Architectural Beauty Research Articles

The Children's Castle

IT DOESN'T LOOK like much of an institution from the outside; just a motley group of low, gray-brown, old-fashioned buildings at the very end of a hilly cobbled street in an old and ugly section of Helsinki. And a superficial look at the inside would make you smile when you heard someone refer to it as a castle. But no one is joking about the name. The Castle is certainly no Fairyland castle, but a most real, alive, and down-to-earth sort of place. It's not the sort of castle you or I would think of building; but what it lacks in beautiful architecture is more than made up by these ugly old buildings in the hundreds, yes, thousands of children's lives that have been saved here. And all this was done without magic. Well, what is this Children's Castle? The Finns call it the Lastenlinna, and those Finns who speak Swedish call it the Barnets Borg. They mean the same thing. Basically it is an organization with the avowed purpose of saving children's lives. How it does that is a story based on lots of courage, or sisu as the Finns call it, and an unflagging love for Every living organism must have a heart and a head; in this case the heart is a nurse named Agnes Sinervo; the head is a famous pediatrician, Prof. Arvo Ylppo (pronounced ill pay). And as in every good organism, the heart and head work together. Recent photographs in the Finnish newspapers have portrayed the institution as in a frightful state of disrepair, with equipment rusted and decrepit. But Miss Sinervo maintains things are not so bad since they are surrounded by living, beautiful We do not see the brokendown boilers and the dented pots and pans; we see the children. It all goes back to 1918, when in the aftermath of the first World War, Finland found itself with many homeless mothers and The Baroness Sophie Mannerheim purchased a building in the Kallio

Architectural beauty in an alkylation unit.

Architectural beauty in an alkylation unit.

Animal Biology

THIS book is already well known, and young people coming to the study of zoology for the first time will find in this second edition an account of animal structure which is welded with the elementary facts about the animal's physiology and relation to the environment. The whole fascinating story is told in words which create enthusiasm and stimulate further study and reflection. Older readers who were students when morphology was the main pre-occupation of zoology will appreciate this book no less. It is easy to neglect or even to deprecate the beauty and significance of animal architecture, but this book avoids this error and also the older one of emphasizing it too much. By it the beginner will be prepared for the wider conceptions of modern biology. Animal Biology By Dr. A. J. Grove Dr. G. E. Newell. Second edition. Pp. viii + 678. (London: University Tutorial Press, Ltd., 1944.) 16s.

Santiago de los Caballeros de Guatemala

THE Spanish city well described and illustrated in this volume was begun towards the middle of the sixteenth century as the third capital of the colony of Guatemala, after the second one, Almolonga, built by Alvarado, had been destroyed by earthquake. Much of the city known to-day as Antigua Guatemala still stands, but it lies in a volcanic area and suffered repeated earthquake shocks until in 1773 it was so badly devastated that Spain ordered its abandonment and the removal of the capital to a new site, the modern Nueva Guatemala. Mrs. Popenoe had made a wide study of Central American archaeology and written this book shortly before her untimely death. She has succeeded in reconstructing the life of the city and much of the beautiful architecture of the early Renaissance which characterised the first buildings. The work is based on old documentary records.

The New Municipal Technical Institute, Belfast

THE formal opening of the new Municipal Technical Institute, Belfast, on October 30, by the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland (the Earl of Aberdeen), may be said to close the first epoch in the history of technical education in that city, and, indeed, in the whole of Ireland. When it is remembered that the Agriculture and Technical Instruction (Ireland) Act became law so recently as 1899, the progress already made is most noteworthy. Within that brief period the annual enrolment of students has risen to 5000, and these are now housed in a building which in beauty of architecture and excellence of equipment may challenge comparison with anything of a similar nature in the United Kingdom.

A lost principle of beauty in architecture

A lost principle of beauty in architecture

1. On the Mathematical Form of the Gothic Pendant

The author commenced, by stating the general proofs of the knowledge of the principles of equilibrium displayed by Gothic architects in the structures (especially) of the pointed style. The adaptation of their edifices was to the combined ends of elegance and strength. The extension of this principle to the case of the Gothic pendant is the chief object of this paper. Sufficiency in point of strength, without redundancy of material, is considered by the author as the primary source of architectural beauty; which he has demonstrated to be the case when the depending Gothic drop is generated by the revolution of the logarithmic curve round its axis.