#it has a slate floor and a variety of colors. desert modernism

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Living Room - Midcentury Living Room

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World Architecture: A Comparative Review

About the Author

Finbar MacGuffin currently attends the Imperial Academy of the Sciences at Gestalt, majoring in civil engineering and heavy construction. At 16, he is among the youngest students in the history of the program. He was born in citadel at Threshold, capital of the the district of Campbell in the Western Colonies. [Leave this out, Barry; you’re this close to the degree.]

Introduction

Many architectural styles present throughout the planet have parallels to cultures preceding the ancestral Leveler culture as attested in the printed records. In many cases, drawing from these blueprints and designs yielded really remarkably stable structures, often with distinctive profiles and aesthetics that became preferred by a specific modern culture or sovereign state. This paper article provides an overview of the principal architectural styles paradigms adopted by the sovereign states and analyzes their origins and respective strengths.

Meridian

The Meridian Empire known today was formed consolidated from the union of crowns between the two nations entities that once occupied the namesake continent, Gran and Sapiria. The current public and palatial architectural paradigm of the Meridian Empire is derived from the national traditions and industries of the two countries its rich national tradition and industrial prowess, fusing stone, wood, colored glass and metalwork in increasingly ornate artistic designs.

Many cues in Meridian architecture derive from ancestral styles called neoclassical and baroque, one not favored by the Levelers but was well-documented among their predecessors.  Public and palatial buildings tended to be ornamented spaces that were vast and cavernous yet understated, with few but lavish furnishings in between.

Flourishes are common in larger buildings and take the form of both organic and geometric ornamentation in the roofs, windows, doorways, and walls. Support structures such as vaults, coffers, pillars, and columns are often just as decorative as they are structural.

Columns, brickwork, and domes are even present in buildings that do not require such structural flourishes, such as skyscrapers built from internal skeletons or steel or reinforced concrete. From the outside, they resemble other, smaller Meridian buildings, albeit with significantly more floors; this adherence to tradition sets Meridian high rise development apart aesthetically from their counterparts in Shinar and the United Federation.

Skyscraper development is mostly restricted to special unobtrusive districts in key commercial cities like Hanlon [I have an apartment there. Spectacular views!], and with few exceptions is seen largely as a novelty rather than a strict necessity. Urban development in Meridian cities typically favored terraced housing, with many neighborhoods comprising of blocked rows of terraced houses homes and shops surrounding manicured garden squares.

Meridian buildings outside of those of the vernacular are rarely arbitrarily built. Urban planning is of immense importance. Well-kept streets, beautiful vistas, and well-directed road and pedestrian traffic serve the key purposes of maintaining social control order

Royal Concord

A continent of immense cultural diversity, Concord had for much of its history been the haven for the surviving ancestral religions, and; their profound impact on the people’s way of life is very prominently displayed in the Royalist school of architecture. The largest and most predominant religion in the region, Islam, is the primary influence of the Royal Concord architectural style.

The architects of Royal Concord used a style that strongly preferred geometric patterns, as attested by the records in their own national libraries. This can be seen is best demonstrated in their preference for carefully laid out complicated patterns in their ornamentation and the near-perfect obsessive geometry of their buildings. Hexagonal and rectilinear plans, elegant arches, and semicircular domed roofs are commonplace.

The chief religion of the Royal Concordians focused on the star Sol, and cities were carefully planned to accommodate and track this star that they may direct worship toward it. Observatories are a frequent feature in many cities and frequently perform double duty as exceptionally large city planning tools.

Theirs was a style focused on creating large, airy spaces, and relied on architectural shapes and features to heat and cool buildings. Stone, brick, and wood were often used in both ornamental and functional tandem. Concordian architecture is especially famous for chiefly utilizes ambient and energy-saving modes of structural temperature control; Concordian homes are relatively cool in summer and warm in winter, needing very little in the way of mechanized central heating or cooling.

Even among wealthy households, Concordian rooms tend to be more compact (palaces have many rooms and often house huge families), with only large common rooms being the few rooms of any considerable size [This is a redundancy], yet are more than likely to be well furnished with both lavish decorations and items of comfort.  The sole exception are rooms in public spaces, designed to have plenty of occupants and are thus appropriately sized.

Bufferia Republican Concord

Few examples remain of the vernacular wood cabin constructions that dominated the region known as Bufferia Concord’s separatist western frontier. The Republican government regime that now controls the country region had favored utilizing a unified [and ugly, if you remember what we talked about in class] architectural style to distance their country from the Royalists across the border.

The breakaway Republic of Bufferia republican separatists thus represents a huge leap toward the opposite direction when it came to architecture aesthetic leap backwards. Whereas the Royal Concord style favored a lacy, airy aesthetic, the Bufferian Republican Concordian style preferred large solid-looking hideous [I wanted to keep that in, but the committee didn’t let me] edifices designed to evoke ponderous size. Its chief influences had been Brutalism and Socialist Realism, architectural movements that naturally favored size. and favored by corrupt tyrants.

Much like Meridian and their royalist counterparts, the Republican Concordians put immense value in city planning. For the past 80 years, the Republican regime had been obsessed with maintaining social control through the utilization of public spaces. Communal housing is the norm for the workers in the country outside the higher echelons of government. Homes are small apartments in medium-sized multistory buildings surrounded by large public plazas. Most activities are directed toward common rooms and open public spaces.

Overcompensation is the order of the day in Republican Concordian monumental architecture. Public buildings and open spaces tend to be large, showy affairs. The grandiose imagery created by the monuments is ultimately propagandistic, designed to make individual onlookers seem small and feel insignificant. [I like this!]

