1.
Dry stone
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Dry stone is a building method by which structures are constructed from stones without any mortar to bind them together. Dry stone structures are stable because of their construction method. Dry stone technology is best known in the context of wall construction, but dry stone artwork, buildings, bridges, Dry stone walls have been traditionally used in building construction as field boundaries and garden or churchyard walls, and on steep slopes as retaining walls for terracing. Some dry-stone wall constructions in north-west Europe have been dated back to the Neolithic Age, some Cornish hedges are believed by the Guild of Cornish Hedgers to date from 5000 BC, although there appears to be little dating evidence. In County Mayo, Ireland, a field system made from dry-stone walls. The cyclopean walls of the acropolis of Mycenae have been dated to 1350 BC, in Belize, the Mayan ruins at Lubaantun illustrate use of dry stone construction in architecture of the 8th and 9th centuries AD. When used as boundaries, dry stone structures often are known as dykes. Dry stone walls are characteristic of areas of Britain and Ireland where rock outcrops naturally or large stones exist in quantity in the soil. They are especially abundant in the West of Ireland, particularly Connemara and they may also be found throughout the Mediterranean, including retaining walls used for terracing. Such constructions are common where large stones are plentiful or conditions are too harsh for hedges capable of retaining livestock to be grown as field boundaries. Many thousands of miles of such walls exist, most of them centuries old, the technique of construction was brought to America primarily by English and Scots-Irish immigrants. The technique was taken to Australia and New Zealand. Similar walls also are found in the Swiss-Italian border region, where they are used to enclose the open space under large natural boulders or outcrops. The higher-lying rock-rich fields and pastures in Bohemias South-Western border range of Šumava are often lined by dry stone walls built of field-stones removed from the arable or cultural land and they serve both as cattle/sheep fences and the lots borders. Sometimes also the dry stone terracing is apparent, often combined with parts of masonry that are held together by a clay-cum-needles composite mortar. Great Zimbabwe is a city in the south-eastern hills of Zimbabwe, near Lake Mutirikwe. It was the capital of the Kingdom of Zimbabwe during the countrys Late Iron Age, construction on the monument began in the 11th century and continued until the 15th century. The exact identity of the Great Zimbabwe builders is at present unknown, the stone city spans an area of 722 hectares which, at its peak, could have housed up to 18,000 people
2.
Course (architecture)
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A course is a continuous horizontal layer of similarly-sized building material one unit high, usually in a wall. The term is almost always used in conjunction with unit masonry such as brick, cut stone, stretcher – The typical course style, masonry units are laid with their head viewed from a side cross-section and the long, narrow sides forming the bulk of the visible course. Header – Heads form the course and the long, narrow side is viewed from a side cross-section. This is often used to interlock a double wall. Rowlock – The long narrow sides are top and bottom, long thin sides are top and bottom, the heads are viewed from a side cross-section. Away from the top of the building it will represent a table where it has any mock or physical supports, these effects are defined as a dentillated course. Where just below the eaves or parapet wall the band course can be considered part of a cornice
3.
