In the archaeological abundance provided by the ancient city of Thessaloniki, the greatest attention is paid to the objects from the ancient and Byzantine era, which are clearly marked on the ground, on maps and in tourist manuals.
Of course, this is always the case, buildings intended for the social elite attract the most attention. In China, these are magnificent palaces and temples built for members of the political, ideological and economic elite of that great country.
In recent years, Skopje’s architecture has been spoken of mostly pejoratively, primarily in light of the controversial buildings and monuments that, under the decisive influence of politics, are being erected on both sides of the river around Macedonia Square.
A few minutes’ walk from the Eiffel Tower, in the prestigious seventh arrondissement of the city of Paris, where, according to tradition, the homes of members of the French nobility and high bourgeoisie are located, Avenue Rapp stretches out in all its proud beauty.
At the turn of the twentieth century, the age-old Ottoman Empire was collapsing. Life was dangerous in all remote areas, on side roads and remote villages, but in Macedonia the situation was simply unbearable.
After a humiliating defeat in the Opium War, the Chinese Empire, until then frozen in the past, got a new chance. Chinese ports are open for trade with the world, and in strategic places, locations have been designated for the settlement of foreign entrepreneurs, so-called “concessions”, for which a special legal system will apply.
In one of the most fashionable districts of Paris, in the 16th arrondissement, not far from the picturesque Avenue Mozart, there is a small, dead-end street that exudes the atmosphere of refined charm of the interwar Parisian artistic elite.
Until the middle of the sixteenth century, Madrid was a boring, provincial Castilian town, with barely twenty thousand inhabitants, whose main problem was how to kill time. The only political activity in the city was the occasional session of the Cortes, a traveling royal court and parliament, which would sometimes visit there, but whose decisions and pompous proclamations had no real impact on royal politics anyway.
Many architects think they know how to design a futuristic house, a space age house, a residence for cosmonauts, high tech rich people or James Bond. According to a widespread understanding, such a house should, in at least one part, have a circular or oval base, glass walls, large interior spaces, very little furniture, and it should be dominated by structural elements of unusual curved lines.
In one of the most interesting locations in the world, in the old city center of Istanbul, on the coast of the Golden Horn, there is a city quarter called Fanar in Greek, and Fener in Turks.
Case Study House Program In January 1945, when the imminent end of the war was evident, the California magazine Art & Architecture, devoted to modern art, design and architecture, launched its most ambitious project, called the Case Study House Program.
The valleys of the Rhine and Moselle rivers have a special place in the obsession with medieval castles. It is interesting that this “Rhine romanticism”, admiration for the charm of the ruined castles of the area, first caught the upper social classes in England, and only a little later this obsession spread among the common people in Germany, where it became the forerunner of the ill-fated German national romanticism.
