Emotive Architecture的动态

?? GOOD TO KNOW ABOUT AFRICAN ARCHITECTURE ?? BENIN (EDO) ARCHITECTURE ?? ?The Benin Empire was one of the oldest and most developed states in West Africa, dating back to the 11th century.Benin City, originally known as Edo, was once the capital of a pre-colonial African empire located in what is today southern Nigeria. ? Benin City was planned and designed according to precise rules of symmetry, proportionality and repetition, known today as “fractal design”. Mathematician Ron Eglash, author of African Fractals - which examines the patterns underlying architecture, art and design in many parts of Africa - notes that the town and surrounding villages were deliberately laid out to form perfect fractals, with similar shapes repeated in the rooms of each house, in the house itself and in groups of houses in the village, according to mathematically predictable patterns. ? ??Traditional building materials include clay, bamboo and wood. Clay mixed with palm oil is used to signify the neutralization of misfortune in Edo cosmology. ?Traditional buildings use techniques such as mixing straw and mud to reinforce structures. ?According to Fred Pearce of New Scientist magazine, Benin City's walls were at one time “four times longer than the Great Wall of China and consumed a hundred times more material than the Great Pyramid of Cheops”. These walls “stretched for some 16,000 km in total, in a mosaic of over 500 interconnected settlement boundaries. They covered 6,500 km2 and were all excavated by the Edo people... It took some 150 million hours of digging to build them, and they constitute perhaps the greatest archaeological phenomenon on the planet”. ? Benin City was also one of the first cities to have street lighting. Huge metal lampposts, several meters high, were built and placed throughout the city, notably near the king's palace. Fueled by palm oil, their burning wicks were lit at night to illuminate traffic to and from the palace. ? The early foreign explorers’ descriptions of Benin City portrayed it as a place free of crime and hunger, with large streets and houses kept clean; a city filled with courteous, honest people, and run by a centralised and highly sophisticated bureaucracy. ?The exterior walls of the courts and compounds were decorated with horizontal ridge designs (agben) and clay carvings portraying animals, warriors and other symbols of power – the carvings would create contrasting patterns in the strong sunlight. Natural objects (pebbles or pieces of mica) were also pressed into the wet clay, while in the palaces, pillars were covered with bronze plaques illustrating the victories and deeds of former kings and nobles. #Goodtoknowaboutafricanarchitecture #AfricanArchitecture #BeninArchitecture #EdoArchitecture #Omonabulesowo NB: the 2 illustrations images are from the book “ANCIENT AFRICAN TOWN” by Fiona Macdonald and Gerald Wood