50 Architecture Ideas You Really Need to Know

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First annotation on Aug 3rd, 2025.

Creating the precise curves needed to build a vault is a difficult business, especially if you only have stones and ordinary mortar to build with. You have to put up supporting timber formwork, known as centring, cut each stone very carefully and precisely and then lay the stones on top of the timber. Only long afterwards, when the mortar has set hard, can the centring be removed. With concrete, however, the centring could be much lighter in weight and there was less skill involved in building the vault above it. Since the concrete set quickly, the centring could be removed sooner and the job finished faster.

Unlike earlier philosophers, such as Thomas Hobbes, who saw mankind as pre-eminently selfish, Shaftesbury saw much more potential for virtue, for distinguishing between right and wrong, in humanity. Shaftesbury was also interested in aesthetics, the philosophy of the arts, and drew parallels between artistic beauty and virtue. The most radiant beauty for Shaftesbury was moral beauty, honesty, truth; but the converse for the philosophical earl was also true: artistic beauty was also morally good. As Keats would later, he equated beauty with truth, adding that beautiful architecture had true proportions. For all Beauty is Truth. True Features make the Beauty of a face; and true Proportions the Beauty of Architecture; as true measures that of Harmony and Musick. Lord Shaftesbury
Taste was the ability to be able to distinguish beauty from ugliness – and also to differentiate between moral good and bad. Taste

Townscape identifies many features like those in the view of Oxford (below) that make city scenery distinctive. Here are a few of the most important. •Focal point Structures that form a focus – towers, statues, columns, crosses. •Enclosure Quiet, human-scale precincts, such as squares or courtyards. •Viscosity The way in which people 'slow down' – to talk, meet, window-shop, buy a newspaper – in a healthy urban environment. •Vista The way in which the eye can be led through a scene – vistas may be open, grandiose or screened, for example, by trees. •Punctuation and incident Buildings and objects that catch the eye and give structure to a townscape. •Scale Our perception of the size and prominence of buildings and other structures.