1.
San Francisco
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San Francisco, officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the cultural, commercial, and financial center of Northern California. It is the birthplace of the United Nations, the California Gold Rush of 1849 brought rapid growth, making it the largest city on the West Coast at the time. San Francisco became a consolidated city-county in 1856, after three-quarters of the city was destroyed by the 1906 earthquake and fire, San Francisco was quickly rebuilt, hosting the Panama-Pacific International Exposition nine years later. In World War II, San Francisco was a port of embarkation for service members shipping out to the Pacific Theater. Politically, the city votes strongly along liberal Democratic Party lines, San Francisco is also the headquarters of five major banking institutions and various other companies such as Levi Strauss & Co. Dolby, Airbnb, Weebly, Pacific Gas and Electric Company, Yelp, Pinterest, Twitter, Uber, Lyft, Mozilla, Wikimedia Foundation, as of 2016, San Francisco is ranked high on world liveability rankings. The earliest archaeological evidence of habitation of the territory of the city of San Francisco dates to 3000 BC. Upon independence from Spain in 1821, the became part of Mexico. Under Mexican rule, the system gradually ended, and its lands became privatized. In 1835, Englishman William Richardson erected the first independent homestead, together with Alcalde Francisco de Haro, he laid out a street plan for the expanded settlement, and the town, named Yerba Buena, began to attract American settlers. Commodore John D. Sloat claimed California for the United States on July 7,1846, during the Mexican–American War, montgomery arrived to claim Yerba Buena two days later. Yerba Buena was renamed San Francisco on January 30 of the next year, despite its attractive location as a port and naval base, San Francisco was still a small settlement with inhospitable geography. The California Gold Rush brought a flood of treasure seekers, with their sourdough bread in tow, prospectors accumulated in San Francisco over rival Benicia, raising the population from 1,000 in 1848 to 25,000 by December 1849. The promise of fabulous riches was so strong that crews on arriving vessels deserted and rushed off to the gold fields, leaving behind a forest of masts in San Francisco harbor. Some of these approximately 500 abandoned ships were used at times as storeships, saloons and hotels, many were left to rot, by 1851 the harbor was extended out into the bay by wharves while buildings were erected on piles among the ships. By 1870 Yerba Buena Cove had been filled to create new land, buried ships are occasionally exposed when foundations are dug for new buildings. California was quickly granted statehood in 1850 and the U. S. military built Fort Point at the Golden Gate, silver discoveries, including the Comstock Lode in Nevada in 1859, further drove rapid population growth. With hordes of fortune seekers streaming through the city, lawlessness was common, and the Barbary Coast section of town gained notoriety as a haven for criminals, prostitution, entrepreneurs sought to capitalize on the wealth generated by the Gold Rush
2.
California
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California is the most populous state in the United States and the third most extensive by area. Located on the western coast of the U. S, California is bordered by the other U. S. states of Oregon, Nevada, and Arizona and shares an international border with the Mexican state of Baja California. Los Angeles is Californias most populous city, and the second largest after New York City. The Los Angeles Area and the San Francisco Bay Area are the nations second- and fifth-most populous urban regions, California also has the nations most populous county, Los Angeles County, and its largest county by area, San Bernardino County. The Central Valley, an agricultural area, dominates the states center. What is now California was first settled by various Native American tribes before being explored by a number of European expeditions during the 16th and 17th centuries, the Spanish Empire then claimed it as part of Alta California in their New Spain colony. The area became a part of Mexico in 1821 following its war for independence. The western portion of Alta California then was organized as the State of California, the California Gold Rush starting in 1848 led to dramatic social and demographic changes, with large-scale emigration from the east and abroad with an accompanying economic boom. If it were a country, California would be the 6th largest economy in the world, fifty-eight percent of the states economy is centered on finance, government, real estate services, technology, and professional, scientific and technical business services. Although it accounts for only 1.5 percent of the states economy, the story of Calafia is recorded in a 1510 work The Adventures of Esplandián, written as a sequel to Amadis de Gaula by Spanish adventure writer Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo. The kingdom of Queen Calafia, according to Montalvo, was said to be a land inhabited by griffins and other strange beasts. This conventional wisdom that California was an island, with maps drawn to reflect this belief, shortened forms of the states name include CA, Cal. Calif. and US-CA. Settled by successive waves of arrivals during the last 10,000 years, various estimates of the native population range from 100,000 to 300,000. The Indigenous peoples of California included more than 70 distinct groups of Native Americans, ranging from large, settled populations living on the coast to groups in the interior. California groups also were diverse in their organization with bands, tribes, villages. Trade, intermarriage and military alliances fostered many social and economic relationships among the diverse groups, the first European effort to explore the coast as far north as the Russian River was a Spanish sailing expedition, led by Portuguese captain Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo, in 1542. Some 37 years later English explorer Francis Drake also explored and claimed a portion of the California coast in 1579. Spanish traders made unintended visits with the Manila galleons on their trips from the Philippines beginning in 1565
3.