Inca Empire
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The Inca Empire, also known as the Incan Empire and the Inka Empire, was the largest empire in pre-Columbian America, and possibly the largest empire in the world in the early 16th century. The administrative, political and military center of the empire was located in Cusco in modern-day Peru, the Inca civilization arose from the highlands of Peru sometime in the early 13th century. Its last stronghold was conquered by the Spanish in 1572, from 1438 to 1533, the Incas incorporated a large portion of western South America, centered on the Andean Mountains, using conquest and peaceful assimilation, among other methods. The Incas considered their king, the Sapa Inca, to be the son of the sun, the Inca Empire was unique in that it lacked many features associated with civilization in the Old world. In the words of one scholar, The Incas lacked the use of wheeled vehicles, the Incan economy has been described as feudal, slave, socialist. The economy functioned largely without money and without markets, instead, exchange of goods and services was based on reciprocity between individuals and among individuals, groups, and Inca rulers. Taxes consisted of an obligation of a person to the Empire. The Inca rulers reciprocated by granting access to land and goods and providing food, the Inca referred to their empire as Tawantinsuyu, the four suyu. The four suyu were, Chinchaysuyu, Antisuyu, Qullasuyu and Kuntisuyu, the name Tawantinsuyu was, therefore, a descriptive term indicating a union of provinces. The Spanish transliterated the name as Tahuatinsuyo or Tahuatinsuyu, the term Inka means ruler or lord in Quechua and was used to refer to the ruling class or the ruling family. The Incas were a small percentage of the total population of the empire, probably numbering only 15,000 to 40,000. The Spanish adopted the term as a term referring to all subjects of the empire rather than simply the ruling class. As such the name Imperio inca referred to the nation that they encountered, the Inca people were a pastoral tribe in the Cusco area around the 12th century. Incan oral history tells a story of three caves. The center cave at Tampu Tuqu was named Qhapaq Tuqu, the other caves were Maras Tuqu and Sutiq Tuqu. Four brothers and four sisters stepped out of the middle cave and they were, Ayar Manco, Ayar Cachi, Ayar Awqa and Ayar Uchu, and Mama Ocllo, Mama Raua, Mama Huaco and Mama Qura. Out of the side caves came the people who were to be the ancestors of all the Inca clans, Ayar Manco carried a magic staff made of the finest gold. Where this staff landed, the people would live and they traveled for a long time
4.
Machu Picchu
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Machu Picchu is a 15th-century Inca citadel situated on a mountain ridge 2,430 metres above sea level. It is located in the Cusco Region, Urubamba Province, Machupicchu District in Peru, above the Sacred Valley, most archaeologists believe that Machu Picchu was built as an estate for the Inca emperor Pachacuti. Often mistakenly referred to as the Lost City of the Incas, the Incas built the estate around 1450 but abandoned it a century later at the time of the Spanish Conquest. Machu Picchu was built in the classical Inca style, with polished dry-stone walls and its three primary structures are the Inti Watana, the Temple of the Sun, and the Room of the Three Windows. Most of the buildings have been reconstructed in order to give tourists a better idea of how they originally appeared. By 1976, thirty percent of Machu Picchu had been restored, Machu Picchu was declared a Peruvian Historical Sanctuary in 1981 and a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1983. In 2007, Machu Picchu was voted one of the New Seven Wonders of the World in a worldwide Internet poll. In the Quechua language, machu means old or old person, while picchu means peak, mountain or prominence with a base that ends in sharp peaks. Machu Picchu was built around 1450, at the height of the Inca and its construction appears to date to the period of the two great Inca rulers, Pachacutec Inca Yupanqui and Túpac Inca Yupanqui. It was abandoned just over 100 years later, in 1572 and it is possible that most of its inhabitants died from smallpox introduced by travellers before the Spanish conquistadors arrived in the area. Although it was located only about 80 kilometers from the Inca capital in Cusco, the conquistadors had notes of a place called Piccho, although no record of a Spanish visit exists. The types of sacred rocks defaced by the conquistadors in other locations are untouched at Machu Picchu, over the centuries, the surrounding jungle overgrew the site, and few outside the immediate area knew of its existence. The site may have discovered and plundered in 1867 by a German businessman. Some evidence indicates that German engineer J. M. von Hassel arrived earlier, maps show references to Machu Picchu as early as 1874. In 1911 American historian and explorer Hiram Bingham travelled the region looking for the old Inca capital and was shown to Machu Picchu by a local farmer, Bingham brought Machu Picchu to international attention and organized another expedition in 1912 to undertake major clearing and excavation. He returned in 1914 and 1915 to continue with excavation, in 1981, Peru declared an area of 325.92 square kilometres surrounding Machu Picchu a Historical Sanctuary. In addition to the ruins, the sanctuary includes a portion of the adjoining region, rich with the flora and fauna of the Peruvian Yungas. In 1983, UNESCO designated Machu Picchu a World Heritage Site, describing it as a masterpiece of architecture
5.
