Architecture

Folk Architecture  |  Worship Space  |  Residential Architecture  |  Digital Art

I am quite an architecture buff.  While it is something that several people suggested in my high school years that I should pursue as a career, I prefer to keep it as a hobby of mine.

Folk Architecture
I am most interested in folk buildings from rural environments of Europe and North America.  Some of my favorite places that I visited while I was in Europe were the myriad open-air museums that not only are home to a variety of local architecture traditions, but maintain as many of the rural traditions as they could, through breeding programs of livestock and flora, continued research into building methods, and recreation of life in such an environment.  Here are some links to a few of the places I visited that possessed such qualities as blending architecture and lifestyle.

Freilichtmuseum am Kiekeberg (a recreation of a northern German heathland farm located at Kiekeberg, Germany).
Frilandsmuseet (a branch of the Danish National Museum covering diverse aspects of rural life located in Sorgenfri, Denmark).
Norsk Folkemuseum (a walk through traditional Norwegian life, from town to farm, from north to south located near Oslo, Norway).
Skanzen Szentendre (a complete survey of traditional Hungarian architecture from all corners of Hungary located in Szentendre, near Budapest, Hungary).
Kulturen in Lund (an open-air architecture museum, that also houses extensive medieval collections of located in Lund, in southern Sweden's Skåne region).

Worship Space
Folk buildings are not my only architectural interest, however.  I am also very interested in the design and use of worship space.  I have spent a decent amount of time studying the interaction between church design and liturgical forms.  While visiting many of the grand cathedrals of Europe was a wonderful and awe-inspiring study of architecture, I became most enamored with the many smaller historical churches and how they drew the faithful into the Mass.

I recently gave a presentation on the interaction between liturgical worship space and the stational liturgies of Rome.  It is available as a PDF and is titled "The Architectural Context of Roman Stational Liturgy" (2002).

Residential Architecture
A final interest in architecture that I have is that of designing buildings of my own.  Most have been some sort of residence, or at least that was the intent.  Most are rather eccentric, having been patterned off of a variety of buildings from the medieval tower at Vordingborg, Denmark, to the rural farmhouses of northern Germany and Denmark; from the Franciscan missions of California to the Colombian haciendas of colonial days; from Japanese garden houses to modular homes based on Mongolian Yurts; and from Roman villas (both rural and urban) to monastic settlements stretching from Northumbria to Greece.  Many of these that I designed when I still used a PC using AutoCAD and have made them available here.  To view them, you will need to use DWF Viewer (PC only), a program made to view AutoCAD files, without actually needing AutoCAD.

Some of my eccentric home deigns:
Byhus - a "city house" inspired by some of the homes in Copenhagen, Denmark.
Bauernhaus - a farm house inspired by those farm houses (bauernhäuser) in Lower Saxony, Germany.  This home has the unique distinction of integrating the barn and residence under one roof.
Domus rōmāna Casādum II - a design inspired by Roman villa urbanus, complete with peristlylum, atrium, etc.
Domus rōmāna Casādum I - a variation on the previous house.  Actually conceived of previously, I did not get around to entering this design until later.
A Duplex - do not let the name fool you, this Duplex is not small, it is a very large and luxurious home; it is a variation on the Roman theme of the previous two homes.
Modular home - a sketch I made made to fit to a very hilly terrain.

Digital Art
In connection with my interest in architecture, I have recently become interested in designing digital art—landscapes and buildings.  These are all three dimensional graphics, rendered by computer.  I have been experimenting and have finished my first wallpaper.  Using the freeware Terragen.  I built this first image while following through a tutorial.  Expect more of these images to come, but much nicer.

Highland River - 19. July 2001

Recently I have been experimenting with the new version of Terragen, designed especially for Macintosh OS X. As all of the renders I have done were simply tests of certain features, none of them were actual images worth posting. But expect more to be developed, especially when I get my own G4 PowerBook in the near future.