Architecture and our lives

"Architecture mirrors society's aspirations and beliefs, and represents its attempts to master the land -- to tame the elements and shape geography to suit itself. The sacred earth and stone mountains of early civilizations have given way to landscapes of steel and glass. The most public of all art forms, architecture also affects the most intimate parts of our lives. In modern society, we are born in buildings and die in buildings. In between, we shuttle from home to office -- from one box to another."

As much as people probably don't want to admit it, architecture is one of the many aspects of our lives that affects us the most. As said in this quote, we are born, and almost all of us die in buildings, we live in buildings, and we go, day to day from building to building. Look around the room you are in right now. I bet you, that you can tell, from the architecture and how it was built, approximately how old the building is that you are in right now. For example, I am in the library of my school. The ceiling in this room is yellow and has intricate designs of the past century. As architecture changes, so does how we live. In past days, I have to say that people spent much more time outside, and didn't have much use for buildings except for storage and to sleep in. Now, thanks to modern technology, we spend all of our free time, inside one the computer or watching television. As much as I hate to say it, I suppose that technology has been a benefit to architecture's modernment.

As we grow and change, so does architecture.

Another example of how architecture changes because of culture, is one I found out about when I was on a bus tour in Edinburgh, Scotland. We were touring around the city, and the tourguide asked us if we had noticed the windows of all of the buildings. Of course, most of us had not, but then he explained to us what he was getting at. He said that if we looked closely, the windows toward the top of the building were significantly smaller than the windows of the bottom floors. He explained that architects used to design buidlings this way so that to the human eye, the buildings would look taller than they actually were because of the optical allusion. Because of culture, people feel the need to have bigger homes. Having this optical allusion, it would make any person think that the buildings was actually bigger than it was..and this makes you think that the owner is more priveledged, and this is what culture brings us.