Allies of World War II
The Allies of World War II, called the United Nations from the 1 January 1942 declaration, were the countries that together opposed the Axis powers during the Second World War. The Allies promoted the alliance as a means to control German and Italian aggression. At the start of the war on 1 September 1939, the Allies consisted of France and the United Kingdom, as well as their dependent states, such as British India. Within days they were joined by the independent Dominions of the British Commonwealth: Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. After the start of the German invasion of North Europe until the Balkan Campaign, the Netherlands, Belgium and Yugoslavia joined the Allies. After first having cooperated with Germany in invading Poland whilst remaining neutral in the Allied-Axis conflict, the Soviet Union perforce joined the Allies in June 1941 after being invaded by Germany; the United States provided war materiel and money all along, joined in December 1941 after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
China had been in a prolonged war with Japan since the Marco Polo Bridge Incident of 1937, but joined the Allies in 1941. The alliance was formalised by the Declaration by United Nations, from 1 January 1942. However, the name United Nations was used to describe the Allies during the war; the leaders of the "Big Three"—the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, the United States—controlled Allied strategy. The Big Three together with China were referred as a "trusteeship of the powerful" were recognized as the Allied "Big Four" in the Declaration by United Nations and as the "Four Policemen" of the United Nations. After the war ended, the Allied nations became the basis of the modern United Nations. Members The origins of the Allied powers stem from the Allies of World War I and cooperation of the victorious powers at the Paris Peace Conference, 1919. Germany resented signing Treaty of Versailles; the new Weimar Republic's legitimacy became shaken. However, the 1920s were peaceful. With the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the ensuing Great Depression, political unrest in Europe soared including the rise in support of revanchist nationalists in Germany who blamed the severity of the economic crisis on the Treaty of Versailles.
By the early 1930s, the Nazi Party led by Adolf Hitler became the dominant revanchist movement in Germany and Hitler and the Nazis gained power in 1933. The Nazi regime demanded the immediate cancellation of the Treaty of Versailles and made claims to German-populated Austria, German-populated territories of Czechoslovakia; the likelihood of war was high, the question was whether it could be avoided through strategies such as appeasement. In Asia, when Japan seized Manchuria in 1931, the League of Nations condemned it for aggression against China. Japan responded by leaving the League of Nations in March 1933. After four quiet years, the Sino-Japanese War erupted in 1937 with Japanese forces invading China; the League of Nations initiated sanctions on Japan. The United States, in particular, was sought to support China. In March 1939, Germany took over Czechoslovakia, violating the Munich Agreement signed six months before, demonstrating that the appeasement policy was a failure. Britain and France decided that Hitler had no intention to uphold diplomatic agreements and responded by preparing for war.
On 31 March 1939, Britain formed the Anglo-Polish military alliance in an effort to avert a German attack on the country. The French had a long-standing alliance with Poland since 1921; the Soviet Union sought an alliance with the western powers, but Hitler ended the risk of a war with Stalin by signing the Nazi–Soviet non-aggression pact in August 1939. The agreement secretly divided the independent nations of Eastern Europe between the two powers and assured adequate oil supplies for the German war machine. On 1 September 1939, Germany invaded Poland. On 17 September 1939, the Soviet Union invaded Poland from the east. A Polish government-in-exile was set up and it continued to be one of the Allies, a model followed by other occupied countries. After a quiet winter, Germany in April 1940 invaded and defeated Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands and France. Britain and its Empire stood alone against Mussolini. In June 1941, Hitler broke the non-aggression agreement with Stalin and Germany invaded the Soviet Union.
In December, Japan attacked the Britain. The main lines of World War II had formed. During December 1941, U. S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt devised the name "United Nations" for the Allies and proposed it to British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, he referred to the Big Three and China as a "trusteeship of the powerful", later the "Four Policemen". The Declaration by United Nations on 1 January 1942 was the basis of the modern United Nations. At the Potsdam Conference of July–August 1945, Roosevelt's successor, Harry S. Truman, proposed that the foreign ministers of China, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, the United States "should draft the peace treaties and boundary settlements of Europe", which led to the creation of the Council of Foreign Ministers of the "Big Five", soon thereafter the establishment of those states as the permanent members of the UNSC. Great Britain and other members of the British Commonwealth, most known as the Dominions, declared war on Germany separately from 3 September 1939 with the UK first, all within one week of each other.
