I have always been fascinated by architecture, as a demonstration of man’s capacity to create structures of beauty.  Cultures all over the world erect buildings that reflect their varying cultural traditions.  Aside from cultural traditions, architectural details show the artistic period when the building was built.  One day, I took my camera and went to downtown Seattle, to capture the Art Nouveau and Art Deco buildings which were built after the great Seattle fire of 1889, which took down numerous old wooden buildings.  The new ones were built of concrete and stone, longer-lasting materials.  The architects of those days adorned their buildings with all sorts of interesting decorations.

These building details reflect the Art Nouveau style, built at the turn of the 20th Century.  Flower motifs were quite popular at that time.

These buildings were built a little later, in my favorite era, the Art Deco period.  The ornament is a little less elaborate, with strong, clean lines.

Seattle architects liked to include elements like the heads of the Indians above.  There is a building downtown called the Arctic Building, that has heads of walruses over its door.

Some of my favorite buildings are barns.  I am always on the lookout for picturesque barns, and around here we have many.  No two are alike, and you can see many different styles of buildings all designed for basically the same purpose-storing farm products and machinery, and providing shelter for large and small animals.

In Britain, they have a much longer history than we in the New World do.  I have been there twice, and was drawn to the ruins of old buildings.  In the summer of 1991, my Medieval English Society class took numerous field trips around Cambridgeshire to visit towns and rural areas, to spot medieval castles and churches.  The old buildings showed not only the ravages of time and war, but the fact that the locals salvaged building materials from castles, to recycle into their dwellings!

Castle Rising

Orford Castle

Ruins, Castle Acre

When we were in Nashville in 2021, we walked around downtown, and passed the historical park which holds Fort Nashboro at the city’s beginning.  The old log buildings had been nicely restored, to give visitors a good idea of what they looked like when they were new, on the western frontier of settled America.

Perhaps the most unusual building I have ever seen was in Vienna.  The architect sure had fun with the exterior of this apartment building!

The builder made a very clever optical illusion, which I remember spotting when I was on the street below.  Everything looks crooked, BUT if you look only at the windows, you see that they are perfectly level in their ranks-it’s only the colored stucco that makes everything appear lopsided.  It’s called Hundertwasser House, and when it was built in the 1970s it was quite popular.  It turns out that the construction wasn’t as great as it could be, so the actual structure needed extensive renovations.

Here’s the Link to this week’s Original Post.  And Tina’s too.