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Article

Architecture and the automobile  

Robert Buerglener

[motor car]

Architecture and the automobile have been intimately connected since the late 19th century. The attributes of cars required specific architectural solutions for manufacture, sales, and service. On a broader level, the overall built environment was forever changed by roadside structures designed to meet the needs of drivers.

Automobile factories evolved in tandem with mass production; modular form and open floor spaces provided flexibility in machine placement and possibilities for expansion as production needs changed. Detroit-based architect Albert Kahn, with his associate Ernest Wilby (1868–1957), set a new standard for 20th-century industrial buildings through innovative use of space and materials. For the Packard Company’s Building Number Ten (Detroit, 1905; enlarged 1909), Kahn used reinforced concrete to create modular bays, repeatable horizontally and vertically, with wide interior spans and large window surfaces. For Ford’s Highland Park factory (begun 1909; see fig.), Kahn designed a multi-building complex of reinforced concrete and steel-framed buildings that housed machinery strategically in the sequence of production. In Ford’s River Rouge manufacturing complex in Dearborn, MI (...

Article

Bazaar  

Mohammad Gharipour

Bazaar, which is rooted in Middle Persian wāzār and Armenian vačaṟ, has acquired three different meanings: the market as a whole, a market day, and the marketplace. The bazaar as a place is an assemblage of workshops and stores where various goods and services are offered.

Primitive forms of shops and trade centres existed in early civilizations in the Near East, such as Sialk, Tepe in Kashan, Çatal Hüyük, Jerico, and Susa. After the 4th millennium BC, the population grew and villages gradually joined together to shape new cities, resulting in trade even with the remote areas as well as the acceleration of the population in towns. The advancement of trade and accumulation of wealth necessitated the creation of trade centres. Trade, and consequently marketplaces, worked as the main driving force in connecting separate civilizations, while fostering a division of labour, the diffusion of technological innovations, methods of intercultural communication, political and economic management, and techniques of farming and industrial production....

Article

Bell, Gertrude  

Stephen Hill

(Margaret Lowthian)

(b Washington, Co. Durham, July 14, 1868; d Baghdad, 11/July 12, 1926).

English archaeologist and architectural historian. The first woman to achieve a first-class honours in modern history at Oxford University, she travelled widely in Europe, Japan and especially the Middle East in the 1890s, achieving fluency in a number of European languages as well as in Persian, Turkish and Arabic. She developed an interest in archaeology and architecture that was reflected in an authoritative set of articles on the Early Byzantine churches of Syria and southern Turkey, based on her travels in 1905. Her first major travel book, The Desert and the Sown, contains a mixture of travellers’ tales and archaeological information, as does her Amurath to Amurath. Between 1905 and 1914 she made archaeological studies of the Early Byzantine and Early Islamic monuments of Turkey, Syria and Mesopotamia (now Iraq). In 1905 and 1907 she surveyed Binbirkilise with Sir William Ramsay; their book, The Thousand and One Churches, remains the authoritative account of this important site. The architectural recording by survey and photography at Binbirkilise was carried out by Bell and is a lasting monument in its own right. Bell’s interest in Anatolia was inspired by Josef Strzygowski and his book ...

Article

Bellocq, E(rnest) J(ames)  

Amy Rule

(b New Orleans, LA, March 15, 1873; d New Orleans, 1949).

American photographer. Bellocq is known to have worked as a commercial photographer in New Orleans from 1895 to 1940 and to have photographed for local shipbuilders and in the Chinese sector of New Orleans, although none of this work apparently survives. His photography is known only through prints made by Lee Friedlander from the 89 gelatin dry plate negatives found after Bellocq’s death. These negatives date from c. 1912 and are sympathetic portraits of prostitutes of New Orleans and interior views of their workplaces. Known as the Storyville Portraits, 34 were shown by MOMA, New York, in a travelling exhibition in 1970–71. Bellocq’s life was the subject of Pretty Baby (1978), a film by Louis Malle.

E. J. Bellocq: Storyville Portraits: Photographs from the New Orleans Red-light District, circa 1912 (exh. cat. by J. Szarkowski and L. Friedlander, New York, MOMA, 1970)G. Badger: ‘Viewed’, British Journal of Photography...

Article

Belogrud, Andrey  

Catherine Cooke

(Yevgen’yevich)

(b Zhitomir, 1875; d Gatchina, July 19, 1933).