British West Africa and the British colonies in E
Le Corbusier
Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, known as Le Corbusier, was a Swiss-French architect, painter, urban planner and one of the pioneers of what is now called modern architecture. He was born in Switzerland and became a French citizen in 1930, his career spanned five decades, he designed buildings in Europe, Japan and North and South America. Dedicated to providing better living conditions for the residents of crowded cities, Le Corbusier was influential in urban planning, was a founding member of the Congrès International d'Architecture Moderne. Le Corbusier prepared the master plan for the city of Chandigarh in India, contributed specific designs for several buildings there. On 17 July 2016, seventeen projects by Le Corbusier in seven countries were inscribed in the list of UNESCO World Heritage Sites as The Architectural Work of Le Corbusier, an Outstanding Contribution to the Modern Movement. Charles-Édouard Jeanneret was born on 6 October 1887 in La Chaux-de-Fonds, a small city in the French-speaking Neuchâtel canton in north-western Switzerland, in the Jura mountains, just 5 kilometres across the border from France.
It was an industrial town, devoted to the manufacture of watches. His father was an artisan who enameled watches, while his mother gave piano lessons, his elder brother Albert was an amateur violinist. He attended a kindergarten. Like his contemporaries Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier did not have formal academic training as an architect, he was attracted to the visual arts and at the age of fifteen he entered the municipal art school in La-Chaux-de-Fonds which taught the applied arts connected with watchmaking. Three years he attended the higher course of decoration, founded by the painter Charles L'Eplattenier, who had studied in Budapest and Paris. Le Corbusier wrote that L'Eplattenier had made him "a man of the woods" and taught him painting from nature, his father took him into the mountains around the town. He wrote "we were on mountaintops, his architecture teacher in the Art School was the architect René Chapallaz, who had a large influence on Le Corbusier's earliest house designs.
However, he reported that it was the art teacher L'Eplattenier who made him choose architecture. "I had a horror of architecture and architects," he wrote. "... I was sixteen, I accepted the verdict and I obeyed. I moved into architecture." Le Corbusier began teaching himself by going to the library to read about architecture and philosophy, by visiting museums, by sketching buildings, by constructing them. In 1905, he and two other students, under the supervision of their teacher, René Chapallaz and built his first house, the Villa Fallet, for the engraver Louis Fallet, a friend of his teacher Charles L'Eplattenier. Located on the forested hillside near Chaux-de-fonds, it was a large chalet with a steep roof in the local alpine style and crafted colored geometric patterns on the façade. The success of this house led to his construction of two similar houses, the Villas Jacquemet and Stotzer, in the same area. In September 1907, he made his first trip outside of Switzerland. In Florence, he visited the Florence Charterhouse in Galluzzo, which made a lifelong impression on him.
"I would have liked to live in one of what they called their cells," he wrote later. "It was the solution for a unique kind of worker's housing, or rather for a terrestrial paradise." He traveled to Paris, during fourteen months between 1908 until 1910 he worked as a draftsman in the office of the architect Auguste Perret, the pioneer of the use of reinforced concrete in residential construction and the architect of the Art Deco landmark Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. Two years between October 1910 and March 1911, he traveled to Germany and worked four months in the office Peter Behrens, where Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius were working and learning. In 1911, he traveled again for five months, he spoke of what he saw during this trip in many of his books, it was the subject of his last book, Le Voyage d'Orient. In 1912, he began his most ambitious project. Located on the forested hillside near La-Chaux-de-Fonds; the Jeanneret-Perret house was larger than the others, in a more innovative style.