United Federation

The United Federation began as a collection of nations rather than a single entity, and thus a variety of styles has emerged across its borders. Prior to the advent of internal unification—the gradual process that marked the creation of the Federation as a functional union—each of the individual cantons of the country favored a specific architectural style.

Pascal, the one with the longest history of bilateral relations with the Meridian Empire, has plenty of Meridian influences, up until sharing many of its aesthetics. Pascalese buildings are frequently beautiful Neoclassical- or Palladian-influenced structures faced with vermilion brick, white stone, or whitewashed clapboard, and crowned with slate tiles.

[Barry, this section seems overly long and could count as a distinct article on its own. If you’re still keen on writing about this, we can grant you a separate article for the journal that focuses on the comparison of Federation and Imperial Meridian architectural aesthetics.]

Other places known for neoclassical influence in architecture is Jejima. Both northern and southern entities prefer a style of Neoclassical- and Baroque-influenced construction called Antillean suited for the continent’s predominant warm weather. Chief differences between the north and south are the materials utilized. Northern buildings are typically made of stone or adobe, and are plastered with a light-colored insulating stucco that is decorated accordingly, whereas southern buildings are built with a stone or brick foundation or ground floor, with subsequent floors being made of breezy, airy wood. A variation of the Antillean used by the Northern Jimans, only completely made of wood, is utilized in the Principality of Barrie.

Exterior and interior ornamentation are both high priority in both Pascalese and Jiman architecture. This is not universally the case in other Federation cultures. Belisarians favor an austere, minimalist vernacular style of plaster and lacquered wood, whereas fired mud brick, flat roofed architecture (a variant of a much older style called Sahelian) is preferred by cantons of the Mainland’s equatorial coast. The Rads typically utilize an architectural aesthetic (fittingly) known as the Federal style, a less ornamented derivative of the neoclassical styles utilized by the Pascalese.

Teslan architecture comes in two forms; semi-permanent tents its people once used before transitioning to a modern, settled state, and the square-shaped desert block houses they built afterward. The distinct shape of the tents still dominates the appearance of modern buildings in the canton and elsewhere.

Unique shapes are also present in the upturned eaves, intricate timber framing, and hipped-gabled roofs of the Poldevians, a style much like the ones utilized by the Belisarians in their temples and feudal strongholds, albeit with much more prominent and distinctive ornamentation. The Poldevians were a martial, imperial culture and originally favored expressions of social order as expressed in architectural and urban planning much like in Meridian, as expressed in the government districts surrounding their imperial cities.  Specific styles utilized in Poldevian cities include the linear Zakumen, prevalent in the frigid islands, and the dense Lingnan, which predominate the crowded urban landscapes of its capital in the mainland.

Contrasting this is the vernacular architecture of the Chapekians and the Shires, which favored timber-framed buildings with the same stone or masonary foundations used in Jejima. Timber-framed housing was also popular in areas like Stephensonia and, to a limited extent, the Shires, which have also largely adopted the Palladian and Neoclassical styles used by Jejima and Pascal.

The Federation’s modern architecture, however, is unique in its preference for reflective materials like steel, aluminum, and glass.  It is today the most popular and recognizable of Federation architecture, shown through the ubiquity of geometric modern and postmodern styles, reminiscent of large glass shards, visible in all its cities. The Federation had been built on infrastructure, and its gradual move toward less ornamental architectural styles reflects this.

Moreover, the spread of the modern and postmodern styles had been the subject of contention within the cantons itself. While many are happy with the appearance of the structures as is, many others claim that the genericized appearance of the buildings lack both soul and national character. [Spot on!] Many postmodern structures, especially in the Canton of Pascal, have been built at the expense of older traditional buildings. Critics have also lambasted the trends of façadism, a faux-historicist compromise wherein a postmodern building incorporates the restored façade of a demolished traditionalist structure.

Republic of Shinar

Shinar began as a colony of Meridian, and its older buildings reflect the aesthetic influence of the Meridian Empire. This is exemplified by the former Winter Palace at Babel [The traitor’s capital!], once a retreat for the Meridian Imperial family.  One of the few remaining Meridian architectural structures in the former colony [Barbarians.], today it serves as both a museum and as the headquarters of the newly opened Meridian Imperial embassy.

Prior to the revolution, the Shinarians were experimenting in wide-scale skyscraper development, utilizing a style called Art Deco. Although this style is hardly unique to the Shinarians [Plagiarists.], it has become so ubiquitous within the country’s densely overpopulated southern megalopolis that it has become a recognizable mark of Shinarian [”]culture.[”]

The southern Shinarian cities are immensely built up overpopulated areas dominated by colossal skyscrapers with many skywalks surrounding them. They are the world’s most crowded densely populated urban spaces, carrying more people per square kilometer than any city before or since. [It’s fine on it’s own, but try to spin this as the bad thing that it likely is.]

The resultant urban canyons and the shadows cast by the skyscrapers and elevated rails and highways that dominate them blot out the sun completely in some places [”Urban planning” my @$$.]. Shinar’s nighttime urban landscapes are dominated by the intense otherworldly glow of multicolored lighting, especially prominent in the lower levels far removed from the old urban core Meridian-built old city.

Barry

Excellent first draft. Review and apply my changes to the initial article, then talk to me again. With a bit of work, we should be ready for the panel defense in two to three weeks’ time.

Yours,

Professor Rosamund Croft, CEng, MIIMMechE Imperial Academy of the Sciences, Gestalt

Citizen in the Service of His Majesty, Frederick III Blackheart, By Grace of the Ancestral Peoples, Emperor of Meridian