It is difficult to determine when and where the beginning of civil engineering took place, as it merges with the very beginning of human history. Humans used caves as a shelter to protect themselves from rain and cold, and laying logs to cross a river are demonstrations of early knowledge of primitive civil engineering practices. The first man-made buildings began between 4000 and 6000 years ago in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, when humans began to abandon nomadic life and began to build permanent dwellings. During this period, transportation also became an important aspect of the society of the time.

Around 2550 BC, Imhotep, considered the first engineer in history, built a step pyramid for King Djoser located in Saqqara, Egypt. With simple tools and mathematical knowledge he created a monument that resists to this day. His greatest contributions to the engineering of the time was the discovery of the art of stone-framed construction. With this, the next engineers could build gigantic constructions with skill and imagination. Other buildings in history are also notable, such as the Qanat water system (built over three thousand years ago and more than seventy kilometers in length), the Greeks built Parthenon and the Great Wall of China. But a great engineering marvel of ancient times is the Inca city of Machu Picchu, where today is Peru, built around the year 1450. Built on the Andes Mountains, the city boasts ingenious running water systems, drainage systems, food production and structures that lasted for over five hundred years.

Throughout ancient and medieval history most of the buildings were created by artisans such as bricklayers and carpenters, who were considered masters of works. Engineering knowledge was always retained and was rarely replaced by advances. Buildings, roads, and all existing infrastructure at the time were repetitive, and the scale was increased simply with an increase in measurements.

During prehistory the first monuments appear and man begins to master the technique of stoneworking.

Shelter, as the predominant construction in primitive societies, will be the main element of the spatial organization of diverse peoples. This type of construction can still be observed in societies not fully integrated in Western civilization, such as Amerindian, African, Aboriginal peoples, among others. The presence of shelter in the collective unconscious of these peoples is so strong that it will mark the culture of various later societies.

As human communities evolved and increased, affected by constant war threats, the first architectural modality to develop was essentially military.

Humanity was confronted with a world populated by living gods, geniuses, and demons: a world that still knew no scientific objectivity. How individuals dealt with the transformation of their immediate environment was then greatly influenced by their beliefs. Many aspects of everyday life were based on respecting or worshiping the divine and the supernatural. Divine power, therefore, matched (or even surpassed) secular power, making the main buildings of the cities palaces and temples. This importance meant that the figure of the architect was associated with the priests (as in ancient Egypt) or the rulers themselves and the execution of the buildings was accompanied by various rituals that symbolized the contact of man with the divine.

The cities marked an interruption of the wild nature, considered the sacred space in the natural environment. Similarly, temples within cities marked the dwelling place of the gods in the human environment.

 

Classical Antiquity and Classical Architecture

 

Temple of Hephaestus in Athens: Classical Greek Architecture

The architecture and urbanism practiced by the Greeks and Romans stood out from the Egyptians and Babylonians as civic life gained importance. The city becomes the main element of the political and social life of these peoples: the Greeks developed into city-states and the Roman Empire emerged from a single city. During earlier periods and civilizations, religious affairs themselves were the motive and maintenance of established order; In the Greco-Roman period the religious mystery surpassed the limits of the palace-temple and became the subject of the citizens (or the polis): there arises the political word, absolutely related to the idea of ​​city. Whereas earlier peoples developed only military, religious, and residential architecture, the Greeks and Romans were responsible for developing spaces for the manifestation of citizenship and everyday affairs: the Greek it was defined as a grand 

public free space for assembly, surrounded by temples, markets, and public buildings. The space of the agora had become a symbol of the new worldview that included respect for common interests and sparked debate among citizens rather than the old despotic order.

Religious affairs, however, still played a key role in worldly life, but have now been incorporated into the public spaces of the polis. Popular rituals took place in spaces built for this purpose, especially the acropolis. Each place had its own nature (genius locci), set in a world that lived with myth: temples were built on top of the hills (creating a visual landmark in the lower city and providing a refuge for wartime people). ) so as to touch the heavens.

 

Medieval architecture

 

The gothic architectural space

The technology of the period developed mainly in the construction of cathedrals, with tectonic knowledge under the control of craft corporations.

During virtually all medieval times, the figure of the architect (as the lone creator of architectural space and construction) does not exist. The construction of the cathedrals, the main constructive effort of the time, is accompanied by the entire population and is part of the life of the surrounding community. Constructive knowledge is guarded by corporations, which brought together dozens of master-workers (the actual architects) who led the work but also elaborated it.

Christianity defined a new worldview that not only subjected human will to divine design, but hoped that the individual would seek the divine. At first, and due to technical limitations, the design of the architectural space of the temples turns to the center, along an axis that incites the path. Later, with the development of Gothic architecture, one seeks to reach the heavens by inducing the perspective upwards.