The interior spaces were organized around the four pillars of the salon in the center, foretelling the open interiors he would create in his buildings. The project was more expensive to build. However, it led to a commission to build an more imposing villa in the nearby village of Le Locle for a wealthy watch manufacturer. Georges Favre-Jacot. Le Corbusier designed the new house in less than a month; the building was designed to fit its hillside site, interior plan was spacious and designed around a courtyard for maximum light, significant de
Algiers
Algiers is the capital and largest city of Algeria. In 2011, the city's population was estimated to be around 3,500,000. An estimate puts the population of the larger metropolitan city to be around 5,000,000. Algiers is located in the north-central portion of Algeria. Algiers is situated on the west side of a bay of the Mediterranean Sea; the modern part of the city is built on the level ground by the seashore. The casbah and the two quays form a triangle; the city's name is derived via French and Catalan Alger from the Arabic name Al-Jazā’ir, "The Islands". This name refers to the four former islands which lay off the city's coast before becoming part of the mainland in 1525. Al-Jazā’ir is itself a truncated form of the city's older name Jaza'ir Bani Mazghana, "The Islands of the Sons of Mazghana", used by early medieval geographers such as al-Idrisi and Yaqut al-Hamawi. In antiquity, the Greeks knew the town as Ikosion, Latinized as Icosium under Roman rule; the Greeks explained the name as coming from their word for "twenty" because it had been founded by 20 companions of Hercules when he visited the Atlas Mountains during his labors.
In fact, the name transcribed the Punic name ʿWYKSM, "Seagull Island", again named after the site's former islands. Algiers is known as El-Behdja or "Algiers the White" for its whitewashed buildings, seen rising from the sea. A small Phoenician colony on Algiers's former islands was established and taken over by the Carthaginians sometime before the 3rd century BC. After the Punic Wars, the Romans took over administration of the town, which they called Icosium, its ruins now form part of the modern city's marine quarter, with the Rue de la Marine following a former Roman road. Roman cemeteries existed near Bab Azoun; the city was given Latin rights by the emperor Vespasian. The bishops of Icosium are mentioned as late as the 5th century, but the ancient town fell into obscurity during the Muslim conquest of North Africa; the present city was founded in 944 by Bologhine ibn Ziri, the founder of the Berber Zirid–Sanhaja dynasty. He had earlier built a Sanhaja center at Ashir, just south of Algiers.
Although his Zirid dynasty was overthrown by Roger II of Sicily in 1148, the Zirids had lost control of Algiers to their cousins the Hammadids in 1014. The city was wrested from the Hammadids by the Almohads in 1159, in the 13th century came under the dominion of the Ziyanid sultans of Tlemcen. Nominally part of the sultanate of Tlemcen, Algiers had a large measure of independence under amirs of its own due to Oran being the chief seaport of the Ziyanids; the Peñón of Algiers, an islet in front of Algiers harbour had been occupied by the Spaniards as early as 1302. Thereafter, a considerable amount of trade began to flow between Spain. However, Algiers continued to be of comparatively little importance until after the expulsion of the Moors from Spain, many of whom sought asylum in the city. In 1510, following their occupation of Oran and other towns on the coast of Africa, the Spaniards fortified the islet of Peñon and imposed a levy intended to suppress corsair activity. In 1516, the amir of Algiers, Selim b.
Teumi, invited the corsair brothers Aruj and Hayreddin Barbarossa to expel the Spaniards. Aruj came to Algiers, ordered the assassination of Selim, seized the town and ousted the Spanish in the Capture of Algiers. Hayreddin, succeeding Aruj after the latter was killed in battle against the Spaniards in the Fall of Tlemcen, was the founder of the pashaluk, which subsequently became the beylik, of Algeria. Barbarossa lost Algiers in 1524 but regained it with the Capture of Algiers, formally invited the Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent to accept sovereignty over the territory and to annex Algiers to the Ottoman Empire. Algiers from this time became the chief seat of the Barbary pirates. In October 1541 in the Algiers expedition, the King of Spain and Holy Roman Emperor Charles V sought to capture the city, but a storm destroyed a great number of his ships, his army of some 30,000, chiefly made up of Spaniards, was defeated by the Algerians under their Pasha, Hassan. Formally part of the Ottoman Empire but free from Ottoman control, starting in the 16th century Algiers turned to piracy and ransoming.
