Architecture
Throughout the building red oak is used. It is a hardwood used regularly during the period of the building's construction. Transoms above the doors were originally designed to increase air circulation, since of course there was no air conditioning. Now they serve as sources of natural light to the inner spaces of the building. Old Main was the fist building in Tempe to have electricity, but it was rather unreliable. Therefore lighting fixtures of the period all had "down" lamps which ran on electricity and "up" lamps which ran on gas when the electricity wasn't available.
Read more about this topic: Old Main (Arizona State University)
Famous quotes containing the word architecture:
“Polarized light showed the secret architecture of bodies; and when the second-sight of the mind is opened, now one color or form or gesture, and now another, has a pungency, as if a more interior ray had been emitted, disclosing its deep holdings in the frame of things.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“And when his hours are numbered, and the world
Is all his own, retiring, as he were not,
Leaves, when the sun appears, astonished Art
To mimic in slow structures, stone by stone,
Built in an age, the mad wind’s night-work,
The frolic architecture of the snow.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“In short, the building becomes a theatrical demonstration of its functional ideal. In this romanticism, High-Tech architecture is, of course, no different in spirit—if totally different in form—from all the romantic architecture of the past.”
—Dan Cruickshank (b. 1949)