The Famous High Buildings in The World

Famous Buildings and Structures


Prehistorical and Ancient



The megalithic passage tomb at Newgrange in Ireland covers over an acre and was constructed around 3200 B.C. Buried for centuries, the mound was rediscovered in 1699 and was restored starting in 1962. The tomb is extensively decorated with spiral and lozenge shapes. At the winter solstice, the rising sun shines down a long passage and lights up a cross-shaped chamber.

Stonehenge, a massive circular megalithic monument on the Salisbury Plain in southern England, is the most famous of all prehistoric structures. Thought to have been built c. 2000 B.C., it may have been used as an astronomical instrument to measure solar and lunar movements.

The Great Sphinx of Egypt, one of the wonders of ancient Egyptian architecture, adjoins the pyramids of Giza and has a length of 240 ft. Built in the fourth dynasty, it is approximately 4,500 years old. A 10-year, $2.5 million restoration project was completed in 1998. Other Egyptian buildings of note include the Temples of Karnak, Edfu, and Abu Simbel and the Tombs at Beni Hassan.

The Parthenon of Greece, built on the Acropolis in Athens, was the chief temple to the goddess Athena. It was believed to have been completed by 438 B.C. The present temple remained intact until the 5th century A.D. Today, though the Parthenon is in ruins, its majestic proportions are still discernible.

Other great structures of the ancient Greek world were the Temples at Paestum (c. 540 and 420 B.C.); the famous Erechtheum (c. 421–405 B.C.), the Temple of Athena Nike (c. 426 B.C.), and the Olympieum (begun in the 6th century B.C.) in Athens; the Athenian Treasury at Delphi (c. 515 B.C.); and the Theater at Epidaurus (c. 325 B.C.).

The Colosseum (Flavian Amphitheater) of Rome, the largest and most famous of the Roman amphitheaters, was opened for use A.D. 80. Elliptical in shape, it consisted of three stories and an upper gallery, rebuilt in stone in its present form in the 3rd century A.D. It was principally used for gladiatorial combat and could seat between 40,000 and 50,000 spectators.

The Pantheon at Rome, begun by Agrippa in 27 B.C. as a temple, was rebuilt in its present circular form by Hadrian (A.D. 118–128). Literally the Pantheon was intended as a temple of “all the gods.” It is remarkable for its perfect preservation today, and has served continuously for 20 centuries as a place of worship.

Famous Roman triumphal arches, built to commemorate major military victories, include the Arch of Titus (c. A.D. 80) and the Arch of Constantine (c. A.D. 315).

Later European

St. Mark's Cathedral in Venice (1063–1071), one of the great examples of Byzantine architecture, was begun in the 9th century. Partly destroyed by fire in 976, it was later rebuilt as a Byzantine edifice.

Other famous examples of Byzantine architecture are St. Sophia in Istanbul (532–537); San Vitale in Ravenna (542); and Assumption Cathedral in the Kremlin, Moscow (begun in 1475).

The cathedral group at Pisa (1067–1173), one of the most celebrated groups of structures built in Romanesque style, consists of the cathedral, the cathedral's baptistery, and the campanile (Leaning Tower). The campanile, a form of bell tower, is 180 ft high and now leans 13.5 ft out of the perpendicular.

Other examples of Romanesque architecture include the Vézelay Abbey in France (1130) and Durham Cathedral in England.

The Alhambra (1248–1354), located in Granada, Spain, is universally esteemed as one of the greatest masterpieces of Muslim architecture. Designed as a palace and fortress for the Moorish monarchs of Granada, it is surrounded by a heavily fortified wall more than a mile in perimeter.

The Tower of London is a group of buildings and towers covering 13 acres along the north bank of the Thames. The central White Tower, begun in 1078 during the reign of William the Conqueror, was originally a fortress and royal residence, but was later used as a prison. The Bloody Tower is associated with Anne Boleyn and other notables.

Westminster Abbey, in London, was begun in 1050 and completed in 1065. It was rebuilt and enlarged in several phases, beginning in 1245. With only two exceptions (Edward V and Edward VIII), every British monarch since William the Conqueror has been crowned in the abbey.