Due to its location on the periphery of both the Ottoman and European economic spheres, depending for its existence on a Mediterranean, controlled by European shipping, backed by European navies, piracy became the primary economic activity. Repeated attempts were made by various nations to subdue the pirates that disturbed shipping in the western Mediterranean and engaged in slave raids as far north as Iceland; the United States fought two wars over Algiers' attacks on shipping. Among the notable people held for ransom was the future Spanish novelist Miguel de Cervantes, captive in Algiers five years, who wrote two plays set in Algiers of the period; the primary source for knowledge of Algiers of this period, since there are no contemporary local sources, is the Topografía e historia general de Argel, published by Diego de Haedo, but whose authorship is disputed. This work describes in detail the city, the behavior of its inhabitants, its military defenses, with the unsuccessful hope of facilitating an attack by Spain so as to end the piracy.
A signifi
Architect
An architect is a person who plans and reviews the construction of buildings. To practice architecture means to provide services in connection with the design of buildings and the space within the site surrounding the buildings that have human occupancy or use as their principal purpose. Etymologically, architect derives from the Latin architectus, which derives from the Greek, i.e. chief builder. Professionally, an architect's decisions affect public safety, thus an architect must undergo specialized training consisting of advanced education and a practicum for practical experience to earn a license to practice architecture. Practical and academic requirements for becoming an architect vary by jurisdiction. Throughout ancient and medieval history, most of the architectural design and construction was carried out by artisans—such as stone masons and carpenters, rising to the role of master builder; until modern times, there was no clear distinction between engineer. In Europe, the titles architect and engineer were geographical variations that referred to the same person used interchangeably.
It is suggested that various developments in technology and mathematics allowed the development of the professional'gentleman' architect, separate from the hands-on craftsman. Paper was not used in Europe for drawing until the 15th century but became available after 1500. Pencils were used more for drawing by 1600; the availability of both allowed pre-construction drawings to be made by professionals. Concurrently, the introduction of linear perspective and innovations such as the use of different projections to describe a three-dimensional building in two dimensions, together with an increased understanding of dimensional accuracy, helped building designers communicate their ideas. However, the development was gradual; until the 18th-century, buildings continued to be designed and set out by craftsmen with the exception of high-status projects. In most developed countries, only those qualified with an appropriate license, certification or registration with a relevant body may practice architecture.
Such licensure requires a university degree, successful completion of exams, as well as a training period. Representation of oneself as an architect through the use of terms and titles is restricted to licensed individuals by law, although in general, derivatives such as architectural designer are not protected. To practice architecture implies the ability to practice independently of supervision; the term building design professional, by contrast, is a much broader term that includes professionals who practice independently under an alternate profession, such as engineering professionals, or those who assist in the practice architecture under the supervision of a licensed architect such as intern architects. In many places, non-licensed individuals may perform design services outside the professional restrictions, such design houses and other smaller structures. In the architectural profession and environmental knowledge and construction management, an understanding of business are as important as design.
However, the design is the driving force throughout the project and beyond. An architect accepts a commission from a client; the commission might involve preparing feasibility reports, building audits, the design of a building or of several buildings and the spaces among them. The architect participates in developing the requirements. Throughout the project, the architect co-ordinates a design team. Structural and electrical engineers and other specialists, are hired by the client or the architect, who must ensure that the work is co-ordinated to construct the design; the architect, once hired by a client, is responsible for creating a design concept that both meets the requirements of that client and provides a facility suitable to the required use. The architect must meet with, question, the client in order to ascertain all the requirements of the planned project; the full brief is not clear at the beginning: entailing a degree of risk in the design undertaking. The architect may make early proposals to the client, which may rework the terms of the brief.
The "program" is essential to producing a project. This is a guide for the architect in creating the design concept. Design proposal are expected to be both imaginative and pragmatic. Depending on the place, finance and available crafts and technology in which the design takes place, the precise extent and nature of these expectations will vary. F oresight is a prerequisite as designing buildings is a complex and demanding undertaking. Any design concept must at a early stage in its generation take into account a great number of issues and variables which include qualities of space, the end-use and life-cycle of these proposed spaces, connections and aspects between spaces including how they are put together as well as the impact of proposals on the immediate and wider locality. Selection of appropriate materials and technology must be considered and reviewed at an early stage in the design to ensure there are no setbacks which may occur later; the site and its environs, as well as the culture and history of the place, will influence the design.
