Sneferu raised the first smooth-sided pyramid, and his son Khufu the Great Pyramid of Giza, the last surviving wonder of the ancient world.

• 6. The Grammar Of Columns

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  By the 4th century BC, Greek architects and stonemasons had settled a system of rules for all buildings, the orders, recognized most easily by their columns. The Doric column is stout and basic. The Ionic is slimmer, with four scrolls called volutes at the corners of its capital. The Corinthian shares the Ionic form but crowns its capital with acanthus leaves. The friezes differed too, the Doric carrying metopes and triglyphs with guttae, the Ionic and Corinthian running one continuous band of relief. From about 850 BC to about 300 AD, Greek culture flourished on the mainland, the Peloponnese, and the Aegean islands, and its temples became its signature, the Parthenon foremost among them. The Romans inherited this grammar and added to it. They invented the Tuscan order, with un-fluted columns and a simpler entablature, and the Composite, which fused Ionic volutes with Corinthian acanthus. Between 30 and 15 BC, the architect and engineer Marcus Vitruvius Pollio published De architectura, the only architectural treatise to survive from antiquity, regarded since the Renaissance as the first book on architectural theory. Rome also gave the world the dome and the rounded stone arch. The Pantheon remains the largest surviving Roman dome, pierced by a great oculus at its center, and the Colosseum could hold around 50,000 spectators. A persistent modern assumption holds that these ancient buildings were monochrome grey stone. They were not. The Parthenon carried details painted in vibrant reds, blues, and greens, and medieval cathedrals kept colored highlights on capitals and columns. The Renaissance abandoned the practice, because Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo took their palette from Greco-Roman ruins that neglect had bleached white over centuries of weathering.

• 7. Sacred Forms Across Continents

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  Mount Meru, the sacred five-peaked mountain of Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist doctrine, shaped temple design from India to Cambodia. By the 6th or 7th centuries, Hindu temples in the Indian subcontinent had grown into towering brick or stone structures meant to symbolize that mountain, with their guidelines preserved in Sanskrit texts like the Vastu shastras and the Brihat Samhita. The Khmer kings, who ruled a Hindu-Buddhist empire from the early 9th century to the early 15th, built east-facing stone temples at Angkor in present-day Cambodia, many in pyramidal tiered form with five towers, or prasats, evoking the same peaks. Buddhism carried its own forms outward. The stupa, a domed structure containing relics whose dome symbolized the infinite sky, developed in the Indian subcontinent between the 4th and 2nd centuries BC and spread to China, where it became the pagoda, or ta. When Buddhism reached its Chinese peak from the 6th to the 8th centuries, more than 4,600 official and 40,000 unofficial monasteries were built. The faith reached Japan in the mid 6th century by way of the Korean kingdom of Paekche, and by the end of that century Japan was raising Continental-style monasteries such as Horyu-ji at Ikaruga. Japanese building rarely used stone except in foundations, favoring wood and sliding doors called fusuma in place of walls, so interiors could be reshaped at will. Across the Pacific, Nan Madol in the Federated States of Micronesia served as the seat of the Saudeleur Dynasty, which united Pohnpei's estimated 25,000 people until about 1628. Its distinctive megalithic construction began around 1180 to 1200 AD. Africa built in its own registers, from the rock-hewn churches of Lalibela, eleven monolithic churches carved from red volcanic tuff, to the stone settlements of Great Zimbabwe and Khami. Ibn Battuta, visiting Mogadishu in the early 14th century, called it a town endless in size.

• 8. Light, Power, And Illusion

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  Abbot Suger, rebuilding the west front and choir of the Basilica of St Denis from around 1135, complained in his De Administratione that the old church could no longer hold the pilgrims coming to venerate its relics. His solution helped launch Gothic architecture. He inserted a row of slim columns between radiating chapels and the choir arcade, doing away with the dividing walls, so visitors could circle the altar and reach the relics without disrupting it. Suger wanted stained glass not for daylight but for a continuous ray of colored light that would make the wall seem to vanish, and the demand for ever more of it runs through the whole Gothic movement. Earlier medieval builders had worked in heavier registers. Romanesque cathedrals, built from the 10th to 12th centuries, leaned on thick piers, columns, and round arches, since the round arch needed massive support, unlike the pointed Gothic arch that followed. The term itself was coined in the 19th century by critics who judged the style a derivative echo of Rome, though 21st-century scholars now read its profusion of experimental forms as creative invention rather than failure. The Renaissance turned back to antiquity deliberately. The period began around 1452, when Leon Battista Alberti completed his treatise De Re Aedificatoria after studying the ancient ruins of Rome and Vitruvius. Architects flocked to Rome to draw the Colosseum and the Pantheon, sometimes filling gaps by imagination, as Francesco di Giorgio admitted when he noted a reconstruction was largely imagined by me, since very little can be understood from the ruins. The Medici banking family funded much of this work. Then the Baroque, born in the painting studios of Bologna and Rome in the 1580s and 1590s, made everything higher, grander, and more dramatic, the first truly global style in the arts. Walls and facades curved for the first time, as at San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane in Rome. Painted ceilings used quadratura to draw the eye upward into illusory heavens crowded with angels, and light streamed from cupolas onto abundant gilding. Its lighter heir, the Rococo, took its name from the French rocaille, the shell-covered rock-work whose scallop motif echoed through rooms grown smaller and more intimate, where designers loved mirrors, the more the better, as in the Hall of Mirrors of the Amalienburg in Munich by Johann Baptist Zimmermann.