Notre-Dame de Paris (begun in 1163), one of the great examples of Gothic architecture, is a twin-towered church with a steeple over the crossing and immense flying buttresses supporting the masonry at the rear of the church.

Other famous Gothic structures are Chartres Cathedral (France; 12th century); Sainte-Chapelle (Paris, France; 1246–1248); Reims Cathedral (France; 13th–14th centuries; rebuilt after its almost complete destruction in World War I); Rouen Cathedral (France; 13th–16th centuries); Salisbury Cathedral (England; 1220–1260); York Minster, or the Cathedral of St. Peter (England; 1220–1472); Milan Cathedral (Italy; begun in 1386); and Cologne Cathedral (Germany; 13th–19th centuries; damaged in World War II but completely restored).

The Duomo (cathedral) in Florence, with its pink, white, and green marble façade, has become a symbol of the city and the Renaissance. Construction began in 1296 and was completed nearly 200 years later, with the addition of Brunelleschi's massive dome. The adjacent baptistery is famous for its gilded bronze doors by Ghiberti.

The Vatican is a group of buildings in Rome comprising the official residence of the pope. The Basilica of St. Peter, the largest church in the Christian world, was begun in 1452, and it was rebuilt between 1506 and 1626. The Sistine Chapel, begun in 1473, is noted for frescoes by Michelangelo.

Other examples of Renaissance architecture are the Palazzo Riccardi, the Palazzo Pitti, and the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence; the Palazzo Farnese in Rome; the Palazzo Grimani (completed c. 1550) in Venice; the Escorial (1563–93) near Madrid; the Town Hall of Seville (1527–32); the Louvre, Paris; the Château at Blois, France; St. Paul's Cathedral, London (1675–1710; badly damaged in World War II); the École Militaire, Paris (1752); the Pazzi Chapel, Florence, designed by Brunelleschi (1429); and the Palace of Fontainebleau and the Château de Chambord in France.

The Palace of Versailles in France, containing the famous Hall of Mirrors, was built during the reign of Louis XIV in the 17th century and served as the royal palace until 1793. Built on the colossal scale typical of many works of baroque architecture, the palace is also noted for its gardens, which include some 1,400 fountains.

Outstanding European buildings of the 18th and 19th centuries are the Superga at Turin (Italy); the Hôtel-Dieu in Lyons; the Belvedere Palace at Vienna; the Royal Palace of Stockholm; the Bank of England, the British Museum, the University of London, and the Houses of Parliament, all in London; and the Panthéon, the Church of the Madeleine, the Bourse, the Palais de Justice, and the Opera House, all in Paris.

The Eiffel Tower, in Paris, was built for the Exposition of 1889 by Alexandre Gustave Eiffel. It is 984 ft high (1,056 ft including the television tower).

The Guggenheim Bilbao Museum (1993–97) in Bilbao, Spain, was designed by Frank Gehry. The undulating form of this riverfront building, clad in glass and gleaming sheets of titanium, has been compared to a fish, a boat, and water itself.

Richard Wilbur Writer

Richard Wilbur was born in New York City on March 1, 1921. He graduated with a B.A. from Amherst, where he was editor of the college newspaper, in 1942. Youthful engagements with leftist causes caught the attention of federal investigators when he was in training as a U.S. Army cryptographer, and he was demoted to a front-line infantry position where he saw action in the field in Italy, France and Germany. (When the cryptographer in Wilbur’s unit was killed, Wilbur also took over that function.) After demobilization, he continued his studies at Harvard where he obtained an M.A. in 1947, the year his first book was published. He was a member of the prestigious Harvard Fellows and taught there until 1954, when he moved to Wellesley and then to Wesleyan University. At Wesleyan he was instrumental in the founding of the acclaimed Wesleyan University Press poetry series that, from 1959 onward, featured new work by such important young poets as Robert Bly, James Wright, James Dickey, and Richard Howard, as well as such already-established writers as Louis Simpson and Barbara Howes. From Wesleyan he went to Smith as writer-in-residence. In 1987 he was named the second Poet Laureate of the U.S., following Robert Penn Warren.