Cusco
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Cuzco, often spelled Cusco, is a city in southeastern Peru, near the Urubamba Valley of the Andes mountain range. It is the capital of the Cusco Region as well as the Cusco Province, in 2013, the city had a population of 435,114. Located on the end of the Knot of Cuzco, its elevation is around 3,400 m. The site was the capital of the Inca Empire from the 13th until the 16th-century Spanish conquest. In 1983 Cusco was declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO and it has become a major tourist destination, hosting nearly 2 million visitors a year. The Constitution of Peru designates it as the Historical Capital of Peru, the indigenous name of this city is Qusqu. Although the name was used in Quechua, its origin is found in the Aymara language, the word is derived from the phrase qusqu wanka, related to the citys foundation myth of the Ayar Siblings. According to this legend, Ayar Awqa acquired wings and flew to the site of the future city, there he was transformed into a rock to mark the possession of the land by his ayllu. Then Ayar Oche stood up, displayed a pair of large wings, then they went up on top of the hill. Now at the site where he was to remain as an idol and he returned and told Ayar Manco that from then on he was to be named Manco Capac. Ayar Oche came from where the Sun was and the Sun had ordered that Ayar Manco take that name, after this had been stated by the idol, Ayar Oche turned into a stone, just as he was, with his wings. Later Manco Capac went down with Ayar Auca to their settlement. he liked the place now occupied in this city Cuzco, Manco Capac and his companion, with the help of the four women, made a house. Having done this, Manco Capac and his companion, with the four women and it is said that they took the maize from the cave, which this lord Manco Capac named Pacaritambo, which means those of origin because. they came out of that cave. The Spanish conquistadors adopted the name, transliterating it into Spanish phonetics as Cuzco or, less often. Cuzco was the spelling on official documents and chronicles in colonial times. Cuzco, pronounced as in 16th-century Spanish, seems to have been an approximation to the Cusco Quechua pronunciation of the name at the time. As both Spanish and Quechuan pronunciation have evolved since then, the Spanish pronunciation of z is no longer close to the Quechuan pronunciation of the consonant represented by z in Cuzco. In 1976, the city signed an ordinance banning the traditional spelling and ordering the use of a new one, Cusco
6.
Henry Hobson Richardson
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Henry Hobson Richardson was a prominent American architect who designed buildings in Albany, Boston, Buffalo, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and other cities. The style he popularized is named for him, Richardsonian Romanesque, along with Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright, Richardson is one of the recognized trinity of American architecture. He was the great-grandson of inventor and philosopher Joseph Priestley, who is credited with the discovery of oxygen. Richardson went on to study at Harvard College and Tulane University, initially, he was interested in civil engineering, but shifted to architecture, which led him to go to Paris in 1860 to attend the famed École des Beaux Arts in the atelier of Louis-Jules André. He didnt finish his training there, as family backing failed due to the U. S. Civil War, Richardson returned to the U. S. in 1865. He settled in New York in October 1865 and he found work with a builder, Charles, whom he had met in Paris. The two worked together but Richardson was not being challenged. He had little to do and yearned for more, Richardson developed a unique and highly personal idiom, adapting in particular the Romanesque of southern France. His early works, however, were not very remarkable, there are few hints in the mediocre work of Richardsons early years of what was to come in his maturity, when, beginning with his competition-winning design. For the Brattle Square Church in Boston, he adopted the Romanesque, in 1869, he designed the Buffalo State Asylum for the Insane in Buffalo, the largest commission of his career and the first appearance of his eponymous Richardsonian Romanesque style. A massive Medina sandstone complex, it is a National Historic Landmark and, the 1872 Trinity Church in Boston solidified Richardsons national reputation and led to major commissions for the rest of his life. Although incorporating historical elements from a variety of sources, including early Syrian Christian, Byzantine, Trinity was also a collaboration with the construction and engineering firm of the Norcross Brothers, with whom the architect would work on some 30 projects. Of his buildings, the two he liked best, the Allegheny County Courthouse and the Marshall Field Wholesale Store, were completed posthumously by his assistants, Richardson died in 1886 at age 47 of Brights disease, a historical term for the kidney disorder chronic nephritis. On his last day, he signed an informal will directing the three still remaining to carry on the business, which was soon formalized as Shepley, Rutan. One example includes Richardsons design for the Greater Cincinnati Chamber of Commerce Building, Richardson had won the selection process in 1885 and nearly finalized the work, but after his death, his aforementioned successors completed the project. He was buried in Walnut Hills Cemetery, Brookline, Massachusetts, despite an enormous income for an architect of his day, his reckless disregard for financial order meant that he died deeply in debt, leaving little to his widow and six children. Richardsons great grand-daughter is Mill Valley architect Heidi Richardson, Richardson spent much of his later years in his house in Brookline, Massachusetts, which had a studio attached to ease the strain on his health. The house fell into disrepair and was listed in 2007 as an historic site
7.
