History of World Architecture and Architectural Theory
The world-history paper rewards precise attribution: building, architect, decade. Theory questions usually test whether you can link a text to a position rather than recite a biography.
Core rules
- Sequence: Greek and Roman orders → Byzantine (pendentive, Hagia Sophia) → Romanesque → Gothic (pointed arch, rib vault, flying buttress) → Renaissance (Brunelleschi's dome, Alberti's De re aedificatoria) → Baroque → Neoclassicism → 19th-century iron and glass → Arts and Crafts, Art Nouveau, De Stijl, Bauhaus → Modernism and CIAM → postmodernism and after.
- Modernism's canonical arguments: Le Corbusier's five points; Wright's prairie houses; the Athens Charter's zoning of dwelling, work, recreation, circulation.
- Theory texts to place accurately: Venturi's Complexity and Contradiction, Rossi's The Architecture of the City, Frampton's critical regionalism, Pallasmaa on the senses.
Worked example
A white rendered box lifted on pilotis, with a free plan, ribbon windows, a free facade and a roof garden, is the Villa Savoye, Le Corbusier, 1929–31. The reasoning is to match the five points one by one to visible evidence: pilotis free the ground, the domino frame frees the plan and facade, horizontal windows follow from the frame, and the flat roof becomes a garden because damp no longer threatens it.
Traps
- Attributing the Barcelona Pavilion to Le Corbusier instead of Mies.
- Conflating Ruskin's and Viollet-le-Duc's positions on restoration.
- Placing the Bauhaus only in Dessau and forgetting Weimar.
- Dating modernist icons to the wrong decade.