Philip Johnson
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In 1978 he was awarded an American Institute of Architects Gold Medal and in 1979 the first Pritzker Architecture Prize. Johnson was born in Cleveland, Ohio on July 8,1906 and he was descended from the Jansen family of New Amsterdam, and included among his ancestors the Huguenot Jacques Cortelyou, who laid out the first town plan of New Amsterdam for Peter Stuyvesant. In 1928 he met Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who was at the time designing the German Pavilion for the 1929 Barcelona International Exposition. The meeting formed the basis for a relationship of both collaboration and competition In 1930, Johnson joined the architecture department of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. There he arranged for American visits by Gropius and Le Corbusier, in 1932, working with Hitchcock and Alfred H. Barr, Jr. and Henry-Russell Hitchcock, he organized the first exhibition on Modern architecture at the Museum of Modern Art in 1932. The show and their published book International Style, Modern Architecture Since 1922 played an important part in introducing modern architecture to the American public. When the rise of the Nazis in Germany forced the modernists Marcel Breuer and Mies van der Rohe to leave Germany, in 1936, in the depths of the Great Depression, he left the Museum of Modern Art for a brief venture into journalism and politics. In his 1994 biography of Johnson, Schultze wrote, In politics he proved to be a model of futility and he was never much of a political threat to anyone, still less an effective doer of either political good or political evil. In 1941, at the age of 35, Johnson abandoned politics and journalism and enrolled in the Harvard Graduate School of Design, in 1941, Johnson designed and actually built his first building, a house still existing at 9 Ash Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The house, strongly influenced by Mies van der Rohe, has a wall around the lot which merges with the structure, after the United States entered World War II in December 1941, Johnson enlisted in the Army. He spent his service during the war in the United States. In 1946, after he completed his service, Johnson returned to the Museum of Modern Art as a curator. At the same time, he began working to establish his architectural practice and he built a small house, in th style of Mies, in Saaponack, Long Island in 1946. This was followed by one of this most famous buildings, which he built for himself, the Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut, completed in 1949, which has become a landmark of modern architecture. Johnson had curated an exhibit of Mies van der Rohes at the Museum of Modern Art in 1947, the house is a 56 foot by 32 foot glass rectangle, sited at the edge of a crest on Johnsons estate overlooking a pond. The buildings sides are glass and charcoal-painted steel, the floor, of brick, is not flush with the ground, the interior is an open space divided by low walnut cabinets, a brick cylinder contains the bathroom and is the only object to reach floor to ceiling. The New York Times described it in 2005 as one of the 20th centurys greatest residential structures, Johnson continued to add to the Glass House estate during each period of his career. After completing the Glass House, he completed two more houses in New Canaan in a similar to that of Mies, the Hodgson House
4.