 

Modern age

 

The vitruvian man, played by Leonardo da Vinci. In it is synthesized the Renaissance spirit: classic and humanist

With the end of the Middle Ages the European power structure changed radically. Nation-states are beginning to emerge, and despite the still strong influence of the Catholic Church, secular power once again overwhelms it, especially with the crises arising from the Protestant Reformation.

Old Roman architectural treatises are rediscovered by the new architects, profoundly influencing the new architecture. The relative freedom of scientific research obtained has allowed some progress in construction techniques, allowing new experiences and the design of new spaces.

Some Italian regions, and Florence in particular, due to the control of the trade routes that led to Constantinople, became the great world powers and it was in them that the conditions for the development of the arts and sciences developed.

 

Rebirth

 

Florentine landscape, a landmark of the Renaissance

Palazzo della Ragione of Palladio.

The Renaissance spirit evokes the intrinsic qualities that exist in the human being. Man's progress - scientific, spiritual, social - becomes an important goal for the period. Rediscovered Classicism and Humanism emerge as the guide to the new worldview that manifests itself in the artists of the period.

Renaissance culture is multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary. What matters to Renaissance man is the cult of knowledge and reason, with no separation for him between the sciences and the arts. Such culture proved to be a fertile field for the development of architecture, a subject that likewise sees no boundary between the two areas.

Renaissance architecture was classical, but not intended as neoclassical. With the discovery of the old (incomplete) treatises of classical architecture (the most important of which was De Vitruvio's Architecture, the basis for Alberti's De Re Aedificatoria), a new interpretation of that architecture and its application was given way. to the new times. Knowledge gained during the medieval period (such as the control of the different domes and arches) was applied in a new way, incorporating the elements of classical language.

The discovery of perspective is an important aspect to understand the period (and especially the central perspective): the idea of ​​infinity brought about by vanishing point manipulation was widely used as a scenic element in the spatial design of those architects.

The perspective represented a new way of understanding space as something universal, understandable and controllable through the reason of man. Drawing became the main means of projection, as did the figure of the lone architect (unlike the collective conception of medieval buildings). The new means of project design have influenced the spatial design of buildings in the sense that visuals are controlled and directed to a specific point of view. The power of the perspective to universally represent reality was not only describing experience but also anticipating it by projecting the image back to reality. Major Renaissance architects include Vignola, Alberti, Brunelleschi and Michelangelo.

 

Mannerism

 

With the unfolding of the Renaissance and the constant study and application of classical ideals, a certain anti-classical feeling began to emerge among the artists of the period, even though their works remained essentially predominantly classical. At this point comes the one that has been called mannerism.

Mannerist architects (who may rigorously continue to be called Renaissance) appropriate the classical forms but begin to deconstruct their ideals. Some examples of mannerism:

Visual references in internal spaces to the typical elements of the composition of external spaces are constant: windows that turn inwards, treatment of external stairs in interior wings of buildings, etc.

The already established domain of perspective allows different experiments that escape the perspective space of previous periods.

Michelangelo is one of the Renaissance architects who can be called mannerists.

17th and 18th century

The centuries following the Renaissance witnessed a cyclical process of constant withdrawal and rapprochement with classical ideas. Baroque, at first, enhances the discontent of mannerism by the classical norms and provides the genesis of a kind of unprecedented architecture, although often has formal links with the past. Just as baroque represented a reaction to the Renaissance, neoclassicism will later constitute a reaction to baroque and a strong tendency to passadism and the recovery of the classic. This period of two centuries, therefore, will be marked by a cycle of doubts and certainties about the validity of classical ideas.

 

Baroque architecture

 

Formal ostentation in the baroque and rococo spaces.

Baroque appears in the European art scene in two very clear contexts during the seventeenth century: first there was the feeling that, with the scientific advance represented by the Renaissance, classicism, while leveraging this progress, was no longer able to offer all necessary answers to man's doubts. The universe was no longer the same, the world had expanded and the individual felt he wanted to experience a new kind of contact with the divine and the metaphysical. The lush forms of the Baroque, its elliptical, definitely anti-Euclidean space, were an answer to these needs.

The second context is that of the Counter Reformation promoted by the Catholic Church. With the advance of the Protestant churches, the ancient Roman Christian order (which, in a sense, had encouraged the advent of the Renaissance world) was being supplanted by new worldviews and new attitudes toward the Sacred. The Church felt the need to renew herself so as not to lose the faithful, and saw in the promotion of a new aesthetic the chance to identify herself in this new world. The baroque forms were promoted by the institution worldwide (especially in the newly discovered colonies), making it the quintessential Catholic style.

 

Neoclassical architecture

 

The Washington Capitol, exemplary of architectural neoclassicism

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Europe saw a great technological advance, the direct result of the early moments of the Industrial Revolution and of the Enlightenment culture. New constructive and structural possibilities were discovered, so that the old materials (such as stone and wood) were gradually replaced by concrete (and later by reinforced concrete) and metal ...