The design must countenance increasing concerns with environmental sustainability. The architect may introduce, to greater or lesser degrees, aspects of mathematics and a
Nazi Germany
Nazi Germany is the common English name for Germany between 1933 and 1945, when Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party controlled the country through a dictatorship. Under Hitler's rule, Germany was transformed into a totalitarian state that controlled nearly all aspects of life via the Gleichschaltung legal process; the official name of the state was Deutsches Reich until 1943 and Großdeutsches Reich from 1943 to 1945. Nazi Germany is known as the Third Reich, meaning "Third Realm" or "Third Empire", the first two being the Holy Roman Empire and the German Empire; the Nazi regime ended. Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany by the President of the Weimar Republic, Paul von Hindenburg, on 30 January 1933; the NSDAP began to eliminate all political opposition and consolidate its power. Hindenburg died on 2 August 1934 and Hitler became dictator of Germany by merging the offices and powers of the Chancellery and Presidency. A national referendum held 19 August 1934 confirmed Hitler as sole Führer of Germany.
All power was centralised in Hitler's person and his word became the highest law. The government was not a coordinated, co-operating body, but a collection of factions struggling for power and Hitler's favour. In the midst of the Great Depression, the Nazis restored economic stability and ended mass unemployment using heavy military spending and a mixed economy. Extensive public works were undertaken, including the construction of Autobahnen; the return to economic stability boosted the regime's popularity. Racism antisemitism, was a central feature of the regime; the Germanic peoples were considered by the Nazis to be the master race, the purest branch of the Aryan race. Discrimination and persecution against Jews and Romani people began in earnest after the seizure of power; the first concentration camps were established in March 1933. Jews and others deemed undesirable were imprisoned, liberals and communists were killed, imprisoned, or exiled. Christian churches and citizens that opposed Hitler's rule were oppressed, many leaders imprisoned.
Education focused on racial biology, population policy, fitness for military service. Career and educational opportunities for women were curtailed. Recreation and tourism were organised via the Strength Through Joy program, the 1936 Summer Olympics showcased Germany on the international stage. Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels made effective use of film, mass rallies, Hitler's hypnotic oratory to influence public opinion; the government controlled artistic expression, promoting specific art forms and banning or discouraging others. The Nazi regime dominated neighbours through military threats in the years leading up to war. Nazi Germany made aggressive territorial demands, threatening war if these were not met, it seized Austria and Czechoslovakia in 1938 and 1939. Germany signed a non-aggression pact with the USSR, invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, launching World War II in Europe. By early 1941, Germany controlled much of Europe. Reichskommissariats took control of conquered areas and a German administration was established in the remainder of Poland.
Germany exploited labour of both its occupied territories and its allies. In the Holocaust, millions of Jews and other peoples deemed undesirable by the state were imprisoned, murdered in Nazi concentration camps and extermination camps, or shot. While the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 was successful, the Soviet resurgence and entry of the US into the war meant the Wehrmacht lost the initiative on the Eastern Front in 1943 and by late 1944 had been pushed back to the pre-1939 border. Large-scale aerial bombing of Germany escalated in 1944 and the Axis powers were driven back in Eastern and Southern Europe. After the Allied invasion of France, Germany was conquered by the Soviet Union from the east and the other Allies from the west, capitulated in May 1945. Hitler's refusal to admit defeat led to massive destruction of German infrastructure and additional war-related deaths in the closing months of the war; the victorious Allies initiated a policy of denazification and put many of the surviving Nazi leadership on trial for war crimes at the Nuremberg trials.
The official name of the state was Deutsches Reich from 1933 to 1943 and Großdeutsches Reich from 1943 to 1945, while common English terms are "Nazi Germany" and "Third Reich". The latter, adopted by Nazi propaganda as Drittes Reich, was first used in Das Dritte Reich, a 1923 book by Arthur Moeller van den Bruck; the book counted the Holy Roman Empire as the German Empire as the second. Germany was known as the Weimar Republic during the years 1919 to 1933, it was a republic with a semi-presidential system. The Weimar Republic faced numerous problems, including hyperinflation, political extremism, contentious relationships with the Allied victors of World War I, a series of failed attempts at coalition government by divided political parties. Severe setbacks to the German economy began after World War I ended because of reparations payments required under the 1919 Treaty of Versailles; the government printed money to make the payments and to repay the country's war debt, but the resulting hyperinflation led to inflated prices for consumer goods, economic chaos, food riots.