In the postwar years, when poets born between 1920 and 1935 often underwent dramatic changes in their writing styles, Wilbur remained someone who mastered a style early and continued to work within it. It is a style in a direct line of descent from Wallace Stevens : unabashedly rich in its diction, urbane in its metrical sophistication, and remarkably light-hearted and playful. His first and second books, The Beautiful Changes (1947) and Ceremony (1950), were influential volumes, and Wilbur was widely regarded in the 1950s as a poet no less important than Robert Lowell. His third collection, Things of This World (1956), was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. Advice to a Prophet (1961) was followed by Walking to Sleep (1969), which was charlee.jpg (42846 bytes)awarded the Bollingen Prize. The Mind-Reader was published in 1976, and a New and Collected Poems in 1987 (with twenty-four new poems).

"The typical ghastly poem of the fifties was a Wilbur poem not written by Wilbur," wrote Donald Hall in 1961, "a poem with tired wit and obvious comparisons and nothing to keep the mind or the ear occupied." Hall added presciently: "It wasn’t Wilbur’s fault, though I expect he will be asked to suffer for it." Wilbur’s poetry has not, as Hall predicted, retained the high value it had accrued in the postwar years. Although his fame as a translator has continued to grow – his blank verse rhymed-couplet versions of several plays by Moliere have received wide praise – his poetry is often cited as an example of the formalism and the apolitical timidity that is associated with the 1950s. "Wilbur is still admired," Robert von Hallberg notes in his contribution to the Cambridge History of American Literature (1996), "but really as the best poet of the 1950s." Even though he is an outstanding example, he excels in a debased category. Among minor poets he is allowed to be most major, but among major poets he is not even considered the most minor.

A Wilbur poem reads so easily that it can dispel close scrutiny, as if the poem just as it is says all that needs to be said and withholds nothing. (As a result, Wilbur’s work has rarely attracted the attention of the skillful critic.) In fact, the smooth surface of the Wilbur poem can successfully distract us from recognizing how unusual and unexpected are the twists and leaps that structure the poem’s narrative. Many poems by Wilbur, while striking a superficial "balance," implicitly celebrate, while demonstrating, the virtues of a wit that is elaborately playful.

On Richard Wilbur (circa 1962)

Randall Jarrell

Petronius spoke of the "studied felicity" of Horace’s poetry, and I can never read one of Richard Wilbur’s books without thinking of this phrase. His impersonal, exactly accomplished, faintly sententious skill produces poems that, ordinarily, compose themselves into a little too regular a beauty – there is no eminent beauty without a certain strangeness in the proportion; and yet "A Baroque Wall-Fountain in the Villa Sciarra" is one of the most marvelously beautiful, one of the most nearly perfect poems any American has written, and poems like "A Black November Turkey" and "A Hole in the Floor" are the little differentiated, complete-in-themselves universes that true works of art. Wilbur’s lyric calling-to-life of the things of this world – the things, rather than the processes or people – specializes in both true and false happy endings, not by choice but by necessity; he obsessively sees, and shows, the bright underside of every dark thing. What he says about his childhood is true of his maturity:

In my kind world the dead were out of range

And I could not forgive the sad or strange

In beast or man.

This compulsion limits his poems; and yet it is this compulsion, and not merely his greater talent and skill, that differentiates him so favorably from the controlled, accomplished, correct poets who are common nowadays.

From Randall Jarrell, "Fifty Years of American Poetry," The Third Book of Criticism (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1970) 331-332.

