Journal 2

Well, lest start by saying that there are five English courses that we have taken during our career. I think that its great that people, by doing an exam can prove their English skills and jump one or even two English levels, even though, I think that as to many people sometimes the course is really easy, for other people it is really hard, because there’s people who knows English, and there’s other that don’t know nothing at all, and these English courses cant start by teaching truly basic things… it is something hard to solve by the way hehehe… I enjoyed it, because it wasn’t a class of grammar at all, it was interesting aspects of architecture in another language, so I really enjoyed it, and think that it help me as a professional to be.

As I was saying, I enjoyed English courses, it really enlarged my vocabulary… but I don’t until which level English courses can improve because as I just said, in a class there is a large range of knowledge of this language so maybe things that I think can help me, maybe just wont help someone who does not speaks English at all… There’s something that we just have to now clearly, and is that, to people that don’t know English at all, in 5 trimesters wont improve as much as teachers and the same university would like, because of the thing that those 5 levels are balanced into people that knows and people that don’t.

Having the online componet was very useful to me, I could do classes from home, and get to know some helpful tools in the web that may be useful in my future, for example the blogger, which I’ve explained in Journal 1.

I think that English courses shouldn’t be obligatories, they should be part of our pensum by in the Electivas part, and then maybe it can be not more hard but yet more intense, like
History in English… well, Architecture in English, and teach things that maybe we don’t see in other courses of the career.

By the way, you all teachers are really good and I really appreciated your time given to us and enjoyed you classes!

Bye!!!!

Journal 1

Well, lets see...
My blog is an accumulation of activities that I do in my English course at university (Simon Bolivar University) and some interesting stuff that I find on the web. In the blog there are several posts that consist of a combination of text and pictures related to it; the design of the blog is easy for the viewer, but the bad thing is that if there's too many posts, they just accumulate in one side of the page so people dont know sometimes that those posts exists.

I like my blog because the design is nice, and clear. The things that're posted are completed, although there might be some missing, the pictures on my blog are nice, and truly related to architecture, and the black background just highlights the texts and pictures.

In a language class as mine (english course) it is important to use and have a blog for the interaction between all the students. It is really good to share jobs with other students, not only of our class but also people all around the world... so all of us learn more and get to have tons of interesting information.

In our future, a blog may be helpful and also very useful as a consulting web-book, the architect may see others work and get ideas for his own works...although, I think that a blog is more useful for a class, not for a professional, but that is how I think nowadays, so I really don’t know... who knows!!! maybe I'll be writing here in 5 or 10 years as a professional. =)

Montreal

Montreal is the second largest city in Canada and the largest city in the province of Quebec.

As in most parts of Quebec, French is the most common spoken language in the city. Nevertheless, Montreal has a substantial anglophone population and many of the residents are bilingual. Montreal is a "Gamma" global city, hosting a multitude of international festivals and events including the XXI Summer Olympiad, Juste pour Rire (Just for Laughs), the Montreal Jazz Festival, the Formula One Canadian Grand Prix, the Montreal World Film Festival, and many others. During the period of prohibition in the USA, Montreal became well-known as one of North America's "sin cities" with unparalleled nightlife a reputation it still holds today.

Downtown Montreal lies at the foot of Mount Royal, which is designated as a major urban park. The Downtown area contains dozens of notable skyscrapers — which, by law, cannot be higher than Mount Royal — including the aforementioned 1000 de La Gauchetière and 1250 René-Lévesque, as well as Ieoh Ming Pei's Place Ville-Marie. The Tour de la Bourse is also a significant building in Montreal, as it is where all stock and derivative trades take place, and is also home to a successful program to encourage nesting peregrine falcons.

Montreal is known for the contrast between old and new. The Maison des Cooperants (a 146 m / 479 ft tall building) is right in front of an old church. Much of Old Montreal has been kept the way it was back in the day Montreal was first established. Old Montreal was a worldwide port, but shipping has been moved further east to the Port de Montreal site, leaving the Old Port/Vieux-Port as an historical area. The most recent trip to the North Pole departed from that specific port. The Montreal Skyline is ranked eighth in the Emporis in skyline views, a focal point in Montreal's recognition. The reason the Olympic Stadium was built 6 kilometres (3.7 miles) from downtown is that the owners thought that Montreal's downtown would expand to where the Olympic Stadium now stands.