Skyscraper
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A skyscraper is a tall, continuously habitable building having multiple floors. When the term was used in the 1880s it described a building of 10 to 20 floors. Mostly designed for office, commercial and residential uses, a skyscraper can also be called a high-rise, for buildings above a height of 300 m, the term supertall can be used, while skyscrapers reaching beyond 600 m are classified as megatall. One common feature of skyscrapers is having a steel framework that supports curtain walls and these curtain walls either bear on the framework below or are suspended from the framework above, rather than resting on load-bearing walls of conventional construction. Some early skyscrapers have a frame that enables the construction of load-bearing walls taller than of those made of reinforced concrete. Modern skyscrapers walls are not load-bearing, and most skyscrapers are characterized by surface areas of windows made possible by steel frames. However, skyscrapers can have curtain walls that mimic conventional walls with a surface area of windows. Modern skyscrapers often have a structure, and are designed to act like a hollow cylinder to resist wind, seismic. To appear more slender, allow less wind exposure, and transmit more daylight to the ground, many skyscrapers have a design with setbacks, a relatively big building may be considered a skyscraper if it protrudes well above its built environment and changes the overall skyline. The maximum height of structures has progressed historically with building methods and technologies, the Burj Khalifa is currently the tallest building in the world. High-rise buildings are considered shorter than skyscrapers, the first steel-frame skyscraper was the Home Insurance Building in Chicago, Illinois in 1885. Even the scholars making the argument find it to be purely academic and this definition was based on the steel skeleton—as opposed to constructions of load-bearing masonry, which passed their practical limit in 1891 with Chicagos Monadnock Building. What is the characteristic of the tall office building. The force and power of altitude must be in it, the glory and it must be every inch a proud and soaring thing, rising in sheer exaltation that from bottom to top it is a unit without a single dissenting line. Some structural engineers define a highrise as any vertical construction for which wind is a significant load factor than earthquake or weight. Note that this criterion fits not only high-rises but some other tall structures, the word skyscraper often carries a connotation of pride and achievement. A loose convention of some in the United States and Europe draws the limit of a skyscraper at 150 m or 490 ft. The tallest building in ancient times was the 146 m Great Pyramid of Giza in ancient Egypt and it was not surpassed in height for thousands of years, the 14th century AD Lincoln Cathedral being conjectured by many to have exceeded it
5.
Financial District, San Francisco
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The Financial District is a neighborhood in San Francisco, California, that serves as its main central business district. It is home to the citys largest concentration of headquarters, law firms, insurance companies, real estate firms, banks, savings and loans. All six San Francisco Fortune 500 companies—McKesson, Wells Fargo, PG&E, Gap, Charles Schwab, the citys tallest buildings, including 555 California Street and the Transamerica Pyramid, and many other tall buildings, such as 101 California Street and 345 California Street are located there. Montgomery Street is the heart of the district. Since the 1980s, restrictions on high rise construction have shifted new development to the adjacent South of Market area surrounding the Transbay Transit Center and this area is sometimes called the South Financial District by real estate developers, or simply included as part of the Financial District itself. It was not until 1835 that the first settlers established themselves on the shore of Yerba Buena Cove, Yerba Buenas potential as a seaport made it the eventual center for European and American settlement. Gold Rush wealth and business made it the capital of the west coast as many banks. The west coasts first and only skyscrapers, were built in the area along Market Street, the neighborhood was completely destroyed in the 1906 Earthquake and Fire. By 1910, the area was rebuilt with low-rise, masonry-clad buildings ranging from six to twelve stories in height. Due to new building and earthquake retrofitting technologies, the restrictions were lifted. This boom accelerated under mayor Dianne Feinstein during the 1980s, something her critics labelled as Manhattanization and this caused widespread opposition citywide leading to the skyscraper revolt similar to the freeway revolt in the city years earlier. The skyscraper revolt led to the city imposing extremely strict, European-style height restrictions on building construction citywide. Due to these restrictions, lack of buildable lots, and changes in the local real estate market. To encourage new development south of Market, and to fund the replacement for the Transbay Terminal. As a result, nearly all new high rise construction since the 1980s has taken place South of Market, notable examples include the JPMorgan Chase Building,555 Mission Street,101 Second Street, the Four Seasons Hotel, The Paramount, and the Millennium Tower. Adjacent to the Financial District to the west is the Union Square shopping district, to the northwest is Chinatown, and to the north is North Beach and Jackson Square. To the east lies the Embarcadero waterfront and the Ferry Building, to the south lies Market Street and the South of Market district. The Financial District is served by more than two dozen Muni bus and rail lines, including one cable car line, as well as Montgomery Street Station, the nickname FiDi is occasionally employed, analogous to nearby SoMa
6.