Russian architect and teacher. After early training in Pskov, he studied (1901–10) at the Academy of Arts, St Petersburg, latterly in the studio of Leonty Benois. After a year in Odessa he was commissioned in 1911 by the developer Konstantin Rozenshtein to execute façades for residential buildings on the fashionable Bol’shoy Prospect (Petrograd Side), St Petersburg. His treatments at nos 77 (1912–13) and 75 (1913–15) are respectively Gothic and Renaissance classical in their detailing. These, and his elevations in freer classical mode for Gontskevich’s building (1912–15) at no. 102 of the same street, derive their strong identity from the grotesque treatment of stylistic detail that characterizes all Belogrud’s work. Other built works of this period included the Skating Rink complex (1912) in St Petersburg and the Municipal Theatre (1913), Saratov. During these years he was also a lively contributor to stylistic and professional debates in Russian architecture. In ...

Article

Conder, Josiah  

Hiroyuki Suzuki

(b London, Sept 28, 1852; d Tokyo, 1920).

English architect, active in Japan. He was articled to Roger Thomas Smith and then entered the office of William Burges. In 1876 he was awarded the Soane Medallion by the RIBA. In the next year he was appointed the first professor of architecture at the Imperial College of Engineering (now Tokyo University) in Japan, in which role he taught every aspect of architecture and building construction. During this period he was also active as an architect, designing such buildings as the Tokyo Imperial Museum (1877–80; now Tokyo National Museum) and a national banqueting house, Rokumeikan (Deer Cry Pavilion), for the Ministry of Public Works. After leaving his academic and governmental posts, Conder went into private practice and designed many residences, including the Iwasaki residence in Kayacho (1896; see Japan, §III, 5), the Shimazu residence (1915) and the Furukawa residence (1917). His style gradually changed from Gothic to more classical. He is often called the father of Western architecture in Japan, not only on account of his designs but also because of his role in establishing the Western method of architectural higher ...

Article

Eiheiji  

Dennis Lishka

Japanese Zen Buddhist monastery of the Sōtō sect, in Fukui Prefecture. Eiheiji’s significance derives largely from the place in the history of Japanese Buddhism of its founder, Dōgen (1199–1253), and to his interpretation of Sōtō Zen monastic practice. After 1217 Dōgen joined the dominant Tendai school of Buddhism, but he grew disillusioned with Japanese Buddhism as a feasible human soteriology, although he was much attracted to the practice of Zen meditation. In 1223 he left for China, then under the rule of the Song dynasty (ad 960–1279), to practise Chinese Chan (Jap. Zen) Buddhism under the master Rujing (1163–1228) at Mt Tiantong. After his return in 1227 he advocated Sōtō Zen but was continuously harassed by Tendai-sect monks until he cleared donated land in 1243 in Echizen (western Japan) for the first Sōtō Zen monastery, Eiheiji (Monastery of Eternal Peace). At Eiheiji, Dōgen faithfully reproduced Chinese Chan Buddhism in two important ways: experientially, with daily meditation integrated into such basic activities as eating, walking, working, begging and washing, whereby enlightenment might be attained by the practitioner and by others; and architecturally, the buildings in the temple compound, each unique in structure and function, being tightly integrated into a working site for daily Zen discipline and arranged to fit into the topography of the forested hillside....

Article

Itō, Chūta  

Eizo Inagaki

(b Yonezawa, Dewa Province [now Yamagata Prefect.], 1868; d 1954).

Japanese architectural historian and architect. He graduated from the School of Engineering at Tokyo Imperial University in 1892 and then undertook graduate studies in architectural history. He participated in research on the oldest building in Japan, the temple of Hōryūji at Nara, and carried out a survey of the principal buildings that recorded details of the temple’s proportions, construction and decoration. In 1898 he published the Hōryūji kenchikuron (‘Discourse on the architecture of Hōryūji’), his first lengthy thesis. In 1897 he began to teach at the School of Engineering at the university; in 1901 he received his doctorate and in 1905 he became a full professor in the department where he continued teaching until his retirement in 1928.

In his research Itō was more interested in comparing the civilizations of the East and West, and the influences on them, rather than merely accumulating archaeological information. As he explained in his first thesis, for example, the architecture of Hōryūji was derived from the Gandhara style in India, having been transmitted to the Korean peninsula and then to Japan. At this time, ...