North Congregational Church
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North Congregational Church was built in Springfield, Massachusetts in 1872-73, and was one of the early works by noted American architect Henry Hobson Richardson. It is one of his first works in the Romanesque style, the structure is of light sandstone and does not show the more distinctive features of later Richardsonian Romanesque works by Richardson and others. While the exterior is rectangular, the interior is cruciform with the corners filled by functional spaces i. e. the vestibule, the church is located at 18 Salem Street, at the corner of Salem and Mattoon Streets. The North Congregational Society disbanded in 1935 and the church was sold and it was later renamed Hispanic Baptist Church. By 2016, the church was operating as IAR Springfield, part of the Apostolic Renewal Renovation Network, the church is a bilingual Apostolic congregation with Hispanic, African-American and Anglo-Saxon members. It has an attendance of 500 people
8.
Rock (geology)
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Rock or stone is a natural substance, a solid aggregate of one or more minerals or mineraloids. For example, granite, a rock, is a combination of the minerals quartz, feldspar. The Earths outer solid layer, the lithosphere, is made of rock, rock has been used by mankind throughout history. The minerals and metals found in rocks have been essential to human civilization, three major groups of rocks are defined, igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic. The scientific study of rocks is called petrology, which is a component of geology. At a granular level, rocks are composed of grains of minerals, the aggregate minerals forming the rock are held together by chemical bonds. The types and abundance of minerals in a rock are determined by the manner in which the rock was formed, many rocks contain silica, a compound of silicon and oxygen that forms 74. 3% of the Earths crust. This material forms crystals with other compounds in the rock, the proportion of silica in rocks and minerals is a major factor in determining their name and properties. Rocks are geologically classified according to such as mineral and chemical composition, permeability, the texture of the constituent particles. These physical properties are the end result of the processes that formed the rocks, over the course of time, rocks can transform from one type into another, as described by the geological model called the rock cycle. These events produce three general classes of rock, igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic, the three classes of rocks are subdivided into many groups. However, there are no hard and fast boundaries between allied rocks, hence the definitions adopted in establishing rock nomenclature merely correspond to more or less arbitrary selected points in a continuously graduated series. Igneous rock forms through the cooling and solidification of magma or lava and this magma can be derived from partial melts of pre-existing rocks in either a planets mantle or crust. Typically, the melting of rocks is caused by one or more of three processes, an increase in temperature, a decrease in pressure, or a change in composition, igneous rocks are divided into two main categories, plutonic rock and volcanic. Plutonic or intrusive rocks result when magma cools and crystallizes slowly within the Earths crust, a common example of this type is granite. Volcanic or extrusive rocks result from magma reaching the surface either as lava or fragmental ejecta, the chemical abundance and the rate of cooling of magma typically forms a sequence known as Bowens reaction series. Most major igneous rocks are found along this scale, about 64. 7% of the Earths crust by volume consists of igneous rocks, making it the most plentiful category. Of these, 66% are basalts and gabbros, 16% are granite, only 0. 6% are syenites and 0. 3% peridotites and dunites
9.