John Gery

Because of the uniform quality of Richard Wilbur's poetry over the years, changes in his vision are not as easily traceable as in the work of Rich, a poet who celebrates change. Yet despite the formal grace of his work, Wilbur is a poet of disparities as well as of unities. No more a religious poet, finally, than a sociopolitical or transcendentalist one, he joins images and ideas as much to explore what inevitably divides them as to illustrate their inherent connections, to impart "the proper relation between the tangible world and the intuitions of the spirit." To read a poem by Wilbur--whose poems like those of the Metaphysical poets are ideally suited for careful scrutiny--is to be pulled simultaneously toward anxiety and consolation, toward despair and hope, and ultimately to he deposited somewhere in between. More than most of his contemporaries, Wilbur has maintained a conviction in the continuity of the world; his deliberately balanced work seems, in its very structure, to argue a belief in nature, as well as in the role of language in nature. But his art attempts neither to convince us through a will to belief nor to cajole us through cunning; he considers his role as an artist too modest to proselytize or pander. Still, the assumptions of the believer are everywhere evident--in his rhymes, in his precise diction and playful punning, in his acceptance of prevalent literary conventions, in his patterns of imagery, in his tone.

Writing within these self -determined confines, Wilbur has been regularly criticized, ever since Randall Jarrell complained that "he never goes far enough," for having avoided the serious issues of the modern world, for being too oblique or emblematic in his approach to contemporary problems, or, in comparison to such poets as Lowell, Berryman, Plath, and Ginsberg, for not suffering enough. Rather than measure him only according to others, however, Wilbur's more appreciative readers opt to take him on his own terms, as a poet originally provoked by his disturbing experience in World War II "to take ahold of raw events and convert them, provisionally, into experience," as well as to take "refuge from events in language itself," specifically, in the language of poetry. "One must gauge the impact of the war on Wilbur," notes John Reibetanz, "not so much by looking for reflections of it in his poetry (the way we do with Lowell) as by observing the extent to which it has driven him into a world of his own making." Unlike more dramatic or politicized poets, he is a poet less of action than of observation, for whom "images come in and vision flows out," a "quiet thought-provoker ... sick of pretensiousness and extravagant claims, desiring instead a simple and direct appraisal of the ‘world's own change,’" and, most of all, "a true nature poet" who "always has had a kind of ecological prophecy to deliver" and whose "reverence for life--not as an abstraction but in its very holy and delectable particulars--makes his voice timely". . . .

Whether palatable to readers or not, the conspicuous presence of form in Wilbur's poems does more than suggest a belief in the ability of language to convey meaning. It provides two distinct advantages. First, his explicitly formal structure provides him a kind of linguistic sanctuary within which he can speculate on any subject outside his immediate experience. Like Yeats, in other words, Wilbur accepts the "artificiality" of art. In an early essay in response to the "free" verse of Williams, he writes,

In each art the difficulty of the form is a substitution for the difficulty of direct apprehension and expression of the object. The first difficulty may be more or less overcome, but the second is insuperable; thus every poem begins, or ought to, by a disorderly retreat to defensible positions. Or, rather, by a perception of the hopelessness of direct combat, and a resort to the warfare of spells, effigies, and prophecies. The relation between the artist and reality is an oblique one, and indeed there is no good art which is not consciously oblique. If you respect the reality of the world, you know that you can approach that reality only by indirect means.