When the government defaulted on their reparations payments in January 1923, French troops occupied German industrial areas along the Ruhr and widespread civil unrest followed. The National Socialist German Workers' Party (National
Modern architecture
Modern architecture, or modernist architecture was based upon new and innovative technologies of construction the use of glass and reinforced concrete. It emerged in the first half of the 20th century and became dominant after World War II until the 1980s, when it was replaced as the principal style for institutional and corporate buildings by postmodern architecture. Modern architecture emerged at the end of the 19th century from revolutions in technology and building materials, from a desire to break away from historical architectural styles and to invent something, purely functional and new; the revolution in materials came first, with the use of cast iron, plate glass, reinforced concrete, to build structures that were stronger and taller. The cast plate glass process was invented in 1848, allowing the manufacture of large windows; the Crystal Palace by Joseph Paxton at the Great Exhibition of 1851 was an early example of iron and plate glass construction, followed in 1864 by the first glass and metal curtain wall.
These developments together led to the first steel-framed skyscraper, the ten-story Home Insurance Building in Chicago, built in 1884 by William Le Baron Jenney. The iron frame construction of the Eiffel Tower the tallest structure in the world, captured the imagination of millions of visitors to the 1889 Paris Universal Exposition. French industrialist François Coignet was the first to use iron-reinforced concrete, that is, concrete strengthened with iron bars, as a technique for constructing buildings. In 1853 Coignet built the first iron reinforced concrete structure, a four-story house in the suburbs of Paris. A further important step forward was the invention of the safety elevator by Elisha Otis, first demonstrated at the Crystal Palace exposition in 1852, which made tall office and apartment buildings practical. Another important technology for the new architecture was electric light, which reduced the inherent danger of fires caused by gas in the 19th century; the debut of new materials and techniques inspired architects to break away from the neoclassical and eclectic models that dominated European and American architecture in the late 19th century, most notably eclecticism and Edwardian architecture, the Beaux-Arts architectural style.
This break with the past was urged by the architectural theorist and historian Eugène Viollet-le-Duc. In his 1872 book Entretiens sur L'Architecture, he urged: "use the means and knowledge given to us by our times, without the intervening traditions which are no longer viable today, in that way we can inaugurate a new architecture. For each function its material; this book influenced a generation of architects, including Louis Sullivan, Victor Horta, Hector Guimard, Antoni Gaudí. At the end of the 19th century, a few architects began to challenge the traditional Beaux Arts and Neoclassical styles that dominated architecture in Europe and the United States; the Glasgow School of Art designed by Charles Rennie MacIntosh, had a facade dominated by large vertical bays of windows. The Art Nouveau style was launched in the 1890s by Victor Horta in Belgium and Hector Guimard in France. In Barcelona, Antonio Gaudi conceived architecture as a form of sculpture. In 1903–1904 in Paris Auguste Perret and Henri Sauvage began to use reinforced concrete only used for industrial structures, to build apartment buildings.
Reinforced concrete, which could be molded into any shape, which could create enormous spaces without the need of supporting pillars, replaced stone and brick as the primary material for modernist architects. The first concrete apartment buildings by Perret and Sauvage were covered with ceramic tiles, but in 1905 Perret built the first concrete parking garage on 51 rue de Ponthieu in Paris. Henri Sauvage added another construction innovation in an apartment building on Rue Vavin in Paris. Between 1910 and 1913, Auguste Perret built the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, a masterpiece of reinforced concrete construction, with Art Deco sculptural bas-reliefs on the facade by Antoine Bourdelle; because of the concrete construction, no columns blocked the spectator's view of the stage. Otto Wagner, in Vienna, was another pioneer of the new style. In his book Moderne Architektur he had called for a more rationalist style of architecture, based on "modern life", he designed a stylized ornamental metro station at Karlsplatz in Vienna an ornamental Art Nouveau residence, Majolika House, before moving to a much more geometric and simplified style, without ornament, in the Austrian Postal Savings Bank.
