Architecture 100: History, Theory, Perception, Movement, and Proportion

Comprehensive practice flashcards reviewing key concepts, figures, buildings, and terminology across urban development, modernism, Louis Kahn, architectural photography, rhythm, and classical proportional systems.

Early Chicago School of Architecture

An architectural movement that emerged in late 19th-century Chicago characterized by structural rationality, large glass apertures for natural light, fireproofing using terra cotta, and iron and steel frames enabled by Industrial Revolution technologies.

Balloon Framing

A lightweight timber framing method developed in 19th-century Chicago that replaced heavy timber framing with standardized, machine-sawn dimensional lumber and factory-made nails, allowing rapid urban expansion.

Home Insurance Building

A historic Chicago high-rise designed by William Le Baron Jenney in 1885, recognized as the world's first tall building to utilize an internal metal skeleton of iron and structural steel.

The Rookery

An 1888 Chicago commercial office building designed by Burnham & Root featuring a central light court, iron-frame construction, and an interior lobby remodel executed by Frank Lloyd Wright.

Monadnock Building

An 1891 office tower in Chicago designed by Burnham & Root, famous as the tallest commercial building supported entirely by load-bearing masonry walls, requiring six-foot-thick brick piers at the base.

Auditorium Building

A massive 1889 multi-use complex designed by Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan in Chicago that combined a major acoustic theater, a luxury hotel, and commercial offices encased in heavy granite and limestone walls.

Carson, Pirie, Scott Building

An 1899 Chicago department store designed by Louis Sullivan, noted for its horizontal Chicago window grid and richly detailed cast-iron organic ornamentation encircling the street-level corner entry.

World's Columbian Exposition (1893)

The Chicago World's Fair designed under the supervision of Daniel Burnham and Frederick Law Olmsted, characterized by neoclassical, plaster-clad monumental pavilions dubbed the 'White City' arranged around the Grand Basin.

Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal

A major civil engineering feat completed in 1900 that permanently reversed the direction of the Chicago River, channeling the city's sewage away from Lake Michigan and toward the Mississippi River watershed.

Served vs. Servant Spaces

Louis Kahn's architectural principle distinguishing primary inhabited zones of a program (such as galleries, libraries, and living spaces) from secondary utility zones that support them (such as stairwells, mechanical chases, and storage).

Genius Loci

A Latin concept meaning the 'spirit of a place'; for Louis Kahn, designing with genius loci required understanding and responding to the essential nature of a site rather than superficially replicating historical styles.

Salk Institute for Biological Studies

A biomedical research facility in La Jolla, California (1962–1967) designed by Louis Kahn, consisting of two mirrored cast-concrete laboratory wings flanking an open central travertine plaza aligned toward the Pacific Ocean.

Phillips Exeter Academy Library

A 1965 brick-and-concrete library designed by Louis Kahn in Exeter, New Hampshire, featuring an expansive central light-filled atrium pierced by massive circular concrete diaphragms that frame the peripheral book stacks.

Cycloid Vault

A mathematically curved arch geometry utilized by Louis Kahn at the Kimbell Art Museum to produce low, self-supporting concrete vaults that wash interior gallery walls with even, indirect natural daylight.

Kimbell Art Museum

An art museum in Fort Worth, Texas (1966) designed by Louis Kahn, organized into three bays of modular cycloid concrete vaults illuminated by narrow linear skylights and curved aluminum light reflectors.

The Image of the City Elements

The five structural components identified by urban theorist Kevin Lynch used to analyze urban navigability: Paths (circulation corridors), Edges (linear boundaries), Districts (thematic areas), Nodes (focal intersection points), and Landmarks (reference objects).

Chronophotography

An early photographic technique developed in the late 19th century by Étienne-Jules Marey and Eadweard Muybridge that recorded successive phases of motion on a single photographic plate or sequenced film strip.

The Joiners

A composite photocollage technique developed by artist David Hockney that combines dozens of photographic fragments to depict multiple viewpoints, organic distortions, and the passage of time within a single scene.

Deconstructivist Architecture

A late 20th-century architectural movement influenced by philosopher Jacques Derrida that breaks standard conventions of form through fragmentation, non-rectilinear geometries, and the deliberate distortion of structural envelopes.