The Books Fiction by L. Frank Baum

Lyman Frank Baum Writer

L. Frank Baum Biography
L. Frank Baum (1856-1919) children's author, playwright and journalist wrote the American classic The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. (1900) .Lyman Frank Baum was born 15 May, 1856 in Chittenango, New York. His father was Benjamin Ward Baum, who would make a fortune in Pennsylvania Oil, and his mother Cynthia Stanton. Frank, as he preferred to be called, was born with a weak heart so wasn't a boisterous child, but timid and shy. He was home schooled and having few playmates, he also spent hours reading in his father's library. He developed an aversion to the usual scary creatures and violence of folklore and popular children's fairytales of the time and would end up creating his own adaptations of them in order to give other children, later including his own, delight in stories rather than grim and frightful moral lessons. Baum's childhood and home life with nine siblings was happy and no doubt set the tone for his future Oz series.
In 1869 Baum entered the Peekskill Military School but the atmosphere of harsh discipline and strenuous activity was too much for him physically and he was removed. The experience left him with distaste for academics and the military though his creativity was undaunted and he turned to creative writing. After his father bought him a printing press, with his younger brother Harry, he started his own newspaper, the Rose Lawn Home Journal, named after the family estate. Baum started to write the articles, editorials, fiction and poetry that would fill its pages. He would also write about the raising and breeding of chickens in The Book of Hamburgs. (1896)
At the age of twenty-five, Baum started studying theatre in New York City. From 1881 to 1882 he managed an opera house in Richburg, New York. He wrote the play The Maid of Arran in 1882 which he acted in. On 9 November, 1882 he married Maud Gage with whom he would have four children. Baum became a theosophist, his beliefs often reflected in his writings. He left theatre life in 1883 to go into private business though it floundered for a few years and in 1888 he decided to move the family to Aberdeen, South Dakota. He opened a department store there which failed. He edited the newspaper, Saturday Pioneer, though it failed too. In 1891 the Baum’s moved to Chicago. After more failed attempts to establish himself financially, Baum, encouraged by his mother-in-law, started to write down the nursery rhymes he had improvised and told to his sons over the years. Mother Goose in Prose was published in 1897. It met rave reviews and in 1899 he collaborated with Chicago cartoonist and poster designer W. W. Denslow on yet another success, Father Goose: His Book. It would be the best-selling book for that year with an estimated 175,000 copies sold.
1900 was the year that the book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was published to instant success, another collaboration between Baum and Denslow. A copy sold for $1.50. It would be adapted as a musical for a long run on Broadway in 1903 to great critical acclaim. Encouraged by positive reviews, this was now the time Baum would turn his full attentions to writing. Under various pseudonyms he would also write many children's stories, songbooks and plays such as Mary Louise. (1916) The next book in the Oz series, The Land of Oz, (1904) was Baum's response to the demand for more and also to supplement his dwindling finances due to the high theatre production costs of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Ozma of Oz, (1907) Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz (1908), and The Road to Oz (1909) followed. America now had its own home-spun fairy tale which combined elements of traditional magic, a witch, and make-believe fantasy of a talking scarecrow and tin man. Dorothy and her dog exemplify the girl next door and the cyclone sweeping them away from home and the ensuing journey back appeals universally. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz has been translated into many different languages all over the world. The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus was published in 1902 and The Enchanted Island of Yew in 1903.
The Baum family moved to Hollywood, California in 1910 whereupon the release and success of The Emerald City of Oz (1910) overshadowed The Sea Fairies (1911) and Sky Island. (1912) Baum had to declare bankruptcy in 1911. Thereafter he referred to himself as "Royal Historian of Oz" and commenced writing one Oz book per year including; The Patchwork Girl of Oz (1913), Tik-Tok of Oz (1914), The Scarecrow of Oz (1915), Rinkitink in Oz (1916), The Lost Princess of Oz (1917), The Tin Woodman of Oz (1918), The Magic of Oz (1919), and Glinda of Oz, his last book published posthumously. Baum started the Oz Film Manufacturing Company which experimented with film effects and he would write many and direct two but the company folded a year later. He started acting again with an amateur group called The Uplifters.
Three years later after failing health Baum would became bedridden, still suffering from a frail heart. L. Frank Baum died of a stroke on 6 May, 1919 and is buried in the Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery, in Glendale, California. An obituary was printed in the New York Times 8 May, 1919 edition.
L. Frank Baum's papers and manuscripts are housed at Columbia University. To Please a Child: A Biography of L. Frank Baum, Royal Historian of Oz (1961) is written by Baum's son Frank J. Baum and Russell P. MacFall. The Baum Bugle is a journal founded by the International Wizard of Oz Club in 1957. The 1939 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer is the best-known version of the Wizard of Oz though there were many others made.
From an inscription in a book that Baum had given his sister he notes: "I have learned to regard fame as a will-o-the-wisp, which when caught, is not worth the possession; but to please a child is a sweet and lovely thing that warms one's heart and brings its own reward."

Biography written by C.D. Merriman for Jalic Inc. Copyright Jalic Inc 2005. All Rights Reserved.

