Old & New
Distinctive change between old architecture and with what we have in the present.
There is really obvious change on the old architecture design with what we have now in the present. Let’s us all start with the olden days first. To identify the change, we actually need to look into a lot of aspects rather than just technologies. I mean yes, technologies does play a major role in this distinctive change.
In the olden days, buildings were built to fulfil human’s basic living needs, such as shelter for different climate, religious and daily human activities. After fulfilling all the requirements, people started on how they can make the buildings look grand and powerful to show their social status.
Due to limited building materials and technologies, the people in the past uses what they can find in their surrounding environment and gradually invent new building materials like muds and bricks to achieve desire strength of the building. It is very impressed on how people in the olden days plays with materials and the limited construction techniques they had to design their buildings.
Malay house architecture to allow ventilation, rain fall and avoid floods.
For example, in South East Asia, the buildings in the olden days uses wood and rattan that existed in their surroundings to build their houses. Then, they will start to think how to design the house to adapt with the nature and climate. After the basic requirements, they will start to apply art and craft on their houses to show their culture.
How Parthenon would look like in the ancient Greece.
Buildings in the ancient time is more focused on the size of the building to define their social status, power and religion.
Same goes to the building in the ancient Rome, Greece and Egypt, where ornamentation is very important for different purposes and function of the buildings. With no advance technologies like mass production, it is impressive to see the people from the past making ornamentation that is very detailed all by hand. In the ancient Rome, different god and goddess has different ornamentation to be crafted on the building to portray their sincerity and also their country’s status. The design approach in the old architecture is more of “Space follow function” and “More is better”.
When comes to our present days, architecture approach have all changed as technologies has become so important to every one of us. Communication and transportation is no longer a huge issue to us anymore. Knowledge and information can be shared throughout the world at instant. The architecture design no longer need to consider about the climate and geography but technologies.
In this modern days, people seems to be more expressive rather than practical. The architecture designs often being either very dramatic or very simple where “Less is more”. For example, I think post modernism is something what some of the architects in this era will plays with. Postmodernism architecture is what that prove best that people have become more expressive with playing with very dramatic design despite is practicality of the building. Things started to become more focusing on brandings not only architecture.
Heydar Aliyev Center by Zaha Hadid
In this modern era, architecture approach has become very interesting where practically we can build whatever we want. The style has become more modernise and even futuristic. I think the best to portray the understanding of futuristic and organic design will be Zaha Hadid and the BIG. Buildings is becoming more iconic to make the place stands out and attract crowd. The forms is more important than the function. The designs are to be simple, clean but still dramatic to impress people.
In the olden days, people creativity design their building and as time passed, some building brings a lot of important historical values. It is now the architects in this present time start to decide to repair or replace. I think it is also one of the architecture approach in today that people tries to save historical buildings by repair and reuse them for other purpose. We learn to adapt to the existing environment and transform them into something new. This doesn’t only save the history recorded on the buildings but also the cost of demolish and building a new building.
Laurent Kronental's Souvenir d'un Futur photos show Paris' forgotten monumental housing estates
I came acrossed this work done by Laurent Kronental on the forgotten utopia city in Paris. iI was seriously shocked looking what what people in the olden days built. Such monumental and dramatically designs. This housing estate was built after World War II to accommodate an increasing population of rural migrants and immigrants. Now, because the young generation has moved to live in the modern cities, now this place is left with mostly old people. If the government ever to develope the area, I do hope they could think of repair and reuse some of the amazing buildings.
Overall, to me, the distinctive change between the old architecture designs with our existing ones is the advanced technology. We can challenge ourselves more on the shapes of the buildings and building materials and doesn’t really need to think about the climate, function of spaces, constructions as it can be solved easily with technologies. We doesn’t really think about using buildings to represent our social status. Rather, we uses things like phones, clothing, shoes, cars, lands, and other living quality to show our social status.