Market Street (San Francisco)
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Market Street is a major thoroughfare in San Francisco, California. Beyond this point, the roadway continues as Portola Drive into the southwestern quadrant of San Francisco, Portola Drive extends south to the intersection of St. Francis Boulevard and Sloat Boulevard, where it continues as Junipero Serra Boulevard. Market Street is the boundary of two street grids, Streets on its southeast side are parallel or perpendicular to Market Street, while those on the northwest are nine degrees off from the cardinal directions. Market Street is a major artery for the city of San Francisco, and has carried in turn horse-drawn streetcars, cable cars, electric streetcars, electric trolleybuses. Today Munis buses, trolleybuses, and heritage streetcars share the street, while below the street the two-level Market Street Subway carries Muni Metro and Bay Area Rapid Transit. While cable cars no longer operate on Market Street, the cable car lines terminate to the side of the street at its intersections with California Street. Market Street cuts across the city for three miles from the waterfront to the hills of Twin Peaks and it was laid out originally by Jasper OFarrell, a 26-year-old trained civil engineer who emigrated to Yerba Buena. The town was renamed San Francisco in 1847 after it was captured by United States troops during the Mexican-American War, OFarrell first repaired the original layout of the settlement around Portsmouth Square and then established Market Street as the widest street in town,120 feet between property lines. It was described at the time as an arrow aimed straight at Los Pechos de la Chola, a friend warned OFarrell, before the crowd had dispersed. He rode with all haste to North Beach, took a boat for Sausalito and he found it discreet to remain some time in the country before venturing to return to the city. The city soon filled in the ground between Portsmouth Square and Happy Valley at First and Mission Street, the dunes were leveled and the sand used for fill. The first horsecar-powered railway line to open in San Francisco commenced running down the thoroughfare on July 4,1860, the two Union Railroad tracks were on the inside and the two San Francisco Municipal Railway tracks were on the outside. In 1892 The Owl Drug Company was established at 1128 Market Street, Market Street underwent major changes in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when Muni Metro service was moved underground in concert with the development of the Bay Area Rapid Transit system. Construction of the Market Street Subway commenced in July 1967, prolonged disruption to what had traditionally been the social and economic center of the city contributed to the decline of the mid-Market shopping district in later years. In 1980, Munis surface operations were partially routed underground with full service changes occurring in 1982, in the days of the first United Nations conferences, Anthony Eden, Molotov, Stettinius, and Bidault rode up Market Street, waving to the crowds of hopefuls. On Christmas Eve 1910, opera singer Luisa Tetrazzini sang a free concert to a crowd some estimated at 250,000. Another historic Market Street event was the New Years Eve celebration at the Ferry Building on December 31,1999, over 1.2 million people jammed Market Street and nearby streets for the raucous and peaceful turn-of-the-century celebration. The San Francisco Gay Pride parade runs down Market Street, attracting many people every year, victory parades celebrating the San Francisco Giants World Series titles were held on Market Street in 2010,2012, and 2014
7.