Wagner declared his intention to express the function of the building in its exterior. The reinforced concrete exterior was covered with plaques of marble attached with bolts of polished aluminum; the interior was purely functional and spare, a large open space of steel and concrete where the only decoration was the structure itself. The Viennese architect Adolf Loos began removing any ornament from his buildings, his S
Perspective (graphical)
Perspective in the graphic arts is an approximate representation on a flat surface, of an image as it is seen by the eye. The two most characteristic features of perspective are that objects appear smaller as their distance from the observer increases. Italian Renaissance painters and architects including Filippo Brunelleschi, Paolo Uccello, Piero della Francesca and Luca Pacioli studied linear perspective, wrote treatises on it, incorporated it into their artworks, thus contributing to the mathematics of art. Linear perspective always works by representing the light that passes from a scene through an imaginary rectangle, to the viewer's eye, as if a viewer were looking through a window and painting what is seen directly onto the windowpane. If viewed from the same spot as the windowpane was painted, the painted image would be identical to what was seen through the unpainted window; each painted object in the scene is thus a flat, scaled down version of the object on the other side of the window.
Because each portion of the painted object lies on the straight line from the viewer's eye to the equivalent portion of the real object it represents, the viewer sees no difference between the painted scene on the windowpane and the view of the real scene. All perspective drawings assume. Objects are scaled relative to that viewer. An object is not scaled evenly: a circle appears as an ellipse and a square can appear as a trapezoid; this distortion is referred to as foreshortening. Perspective drawings have a horizon line, implied; this line, directly opposite the viewer's eye, represents objects infinitely far away. They have shrunk, to the infinitesimal thickness of a line, it is analogous to the Earth's horizon. Any perspective representation of a scene that includes parallel lines has one or more vanishing points in a perspective drawing. A one-point perspective drawing means that the drawing has a single vanishing point directly opposite the viewer's eye and on the horizon line. All lines parallel with the viewer's line of sight recede to the horizon towards this vanishing point.
This is the standard "receding railroad tracks" phenomenon. A two-point drawing would have lines parallel to two different angles. Any number of vanishing points are possible in a drawing, one for each set of parallel lines that are at an angle relative to the plane of the drawing. Perspectives consisting of many parallel lines are observed most when drawing architecture; because it is rare to have a scene consisting of lines parallel to the three Cartesian axes, it is rare to see perspectives in practice with only one, two, or three vanishing points. The earliest art paintings and drawings sized many objects and characters hierarchically according to their spiritual or thematic importance, not their distance from the viewer, did not use foreshortening; the most important figures are shown as the highest in a composition from hieratic motives, leading to the so-called "vertical perspective", common in the art of Ancient Egypt, where a group of "nearer" figures are shown below the larger figure or figures.
The only method to indicate the relative position of elements in the composition was by overlapping, of which much use is made in works like the Parthenon Marbles. Chinese artists made use of oblique perspective from the first or second century until the 18th century, it is not certain. Oblique projection is seen in Japanese art, such as in the Ukiyo-e paintings of Torii Kiyonaga. In the 18th century, Chinese artists began to combine oblique perspective with regular diminution of size of people and objects with distance. Systematic attempts to evolve a system of perspective are considered to have begun around the fifth century BC in the art of ancient Greece, as part of a developing interest in illusionism allied to theatrical scenery; this was detailed within Aristotle's Poetics as skenographia: using flat panels on a stage to give the illusion of depth. The philosophers Anaxagoras and Democritus worked out geometric theories of perspective for use with skenographia. Alcibiades had paintings in his house designed using skenographia, so this art was not confined to the stage.
Euclid's Optics introduced a mathematical theory of perspective, but there is some debate over the extent to which Euclid's perspective coincides with the modern mathematical definition. Various paintings and drawings from the Middle Ages show amateur attempts at projections of objects, where parallel lines are represented in isometric projection, or by nonparallel ones without a vanishing point. By the periods of antiquity, artists those in less popular traditions, were well aware that distant objects could be shown smaller than those close at hand for increased realism, but whether this convention was used in a work depended on many factors; some of the paintings found in the ruins o