Old Montreal

Southeast of downtown is Old Montreal (Vieux-Montréal), an historic area with such attractions as the Old Port, Place Jacques-Cartier, City Hall, the Marché Bonsecours, Place d'Armes, Pointe-à-Callière Museum, and the Notre-Dame de Montréal Basilica. Architecture and cobbled streets in Old Montreal have been maintained or restored to keep the look of the city in its earliest days as a settlement, and horse-drawn calèches help maintain that image. Old Montreal was a worldwide port, but shipping has been moved further east to the Port de Montreal site, leaving the riverside area of Old Port/Vieux-Port as an historical area now restored and maintained by Parks Canada.

BRIDGES

WHAT IS A BRIDGE?
A bridge is a structure built to span a gorge, valley, road, railroad track, river, body of water, or any other physical obstacle.

TYPES OF BRIDGES
There are four main types of bridges: beam bridges, cantilever bridges, arch bridges ,etc.

By use
A bridge is usually designed for trains, pedestrian or road traffic, a pipeline or waterway for water transport or barge traffic. In some cases there may be restrictions in use. For example, it may be a bridge carrying a highway and forbidden for pedestrians and bicycles, or a pedestrian bridge, possibly also for bicycles.

An aqueduct is a bridge that carries water, resembling a viaduct.

Decorative and ceremonial bridges

To create a beautiful image, some bridges are built much taller than necessary. This type, often found in east-asian style gardens, is called a Moon bridge, evoking a rising full moon.

Other garden bridges may cross only a dry bed of stream washed pebbles, intended only to convey an impression of a stream.

Often in palaces a bridge will be built over an artificial waterway as symbolic of a passage to an important place or state of mind. A set of five bridges cross a sinuous waterway in an important courtyard of the Forbidden City in Beijing, China. The central bridge was reserved exclusively for the use of the Emperor, Empress, and their attendants.

TECHNOLOGY INVOLVED IN BUILDING BRIDGES
New bridges are built either to replace old structures that no longer meet the demands of modern traffic or to cross obstacles on a new transportation route. Old bridges are replaced when repairs cannot be made economically or when traffic becomes too heavy for the old bridge. New transportation routes are built when traffic levels have outgrown the capacity of existing routes or simply to make it faster to get from one busy place to another. Often, new transportation routes are part of government programs to promote regional economic development.

In the United States, state and local transportation agencies determine where new bridges are needed and pay a small portion of the cost. The federal government usually pays for most of the construction expense, using money generated from taxes. Bridges funded by tax dollars are used free of charge. The few bridges for which a toll is charged to drivers for use are funded through the sale of bonds to raise money for construction. The money collected from the toll is used to pay back the bonds. The use of tolls and borrowing to finance bridge construction was more widespread in the past than it is today.

MARACAIBO'S LAKE BRIDGE

One of the longest bridges in the world (8km), built in 1962 over Lake Maracaibo, connected by a 55km strait to the Gulf of Venezuela. Developed since 1918 by foreign concerns keen to capitalize on the riches of oil production. A-frame pylons support a single cable at each side.

Name:
Lake Maracaibo Bridge,

General Rafael Urdaneta Bridge
Built:

1958 - 1962
Status:

in use
Location:

Maracaibo, Zulia, Venezuela
Crosses:

Lake Maracaibo

Designer:

Riccardo Morandi

Structural Type:
Cable-stayed bridge
Function / usage:
Motorway bridge / freeway bridge


Chronology
1957
International competition
24 August 1962
Opening
April 1964

CHATLOG 1

karenplasse says: Hi dani, wassup!!!

danielagil85 says: Hiiiii kaaaaaaaren… well here at home…what do we have to do today?

Karenplasse says: well, we have to talk about blogger and that stuff and we should post our brain maps if we haven’t done it!

Danielagil85 says: ohhh great! I love posting things on the blog; it’s interesting and also very useful

Karenplasse says: yes! They are very useful, especially in our careers you know?

Danielagil85 says: yesssssss, you’re correct! It’s cool because we can post interesting things of architecture, building, etc., that we find interesting on the internet in our blogs

Karenplasse says: yeap! And we can share it with all our classmates, teachers and inclusive, people interested on architecture all around the world.

Danielagil85 says: it is so great!... by the way, did you know that our last trimester’s blogs, were nominated as one of the best URLs in the internet course categories?