Tower
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A tower is a tall structure, taller than it is wide, often by a significant margin. Towers are distinguished from masts by their lack of guy-wires and are therefore, along with tall buildings, Towers are specifically distinguished from buildings in that they are not built to be habitable but to serve other functions. Towers can be stand alone structures or be supported by adjacent buildings or can be a feature on top of a structure or building. Old English torr is from Latin turris via Old French tor, the Latin term together with Greek τύρσις was loaned from a pre-Indo-European Mediterranean language, connected with the Illyrian toponym Βου-δοργίς. The oldest known may be the stone tower in walls of Neolithic Jericho. Some of the earliest towers were ziggurats, which existed in Sumerian architecture since the 4th millennium BC, the most famous ziggurats include the Sumerian Ziggurat of Ur, built the 3rd millennium BC, and the Etemenanki, one of the most famous examples of Babylonian architecture. The latter was built in Babylon during the 2nd millennium BC and was considered the tallest tower of the ancient world, some of the earliest surviving examples are the broch structures in northern Scotland, which are conical towerhouses. These and other examples from Phoenician and Roman cultures emphasised the use of a tower in fortification, for example, the name of the Moroccan city of Mogador, founded in the first millennium BC, is derived from the Phoenician word for watchtower. The Romans utilised octagonal towers as elements of Diocletians Palace in Croatia, which monument dates to approximately 300 AD, while the Servian Walls, the Chinese used towers as integrated elements of the Great Wall of China in 210 BC during the Qin Dynasty. Towers were also an important element of castles, other well known towers include the Leaning Tower of Pisa in Pisa, Italy built from 1173 until 1372 and the Two Towers in Bologna, Italy built from 1109 until 1119. The Himalayan Towers are stone towers located chiefly in Tibet built approximately 14th to 15th century, up to a certain height, a tower can be made with the supporting structure with parallel sides. However, above a height, the compressive load of the material is exceeded. This can be avoided if the support structure tapers up the building. A second limit is that of buckling—the structure requires sufficient stiffness to avoid breaking under the loads it faces, many very tall towers have their support structures at the periphery of the building, which greatly increases the overall stiffness. A third limit is dynamic, a tower is subject to varying winds, vortex shedding and these are often dealt with through a combination of simple strength and stiffness, as well as in some cases tuned mass dampers to damp out movements. Varying or tapering the outer aspect of the tower with height avoids vibrations due to vortex shedding occurring along the building simultaneously. Although not correctly called towers many modern skyscraper are often called towers, in the United Kingdom, tall domestic buildings are referred to as tower blocks. In the United States, the original World Trade Center had the nickname the Twin Towers, the tower throughout history has provided its users with an advantage in surveying defensive positions and obtaining a better view of the surrounding areas, including battlefields
8.
Plaza
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A plaza /ˈplɑːzə/ is an open urban public space, such as a city square. The plaza might be enough to serve as a military parade ground. At times of crisis or fiesta, it was the space where a large crowd might gather, like the Italian piazza, the plaza remains a center of community life that is only equaled by the market-place. A plaza de toros is a bullring, in modern usage, a plaza can be any gathering place on a street or between buildings, a street intersection with a statue, etc. Todays metropolitan landscapes often incorporate the plaza as an element, or as an outcome of zoning regulations, building budgetary constraints. Sociologist William H. Plaza is a Spanish word, cognate to Italian piazza, Portuguese praça, Galician praza, Catalan plaça, Romanian piața, German Platz, the origin of all these words is, via Latin platea, from Greek πλατεῖα plateia, meaning broad. The first purpose-built shopping center in the United States, opened in Kansas City, Missouri in 1922, knowingly took the name of Country Club Plaza and adopted Spanish architectural details. More recently plaza has been used to describe a complex, similar to a shopping mall. Examples, Pantip Plaza, Bintang Plaza, Kuching Plaza, Plaza Las Américas, Plaza de las Estrellas, Central Plaza, Schiphol Plaza, Plazas del Centro Comercial Santafé, The Plaza, and Cityplaza. Central Plaza, in Hong Kong, was for four years the tallest building in Asia, at 78 storeys,374 m
9.
