I always said if I was to ever build my own home, that I wouldn’t have a regular square or rectangular room in the house. I really like rooms that have interesting spaces like alcoves or windows, spaces that can be used for decoration and functions. But that’s just dreams! I do that a lot, dream, I love it ! If you don’t, give it a go, you won’t be disappointed.
We don’t have too many ‘out there’ buildings in Waterford to admire but we do have a few like the Museum, the house of Crystal and a few private houses. These are all contemporary architecture but the first of these unusual and Geometric shaped buildings was in the 50s mainly in Eastern Europe, this era was known as Brutalist architecture. These buildings would be government buildings, librarys or universities. They would show a gridded Geometric style that was rough and had unfinished surfaces. They consisted of straight lines and unusual shapes. The materials were concrete and steel mostly. This style lasted till the 70s with some people thought it to be inhuman and unwelcoming. But contemporary architecture has some of those feathers but is done with beauty and consideration to the environment. It also has hitech or conceptual designs. Contemporary architecture isn’t a movement like baroque or modernism, so this meant that they didn’t have to follow a particular school of rules like movements do,so they were free to choose many styles as long as they were different from what had come before or the norm. With most contemporary architecture it tends to have a lot of curves but some also consist of cubes which I really like. They position them in particular ways that create distinctive compositions with large windows. Wood and brick are typically used as well. To me they look like massive sculptures, I find them so interesting. There are so many famous buildings I could mention like the CCTV building in Beijing or the Louis Vuitton foundation in Paris