Karenplasse says: yes!!! I did vote for us hahahaha, but I don’t know if we won it

Danielagil85 says: hahaha, well… we surely won, our blogs are very interesting, and most of them are pretty well done… and have good info…

Karenplasse says: yes, and it isn’t only that, the best thing is that this English course evaluates them, and I enjoy doing it, so it’s cool

Danielagil85 says: yes, I also think that….well gotta go; it’s almost time for me to go to university, so…bye bye!!!

Concert Halls

"A concert hall is a room that functions as a big resonating chamber for music. The classic rectangular lines of the interior shape of a good concert hall are based wholly and practically on laws of physics: the way sound behaves in space. The countless innovative design ideas and construction techniques in modern architecture have also enabled concert halls of various shapes to achieve optimum acoustic qualities. The spectacular modern design of concert halls enhances the beauty and enjoyment of music making inside the gigantic modern sculptures, translating the acoustic rhythm into architectural visual rhythm to create a splendid fusion of various art forms."

Now-a-days, designers, engineers, architects, etc. are thinking not only about building simple things with common machineries and stuff... technology is the central and main character of our history.

Concert halls, as stadiums among others, have been part of the urban edifications that innovate and amaze us, just as the four I've just mentioned have amazed me!

It's incredible what man, US, can do today...

Sydney Opera House, Australia

Architect: Jorn Utzon
Acoustics: Nagata Acoustics


Like Jorn Utzon’s other works, the Sydney Opera House shows his sense of architecture as art, and natural instinct for organic structures related to site conditions. It is a beautiful freestanding, sculptural tripartite structure jutting out into Sydney Harbor and is overlooked by the Sydney Harbor Bridge.

The Sydney Opera House looks like white sailing boats or gigantic white sea shells floating on the blue Sydney Harbor; it also looks like white blooming flowers from some angles. The famous opera house is actually a collection of performance spaces, under white-tiled, sail-shaped concrete shell vaults.

The Australian Ballet, Opera Australia, Sydney Symphony and the Australian Chamber Orchestra are the primary users of the Sydney Opera House. The Western Loggia fulfils Jorn Utzon's vision for the harbour as a focal point for all Sydney Opera House's five venues. The Western Loggia is more than 45m in length and 5m wide with large windows and glass foyer façade, enlivening the Broadwalk so that visitors can experience more of the stunning harbour setting.

A gloriously colorful floor-to–ceiling woolen tapestry in the reception hall designed by Jorn Utzon acts as decorative art work as well as acoustic aid. The tapestry displays stunning colors and visual rhythms. The gold color represents an explosion of violins, the black vertical shapes relate to the rhythm of the music, and the color patches indicate the individual instruments.

Davies Symphony Hall, San Francisco, CA, USA

Architect Company: Skidmore, Owings & Merrill
Acoustic Designer: Lawrence Kierkegaard

The front round exterior resembles a gigantic piano keyboard with green glass walls. When the lights illuminate from inside of the concert hall, the movements or visual "rhythms" created by the concert goers in the lobbies can be seen from the outside, which creates the illusion that the gigantic piano keyboard is being played. The whole structure is fan-shaped with a side entrance. Henry Moore's sculpture is in the front.

Interior:
The vertical strips of mirrors on the walls in the 3-level lobbies echo the exterior piano keyboard; the red carpets in the hallways create attractive contrast with the green glass walls. There are 2,743 seats in the concert hall. 88 FRP (fiberglass reinforced plastic) wall panels inside the concert hall are the key elements which create good acoustics. Mounted onto massive steel trusses, the walls are intended to "close in" the space around the orchestra and direct the sound to the audience and the musicians.

Hollow steel tubes are bonded to fiberglass skin and filled with sand to form the acoustical panels. The panels are reinforced by plastic-covered steel tubes filled with sand to reduce vibration. The less vibration, the less absorption of sound.

The stage wooden walls with built-in Schroeder acoustic diffusers reflect the sounds at varying rates, prolonging reverberation time. The 59 acrylic panels, each weighs 111 pounds, are suspended from steel cables to form a tunable canopy to improve sounds for the orchestra. These transparent panels can be individually raised, lowered, or tilted via computer controls to highlight sections of the orchestra. People often refer to these shiny panels as "sound clouds" which seem to float above the stage.The shallow curve of each panel distributes sound evenly in all directions. Angled front panels direct sounds into the audience.
The fabric panels along the walls can be lowered or lifted by the computer to accommodate the acoustics.

