Modern Architecture

The look of many high-end homes and building campuses is informed by International architecture. It’s a style few builders use to its full extent today, but one that still influences a variety of building movements, from art-deco to post-modern, and is preserved in many cities throughout the world.

International architecture has been widely studied and celebrated for introducing many innovative design aspects. Architects who developed the style also brought about new ways of thinking about design that re-shaped the building world, and modern art in general. The movement was founded on three defining principles: the expression of volume rather than mass, balance rather than preconceived symmetry, and the expulsion of applied ornament. These principles show up in features like exterior heating ducts, irregular but balanced building shapes, and architecture that takes its shape from the inside of the building, as opposed to the outside. Internationally-styled buildings are also generally more functional than other types, although new and avant building methods tend to make them seem more form-oriented. International architect Le Courbusier famously described these functional houses as “machines for living.”

Other characteristics of the International style include transparency (called the honest expression of structure), whether through glass or portals between sections of the building, adoption of steel and concrete as supplementary building materials, and use of mass-production building techniques.

Unlike other building movements that gained momentum over time, the International style has a definite and well-documented origin: the International Exhibition of Modern Architecture in New York City in 1932, which showcased only works done in the new International style. A book titled The International Style: Architecture Since 1922 by Henry Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson recorded the exhibition, and identified the new movement’s three founding principles. While many architects had been working with various aspects of the style for decades, the 1932 exhibition and its accompanying book provided the outline and principles that identified the new architectural style.

International architecture was so-named because it was defined by such a broad base of architects from around the world. The style became more worldly as it grew, particularly in the late 1930s when many high-profile German International architects left their country for Turkey, France, Venezuela, Kenya, and India. International architecture’s lack of a central national or historic reference is also one of its strengths.

By: A Eliason

Architecture used to include all the aspects related designing a building and not much beyond that. The field has grown and expanded so as to be literally a hundred times more than what it was when it first began.

Innovations in buildings and the field itself lend it now to programs and designing schemes where it once was not used for anything other than the building of structures such as homes and apartments.

Architecture is among one of the most exciting fields available for study and when your studies are completed you will be called on to do such incredible feats as design a zoological park to provide for the security of the people and animals as well as to afford ready viewing of them and offer them their natural habitat in which to live. Another position that is becoming more valued and valuable in today’s market is the position of landscape architect. Everyone loves to visit an enjoyable and attractive area such as a park or playground. College campuses are famous for their use of landscaping in an effort to provide a warm welcoming atmosphere to their students.

Architects design these areas so that they are functional, beautiful and fully at ease with the natural environment around them. The landscape architect will plan the exact location of each roadway, walkway and how the flowers and trees as well as the buildings are arranged within the campus unit as a whole.

A landscape architect may work for any number of groups or organizations from developers of real estate to municipal areas such as a small town to a larger city. Working side by side with the architect, the surveyor and engineer together decide the best arrangement for roads, buildings and pathways in everything from a campus to a housing community to an entire city mall or complex.

The landscape architect is required today to affiliate and collaborate with many other persons such as conservationist, foresters, environmental sciences and natural resource companies to make decisions necessary to carry out the project to its completion.

Once the major decisions such as buildings are out of the way, the addition of such things as fountains and other decorative items comes into play as well. When planning a site or building, an architect needs to consider the nature and purpose of the site he/she will plan, and the funding available to him/her to complete the project.

With that in mind, the educational requirements for each type of architect will be stringent and varied. Mathematics will play an important role as well as arts and artistry. Other aspects of learning a solid amount of common sense is required of an architect in that he/she must also analyze and provide for certain natural aspects of their project such as climate, moisture, soil drainage and natural vegetation that exists there.

Typically companies today pay architects vast sums of money for the design of buildings and complexes. Those which work for a single firm and make their home there over a long period of time may expect reasonably a six figure salary from about the third year on particularly if they display a high level of competency at their job.

The market for such services in Canada and the United States is very good and the reasonably good architect can expect that his services will be greatly in demand over the course of his career. Freelance architects are far more common today than those which sign on with a firm, given the higher rate of flexibility in their jobs and the greater satisfaction at being able to choose their own projects.

It is not uncommon that an architecture firm is composed of family members of a limited amount of members in the firm and new recruiting is not done on a regular basis. Most architecture firms are comprised of smaller numbers of architects in a company with draftsmen and other junior workers and the turnover of workers is not great.

Some of the more common architecture firms listed online and samples of those designs they have accomplished:

By: Marcus Lim

Traditionally, many large service businesses, have focused narrowly on direct operational needs like order handling & invoicing, when designing their information architecture. This way they have developed account-centric data structures. A real Customer could have more than one accounts, the records of which were unlinked in the customer database. In this case, more than one Customer records, would exist for the same real Customer. This data model would not reflect accurately the relationship of the Customer to the Business. Moreover this information architecture would often involve loosely coupled or isolated databases, thus developing departmental ‘information silos’. For example the faults call center database, would not integrate to the order handling database. Therefore the Customer interaction history would be fragmented in various isolated systems, serving specific Customer touch points (CTPs). The information architecture described above, does not support the Customer holistic view, which is needed in order to provide quality Customer service or analyze efficiently the Customer behavior.

Any analysis on Customer data which are stored in an account-centric structure is problematic. For example, one might want to calculate a simple Customer value ranking based on the last quarter invoiced amounts. However, this would rather be an account value ranking, than a Customer value ranking, since the analysis would probably not aggregate all accounts related to a specific Customer. Business wise, it is erroneous to carry out Customer analysis on the account level, since this analysis may give an incomplete picture about a Customer. Furthermore, one might want to perform a recency analysis based on Customer interaction history. This analysis won’t be effective, if the Customer interaction history cannot be consolidated in a single database. Any CRM interaction which is not based on the Customer holistic view, cannot be optimised. For example a CTP handling sales inquiries and orders, cannot perform efficient cross & up selling without the Customer holistic view, which allows the call agent to assess the profile of the Customer and handle the case accordingly. Businesses active in highly competitive environments cannot afford not to develop Customer insight. CRM systems have been developed in order to efficiently manage the Customer interface and capture & exploit Customer contact history. However CRM systems integrate with other operational systems in order to support end-to-end processes. These operational systems have to align to a Customer-centric information architecture, in order to achieve the Customer holistic view. Having realized the paramount need to develop Customer insight, Businesses have started reorganizing their information architecture and gradually developing their Customer-centric information assets.

The process is gradual because legacy data structures and account-centric data, inherit their properties to the new systems, during migration projects. In order to avoid the inheritance of the undesirable properties, records of the same Customer should be identified, if possible, and merged in order to realize the new customer-centric structure. The resulting ‘Customer tree’ is a structure which incorporates all accounts and products, related to the same real Customer. This business need has been identified by vendors active in the data quality niche market. They started offering record ‘matching & merging’ functionality, in order to develop and maintain customer-centric information assets (such products are Trillium, Firstlogic, Ascential). Being able to view ‘one face of the Customer’ is of paramount importance to operational as well as analytical CRM. Copyright 2006 – Kostis Panayotakis

By: Kostis Panayotakis