Fountain
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A fountain is a piece of architecture which pours water into a basin or jets it into the air to supply drinking water and/or for a decorative or dramatic effect. Fountains were originally purely functional, connected to springs or aqueducts and used to drinking water and water for bathing and washing to the residents of cities, towns. Until the late 19th century most fountains operated by gravity, and needed a source of higher than the fountain, such as a reservoir or aqueduct. In addition to providing drinking water, fountains were used for decoration, Roman fountains were decorated with bronze or stone masks of animals or heroes. In the Middle Ages, Moorish and Muslim garden designers used fountains to create versions of the gardens of paradise. King Louis XIV of France used fountains in the Gardens of Versailles to illustrate his power over nature, the baroque decorative fountains of Rome in the 17th and 18th centuries marked the arrival point of restored Roman aqueducts and glorified the Popes who built them. By the end of the 19th century, as indoor plumbing became the source of drinking water. Mechanical pumps replaced gravity and allowed fountains to recycle water and to force it high into the air, the Jet dEau in Lake Geneva, built in 1951, shoots water 140 metres in the air. The highest such fountain in the world is King Fahds Fountain in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, fountains are used today to decorate city parks and squares, to honor individuals or events, for recreation and for entertainment. A Splash pad or spray pool allows city residents to enter, get wet, the musical fountain combines moving jets of water, colored lights and recorded music, controlled by a computer, for dramatic effects. Drinking fountains provide clean drinking water in buildings, parks. Ancient civilizations built stone basins to capture and hold precious drinking water, a carved stone basin, dating to around 2000 BC, was discovered in the ruins of the ancient Sumerian city of Lagash in modern Iraq. The ancient Assyrians constructed a series of basins in the gorge of the Comel River, carved in rock, connected by small channels. The lowest basin was decorated with carved reliefs of two lions, the ancient Greeks were apparently the first to use aqueducts and gravity-powered fountains to distribute water. In the 6th century BC the Athenian ruler Peisistratos built the fountain of Athens. It had nine large cannons, or spouts, which supplied drinking water to local residents. Greek fountains were made of stone or marble, with water flowing through bronze pipes, most Greek fountains flowed by simple gravity, but they also discovered how to use principle of a siphon to make water spout, as seen in pictures on Greek vases. The Ancient Romans built a system of aqueducts from mountain rivers and lakes to provide water for the fountains
10.
New York City
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The City of New York, often called New York City or simply New York, is the most populous city in the United States. With an estimated 2015 population of 8,550,405 distributed over an area of about 302.6 square miles. Located at the tip of the state of New York. Home to the headquarters of the United Nations, New York is an important center for international diplomacy and has described as the cultural and financial capital of the world. Situated on one of the worlds largest natural harbors, New York City consists of five boroughs, the five boroughs – Brooklyn, Queens, Manhattan, The Bronx, and Staten Island – were consolidated into a single city in 1898. In 2013, the MSA produced a gross metropolitan product of nearly US$1.39 trillion, in 2012, the CSA generated a GMP of over US$1.55 trillion. NYCs MSA and CSA GDP are higher than all but 11 and 12 countries, New York City traces its origin to its 1624 founding in Lower Manhattan as a trading post by colonists of the Dutch Republic and was named New Amsterdam in 1626. The city and its surroundings came under English control in 1664 and were renamed New York after King Charles II of England granted the lands to his brother, New York served as the capital of the United States from 1785 until 1790. It has been the countrys largest city since 1790, the Statue of Liberty greeted millions of immigrants as they came to the Americas by ship in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and is a symbol of the United States and its democracy. In the 21st century, New York has emerged as a node of creativity and entrepreneurship, social tolerance. Several sources have ranked New York the most photographed city in the world, the names of many of the citys bridges, tapered skyscrapers, and parks are known around the world. Manhattans real estate market is among the most expensive in the world, Manhattans Chinatown incorporates the highest concentration of Chinese people in the Western Hemisphere, with multiple signature Chinatowns developing across the city. Providing continuous 24/7 service, the New York City Subway is one of the most extensive metro systems worldwide, with 472 stations in operation. Over 120 colleges and universities are located in New York City, including Columbia University, New York University, and Rockefeller University, during the Wisconsinan glaciation, the New York City region was situated at the edge of a large ice sheet over 1,000 feet in depth. The ice sheet scraped away large amounts of soil, leaving the bedrock that serves as the foundation for much of New York City today. Later on, movement of the ice sheet would contribute to the separation of what are now Long Island and Staten Island. The first documented visit by a European was in 1524 by Giovanni da Verrazzano, a Florentine explorer in the service of the French crown and he claimed the area for France and named it Nouvelle Angoulême. Heavy ice kept him from further exploration, and he returned to Spain in August and he proceeded to sail up what the Dutch would name the North River, named first by Hudson as the Mauritius after Maurice, Prince of Orange
