[Architecture] Greatest architectural achievements from the past

Nice post, rimrocker. I was completely unaware

 

the great wall. (other)

 

didnt the whole christian thing start in ethiopia?

 

Great engineering is not nescessarily great architecture.

The Great Wall, Stonehenge, the Roman Aqueducts, The Pyramids etc. are great engineering because of the scope of their construction and the solutions to the problems in building them, but Architecture is a mix of structural engineering and art.

 

It's impossible to evaluate objectively and then rank the listed "greatest architectural achievements from the past" if one has not visited them all in person. Then again, I guess a poll like this is not meant to be objective.

Most Chinese can hardly allude to the Forbidden City (aka Forbidden Palace in the poll) without the melancholy feeling over the loss of their Old Summer Palace, which was burned to ground by the British-French invasion force during the Second Opium War in 1860, and any subsequent restoration works of which by the imperial Chinese Manchu court were completely destroyed by the allied Western expeditionary forces in the supressing of the Boxer Uprising in 1901.

The Old Summer Palace, also known as the Imperial Gardens, was mostly built in the 18th century during the Qing Dynasty under Emperor Qianlong and it was several times the size of the Forbidden City. A patron of arts, Emperor Qianlong ordered to build a vast compound of halls, pavilions, temples, lakes, galleries, and gardens that showcased the quintessential Chinese arts and culture. Several famous landscapes of southern China were reproduced in the Imperial Gardens, hundreds of invaluable Chinese art masterpieces and antiquities were stored in the halls. There were also a few buildings in Tibetan and Mongol styles, reflecting the diversity of the Qing Empire.

To satisfy his taste for exotic buildings and objects, Qianlong also commissioned Jesuits Giuseppe Castiglione and Michel Benoist to build scores of European-style structures in a small section of the Imperial Gardens. It was essentially the largest museums in the world at the time. Today, only the ruins of Euporean palaces are remaining at the site of Old Summer Palace, mainly because the stones making up these structures survived the intense blazes during the foreign destructions.

In my opinion, although cited for their historical significance and engineering feat, both the Great Wall and the Pyramids are more of the landmarks of mounds of stone whose architectural aesthetics pales in comparison to other notable architectural works.

 

Tell that to the aliens that used Stonehendge as a landing/launch pad.

 

So hard for me to do - akin to asking me who my favorite artist is. I suppose I would go with the Pantheon because it was technologically innovative and groundbreaking AND it became an aesthetic nebchmark for architecture through the Renaissance, Baroque, Neo-Classical (DC architecture is nothing if not an homage), and today.

Additionally, innovative and beatitful accents adorn the interior and suggest that it truly was a magical experience in there with candlelight under a clear night sky.

Ugh.

 

Stonehenge, where the demons dwell
Where the banshees live and they do live well
Stonehenge
Where a man is a man and the children dance to
the pipes of pan
Stonehenge
Tis a magic place where the moon doth rise
With a dragon's face
Stonehenge
Where the virgins lie
And the prayer of devils fill the midnight sky

And you my love, won't you take my hand
We'll go back in time to that mystic land
Where the dew drops cry and the cats meow
I will take you there
I will show you how

 

I'll have to watch it soon.

 

I love Palace of Versailles. One of the few places I want to see in my lifetime.

Has anyone else been there or seen it up close and personal?

 

i've been to versailles. the gardens are definitely beautiful. and friggin' huge. i might be remembering it wrong but that cool picture is just the inifital walk from the palace and just the start of the cross-shaped pool. we walked a long, long way down that pool, and we stopped once we got to the cross part (b/c we didn't wanna walk all the way down and around the arms). and the part we walked was the short part of the cross. i wanna say i counted 600+ steps to get down the short part of the pool. the gardens are great to walk around in and, while it wasn't as great as some other palaces and you went through it pretty quick, the palace was still very ornately decorated and full of stuff to look at. definitely a recommended visit.

i don't know if it's considered that architecturally beautiful (i think it's kind of a mix of things), but i'd mention St. Peter's Basilica for shear awe factor. i mean you just can't believe how big it is until you are inside. there are all sorts of little niches filled with statues, there's the big altar monument under the dome, the dome itself is enormous and beautiful. it seemed so clean and well done, and, like i said, i just couldn't get over the size. i actually went to it twice i was so impressed. also, it looks great from the outside, and St. Peter's square has all sorts of statues and obelisks and fountains and such. overall, probably my favorite thing i saw in europe, though the duomo in milan, notre dame, versailles, and the champs-elysees were great as well.


as for the list suggested, i've only seen pictures of everything but the pantheon, but the taj mahal has always stood out to me. it just looks so perfect. so from the list, that's what i voted for.

 

No, but seriously...for me, it has to be the Duomo in Milan, Italy. It was built in the 1300's and has something like 500 statues all over its exterior. On clear days, you can get great views of the Alps from the rooftop.

 

now i remember what pissed me off about the duomo in milan, they had freakin' scaffolding all on the front of the thing. we had to go look at post cards they were selling by it to see what it really looked like. not that the inside wasn't really great, but the front is what you want to see. oh well, the rest of milan was great. even the part where i had to pay about $13 to look at The Last Supper for 15 minutes.

 

I'm in my second year of grad school for architecture and my favorite thing I saw in my Arch history class was the Moorish Alhambra in Granada, Spain.

 

Petra

 

That's the first thing I thought of, too. It's not pretty too look at, and it's not complicated. However, I just don't really see how it was done. They've said each block ways like how much? I know it's a ton. I heard a theory about it once saying aliens were involved or something. ha.... who knows.