Masonry
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Masonry is the building of structures from individual units, which are often laid in and bound together by mortar, the term masonry can also refer to the units themselves. The common materials of construction are brick, building stone such as marble, granite, travertine, and limestone, cast stone, concrete block, glass block. Masonry is generally a durable form of construction. However, the used, the quality of the mortar and workmanship. A person who constructs masonry is called a mason or bricklayer, Masonry is commonly used for walls and buildings. Brick and concrete block are the most common types of masonry in use in industrialized nations, Concrete blocks, especially those with hollow cores, offer various possibilities in masonry construction. They generally provide great strength, and are best suited to structures with light transverse loading when the cores remain unfilled. Filling some or all of the cores with concrete or concrete with steel reinforcement offers much greater tensile, the use of material such as bricks and stones can increase the thermal mass of a building and can protect the building from fire. Masonry walls are resistant to projectiles, such as debris from hurricanes or tornadoes. Extreme weather, under circumstances, can cause degradation of masonry due to expansion. Masonry tends to be heavy and must be built upon a foundation, such as reinforced concrete. Other than concrete, masonry construction does not lend well to mechanization. Masonry consists of components and has a low tolerance to oscillation as compared to other materials such as reinforced concrete, plastics, wood. Masonry has high compressive strength under vertical loads but has low tensile strength unless reinforced, the tensile strength of masonry walls can be increased by thickening the wall, or by building masonry piers at intervals. Where practical, steel reinforcements such as windposts can be added, a masonry veneer wall consists of masonry units, usually clay-based bricks, installed on one or both sides of a structurally independent wall usually constructed of wood or masonry. In this context the brick masonry is primarily decorative, not structural, the brick veneer is generally connected to the structural wall by brick ties. There is typically an air gap between the veneer and the structural wall. Concrete blocks, real and cultured stones, and veneer adobe are sometimes used in a very similar veneer fashion
10.
Cuboid
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In geometry, a cuboid is a convex polyhedron bounded by six quadrilateral faces, whose polyhedral graph is the same as that of a cube. By Eulers formula the numbers of faces F, of vertices V, in the case of a cuboid this gives 6 +8 =12 +2, that is, like a cube, a cuboid has 6 faces,8 vertices, and 12 edges. Along with the rectangular cuboids, any parallelepiped is a cuboid of this type, in a rectangular cuboid, all angles are right angles, and opposite faces of a cuboid are equal. By definition this makes it a rectangular prism, and the terms rectangular parallelepiped or orthogonal parallelepiped are also used to designate this polyhedron. The terms rectangular prism and oblong prism, however, are ambiguous, the square cuboid, square box, or right square prism is a special case of the cuboid in which at least two faces are squares. It has Schläfli symbol ×, and its symmetry is doubled from to, the cube is a special case of the square cuboid in which all six faces are squares. It has Schläfli symbol, and its symmetry is raised from, to, if the dimensions of a rectangular cuboid are a, b and c, then its volume is abc and its surface area is 2. The length of the diagonal is d = a 2 + b 2 + c 2. Cuboid shapes are used for boxes, cupboards, rooms, buildings. Cuboids are among those solids that can tessellate 3-dimensional space, the shape is fairly versatile in being able to contain multiple smaller cuboids, e. g. sugar cubes in a box, boxes in a cupboard, cupboards in a room, and rooms in a building. A cuboid with integer edges as well as integer face diagonals is called an Euler brick, a perfect cuboid is an Euler brick whose space diagonal is also an integer. It is currently unknown whether a perfect cuboid actually exists, the number of different nets for a simple cube is 11, however this number increases significantly to 54 for a rectangular cuboid of 3 different lengths. Hyperrectangle Trapezohedron Weisstein, Eric W. Cuboid, rectangular prism and cuboid Paper models and pictures
One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Ashlar". Encyclopædia Britannica. 2 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 733. THis also attests the alternative spellings Ashler and Ashelere.
One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from a publication now in the 