Article

Katayama, Tōkuma  

Hiroyuki Suzuki

(b Hagi Prov., now Yamaguchi Prefect., Dec 20, 1854; d Tokyo, Oct 24, 1917).

Japanese architect. He was one of the first four students to graduate from the Department of Architecture, Imperial College of Engineering (now Tokyo University) in 1879. After a short spell in the Ministry of Public Works, he became an architect in the Ministry of the Imperial Household in 1886, a position he held for the rest of his life. As the first court architect Katayama designed palaces, villas and residences for the imperial family, but his output also included the imperial (now national) museums (all extant) in Nara (1894), Kyoto (1908) and Tokyo (Hyōkeikan, 1909). His style, which was neo-classical with a French Beaux-Arts flavour, was regarded as the most suitable to express the enlightened atmosphere of the Japanese court. He visited European countries and the USA in 1882–4, 1886–7, 1897–8, 1899 and 1902–3. His last three visits were undertaken in connection with the design of his best and largest work, Akasaka Detached Palace or Akasaka Rikyū, Tokyo (...

Article

Kongōbuji  

Mimi Hall Yiengpruksawan

[Kōya, Mt; Kōyasan; Kōyasanji; Kōyasan Kongōbuji]

Japanese Buddhist temple and shrine complex in Ito district, Wakayama Prefecture. Lying about 70 km south of Osaka on Mt Kōya (Kōyasan), a plateau on the eastern slope of the Takamine range, it was founded in the 9th century ad as the headquarters of the Shingon sect (see Buddhism §III 10.) and is one of the two main centres of Esoteric Buddhism (mikkyō) in Japan (see also Enryakuji). At Amano Jinja (Amano Shrine) on the north-western flank of the uplands, Niu Myōjin and Kōya Myōjin, the chief Shinto tutelary deities of the complex, are enshrined. The complex now occupies c. 12 sq. km of hilly terrain, encompassing some 125 structures and housing important art works.

Kongōbuji’s founder, Kōbō Daishi (see Kūkai), had spent the years 804–6 in China studying the system of tantric belief that was to be the basis of Shingon teachings and was seeking a suitable location to perform the religious exercises and Esoteric rituals required by these beliefs. In 816 he received from Emperor Saga (...

Article

Retail architecture  

Sara Stevens

A category of buildings designed to house retail and shopping. It includes arcades, department stores, shopping malls, strip centres, and big-box stores. Retail architecture exists in small towns, big cities, and suburbs: anywhere people congregate. It is as ubiquitous in time and space as the organized exchange of goods for money. It is distinguished from commercial architecture, which, in real estate and architectural practice, can refer more generally to any property that produces income for its investors or owners but does not refer to a building’s architectural function (i.e. retail).

Buildings housing commercial activity have existed since antiquity. Anthropologists have described exchange halls and commercial structures in many cultures, including Roman, Aztec, Tang dynasty China, and Mesopotamian. During the medieval and Renaissance periods, market halls and exchanges were built in cities such as Antwerp, Bruges, London, and Venice, sheltering trading activities at ground level and municipal government functions above (...

Article

Tatsuno, Kingo  

Hiroyuki Suzuki

(b Karatsu Prov. [now Saga Prefect.], Aug 22, 1854; d Tokyo, March 25, 1919).

Japanese architect. He studied architecture under Josiah Conder at the Imperial College of Engineering (now Tokyo University) and in 1879 became one of the first four graduates in the Department of Architecture. He was one of a group of 11 of the first graduates from the college who were sent abroad to study their respective specialist fields. He went to London early in 1880 and until 1883 studied architecture in the office of William Burges and at other institutions. On his return to Japan, he was appointed the first Japanese professor of architecture at the Imperial College in 1884. Alongside his teaching activities, he designed important national buildings including offices for the Bank of Japan (main office, Tokyo, 1903; Kyoto branch, 1906; Osaka branch, 1911) and Tokyo Central Station (1914; partly damaged in World War II). His mature works are characterized by a contrasting use of red brick and white stone similar to the style of R. Norman Shaw’s New Scotland Yard in London. Tatsuno was one of the first generation of Japanese to take over the teaching of architecture in Japanese universities from foreigners. He was a founder-member of the ...