The addition of aesthetic enhancements of cherry veneer seats with end panels and plush mohair fabric seats has helped to reduce the amplification levels to achieve the best acoustic effects.

Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles, CA, USA

Architect: Frank Gehry
Acoustics: Yasuhisa Toyota of Nagata Acoustics


The swooping, shimmering stainless steel curves shine in the sun in quick flashes, throwing reflections of nearby buildings among the shadows.

The upper parts stretch up toward the sky, while the lower parts bend down toward passersby. The curved exterior corridors circumscribing the building create unique spatial experiences. A sculptural rose blossoms in the garden of the Disney Concert Hall.

There are dramatic skylights in the entry lobby. Undulating walls in the pre-concert foyer reach up to the roof, drawing light from one of the building’s 4 large skylights. The main auditorium has 2,265 seats. Concert hall seats upholstered with floral fabric were designed by Frank Gehry.

A billowing wood ceiling hangs lightly over the space, strategically placed to achieve the early sound reflection. Sculpted Douglas fir and cedar are used in the rectangle shaped auditorium; swooping concave walls of staggered wood panels hold terraced seating in the “vineyard” layout. The audience surrounds the stage, which is elevated slightly higher than the adjacent orchestra seats.

The concert platform is composed of 13 stage lifts, each driven by an individual motor and capable of wide range of stage configurations. The lifts are operated by wireless computer technology with touch screen control that can be programmed in advance and controled by a single operator. These various stage configurations create the effective staging of everything from a huge orchestra to small ensemble groups.

A mechanically operated stair automatically raises and lowers with the stage various configurations to provide access to the upper platform level. A combination of the warm wood, the molded forms, and the resultant vibrancy of sound creates the perception of being inside a living sculpture whose pulse is music. The mirror-like stainless steel exterior forms a stunning organic sculpture. The rich wood interior allows musicians and listeners to dwell inside an instrument of exquisite craftsmanship, which is like enjoying music inside a gigantic modern sculpture.

Tenerife Opera House, Canary Islands, Spain

Design Architect: Santiago Calatrava
Acoustic Consultants: Alfonso Garcia Schermes, BBM Muller

It's a multifunction building for the Tenerife Symphony Orchestra, for chamber music groups, and for performances of dance, theater, and Spanish operetta. International conferences are also held here.

The Tenerife Opera House sits on a 5.7-acre site by the ocean. The auditorium covers 73,000 square feet (6,741 square meters). The rest of the site is taken up by the symphony administration building and a public plaza that is covered with local dark-gray stone, with underground parking.

The Tenerife Opera House is alive with visual movements that have many island associations. Its bold forms pop against the brilliant blue of the Atlantic Ocean and endless sky, and its visual rhythms or movements make it look like one of the many ocean waves crashing into the shoreline. It also looks like a seabird or seashell from various angles. From certain angles, it resembles an orchid as well.

The structure’s entire skin of 194,000 square feet (18,000 square meters) is covered by a mosaic of “trencadis,” or broken white ceramics which make the building glisten in the moonlight.

A total of 2000 tons (1.8 million kilograms) of white concrete made locally from river sand was used for the building that has stunning pure white crystalline ceiling with triangular sheets of glass.

The symphonic stage in the larger hall (with 1668 seats) has 22-square-foot (2-square-meter) modules that are individually movable by a hydraulic system. There is a “variable” acoustic system in the symphony hall. Surface materials are solid pressed wood covered with fiberglass. This assembly has opening or closing glass panels, exposing either the fiberglass material or the wood, depending on the acoustical requirements of the event.

The back walls of the chamber music hall (with 410 seats) are covered with horizontal wood slats, with fiberglass behind them. An open lobby separates the two halls to create an acoustical separation so that events can be held simultaneously in both. Cool air comes up from the air-conditioning outlets below the seats in both of the symphony hall and the chamber music hall to eliminate the need for HVAC (heating, ventilation, air-conditioning) installations that would disturb the clean interior lines.

Once described as the Mozart of architecture, Santiago Calatrava designs buildings as artworks with dramatic, unique, dynamic, graceful forms and beauty.

Rhythm

Ritual

Rhythm and ritual connection

What did I create this Blog?

This blog has been created to post interest things

about Architecture around the world

as well as some entries of English courses...

Hope you enjoy it!

DGA