Morphosis

An interdisciplinary architectural firm co-founded by Thom Mayne in 1972 whose name means 'change in form,' emphasizing dynamic, contradictory entities, shifting tectonic planes, and site-ground interactions.

Diamond Ranch High School

A 1997 high school campus in Pomona, California designed by Morphosis that addresses educational flexibility through dynamic shifting building masses structured around a fractured, outdoor pedestrian canyon called 'The Agora.'

Picasso's Bull (1945)

A series of 11 progressive lithographs created by Pablo Picasso demonstrating the systematic translation, reduction, and deconstruction of a realistic animal figure down to its essential linear structure.

Architectural Promenade

A spatial sequence concept formulated by Le Corbusier in which movement along a predetermined route choreographs the occupant's sensory and perceptual experience of a building's geometry, light, and volume.

Concept of Ma

A traditional Japanese spatial and aesthetic concept meaning 'the space in-between,' negative space, or an intentional pause that establishes harmony and structural balance between physical elements.

The Spanish Steps

An 18th-century Baroque urban staircase built in 1725 in Rome designed with alternating curved landings, terraces, and counter-rhythms inspired by the polonaise dance to bridge two distinct urban piazzas.

Monotone Rhythm

A simple architectural rhythm formed by the unvarying repetition of a single formal element or beat ($A-A-A-A$ or solid-solid-solid), commonly deployed in processional colonnades to project monumental authority and order.

Duotone Rhythm

A regular architectural cadence created by alternating between two distinct spatial or formal elements ($A-B-A-B$ or solid-void-solid-void), often found in classical civic façades.

Caesura

A structural pause or rhythmic interruption originating in poetic verse that translates into architecture as an intentional physical threshold, pause, or gap along a path of travel.

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Ramp

A continuous, shallowly inclined spiral ramp designed by Frank Lloyd Wright (1959) that deliberately slows visitor movement, allowing unhurried panoramic observation of artworks along a unified vertical promenade.

Concinnitas (Alberti's Theory of Beauty)

Leon Battista Alberti's definition of beauty as a harmonious agreement of all component parts such that nothing can be added, diminished, or altered without diminishing the perfection of the whole.

Alberti's Musical Consonances

Mathematical ratios derived from acoustic harmony applied by Leon Battista Alberti to building dimensions, including unison ($1:1$), sesquitertius ($4:3$, musical fourth), sesquialter ($3:2$, fifth), and duplus ($2:1$, octave).

Intercolumniation

The proportional clear spacing between adjacent columns in a classical colonnade, systematically measured as a multiple or ratio of the column shaft's lower diameter.

Giant Order

An architectural order featuring columns or pilasters that rise through two or more stories of a building façade, first introduced by Michelangelo and refined by Andrea Palladio.

Villa Foscari (La Malcontenta)

A 1560 villa designed by Andrea Palladio near Mira, Italy, notable for its raised piano nobile, hexastyle Ionic portico, integrated thermal lunette window, and room dimensions derived from harmonic ratios.

Five Points of Architecture

Le Corbusier's 1923 modern design principles enabled by reinforced concrete: pilotis (structural columns), a free floor plan, a free façade, horizontal ribbon windows, and a flat roof garden.

The Modulor

An anthropometric proportioning system patented in 1945 by Le Corbusier based on the human body and the Golden Section, consisting of the Red Series (navel height $108\,\text{cm}$, raised arm $216\,\text{cm}$) and the Blue Series (navel height $113\,\text{cm}$, raised arm $226\,\text{cm}$).

Unité d'Habitation

A self-contained residential housing block completed in Marseilles in 1952 by Le Corbusier, constructed of raw exposed concrete (béton brut) and sized according to the Modulor proportioning system.

Vitruvian Man

Leonardo da Vinci's c. 1490 drawing illustrating Marcus Vitruvius Pollio's canon of bodily symmetry, demonstrating that the human form fits simultaneously within both a circle and a square.

Regulating Lines (Tracés Régulateurs)

Geometrical diagonal guide lines based on the Golden Section and orthogonal projections employed by Le Corbusier to bring mathematical order, discipline, and proportion to architectural elevations and plans.