Biographical sketch of Ferdinand de Saussure

Ferdinand de Saussure, 1857-1913. Ferdinand de Saussure was born in Geneva into a family of well-known scientists. He studied Sanskrit and comparative linguistics in Geneva, Paris, and Leipzig, where he fell in with the circle of young scholars known as the Neogrammarians. Brugmann, in particular, was his mentor, but he was also close to Karl Verner and others of the circle.
In 1878, at the age of 21, Saussure published a long and precocious paper called "Note on the Primitive System of the Indo-European Vowels". He explained in greater and clearer detail than others who were coming to similar conclusions how the PIE ablaut system worked. (Ablaut is the ancient system of vowel alternations in the parent language, visible in surviving irregular alternations among cognates like Latin ped vs. Greek pod, 'foot'; and also in the Germanic strong verb system in exemplified by vowel alternates like sing, sang, sung).
One of the most inspired parts of his analysis is the positing of 'sonorant co-efficients', consonantal elements that do not appear in any daughter language but can be hypothesized due to the systematic way the vowels are affected in the descendent languages, and due to position and distribution of such elements in the rest of the PIE system. The great 20th century Indo-Europeanist Jerzy Kurylowicz later pointed out that Hittite, the last-discovered ancient Indo-European language, had consonants in just the positions predicted by Saussure's analysis. These consonants are now called laryngeals, and the study of laryngeals, bringing to bear more recent evidence than Saussure had access to, is still an important area of Indo-European studies.
This brilliant start was not followed by any tremendous output of published work, but it contained the seeds of his essential insight into the importance of the linguistic system and how central it is for understanding human knowledge and behavior. De Saussure was only eight years younger than Karl Brugmann, and he died some years earlier than Brugmann; yet because of his re-focussing of attention onto aspects of language that had not been part of the older field, he seems to belong to a later generation. His ideas fit into a recognizably modern era in which human phenomena are no longer viewed primarily from the point of view of their construed trajectory through time, but as structural wholes that are self-contained and whose parts fill interrelated functions.
Saussure's influence on linguists was far-reaching, first through his direct influence on his students at the University of Geneva, who practically worshipped him, and then through his ideas as collected and disseminated after his death by two of his students, Charles Bally and Albert Sechaye These students, who became well-known linguistic researchers in their own right, put together course notes from their and another student's notebooks to produce the Cours de Linguistique Generale, based on several of Saussure's courses of lectures at Geneva, using the notebooks of various students attending. This composite work, shaped and interpreted by Bally and Sechaye, was prepared in the years immediately following Saussure's death as a tribute and as a way making his brilliant ideas accessible beyond Geneva and for posterity. It worked: the Cours was widely read in French by scholars all over Europe, and in 1959 was translated into English by Wade Baskin mainly for American students, who were less likely to have learned to read French than their European counterparts. A new translation of the Cours by Roy Harris appeared in 1986.
Saussure's fresh ideas were consonant with those of his influental compatriot Claude Levi-Strauss, and also those of Emile Durkheim, pioneer of the new field of sociology. Saussure's influence spread all through the new social sciences in the early and mid-twentieth century, and ultimately, for better or worse, to literary theory and modern cultural studies. They still exert a very strong intellectual force in all these disciplines (probably most in Linguistics and the disciplines most influenced by literary theory; less so now in traditional Anthropology, Sociology, and Psychology).
In Linguistics, Saussure's focus on the synchronic dimension and on language as an interrelated system of elements was maintained through the American Structuralist period (Bloomfield, Hockett), and also in the Generative period (Chomsky, Bresnan). His view of the essential nature of the form-meaning pairing, without the intermediate and essentiallly meaningless syntactic layer posited by Chomsky, Perlmutter, and other generative theory-builders, has re-emerged in theories like Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (Sag and Pollard) and Construction Grammar.
Modern Functionalist theories have integrated diachrony much more than generative theories (cf. the Functional Typology of Greenberg, Givón, Comrie, Heine, and Bybee), but the focus on the synchronic has nevertheless been essentially maintained in modern Cognitive theories of language, in keeping with the synchronic view of the human mind in the Cognitive Sciences, notably Psychology and Neuroscience.