Around the World of Architecture

Kahn’s roofs are cycloid vaults — the curve a point on a rolling circle traces — each spanning 100 feet on four corner piers, in concrete only four inches thick. A slit along the top lets Texas sun hit a hidden aluminum wing that throws it back onto the ceiling, so the galleries glow silver while the vaults never actually meet.

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The Chinese name is Xiangshan — incense hills, not perfume. The summit is Incense-Burner Peak: two rocks that read as bronze censers, set in a Jin-dynasty hunting ground Qianlong later rebuilt as Jingyi Garden, then sacked twice by foreign armies. The famous autumn fire is not maple; it is smoke trees, a hillside of Cotinus that turns as if the incense finally caught.

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The Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests is a wooden calendar: four inner “dragon well” pillars for the seasons, twelve for the months, twelve for the two-hour watches of the day — twenty-eight columns for the twenty-eight lunar mansions, and not a nail in the frame. The park itself is a diagram of the cosmos, round to the north for heaven and square to the south for earth; the emperor walked it alone.

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14th-century Roman Catholic cathedral - Before the Sistine, Michelangelo came here and studied. In the Cappella di San Brizio, Luca Signorelli’s Last Judgment was already on the walls; Michelangelo stayed with those figures, then took what he had learned to Rome. The cathedral around the chapel is a cliff-top reliquary of striped stone and gold mosaic. Wonderful place to visit.

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Jan Letzel’s 1915 Industrial Promotion Hall stood 160 metres from the hypocenter, almost directly under a blast 600 metres up. The copper skin of the dome melted in the first instant, so the shockwave passed through the steel ribs instead of catching a roof and tearing the building over; the thick side walls took a vertical punch and stayed. Those who were at work inside did not survive. The skeletal remains were kept in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park so the place and the people would never be forgotten.

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It is Edo Castle’s inner Sakurada gate — the quiet twin of the outer Sakurada-mon, where a shogunal regent was cut down in the snow in 1860. The name is the kikyō, a five-petaled balloon flower stamped on the tiles, a star in plaster. The keep burned in 1657 and was never rebuilt; this turret-gate is still the door, the place palace tours line up to walk into the Emperor’s house.

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Built in honor of the mountain, these red halls are only the front door. Ieyasu built the two-storey sanctuary after he won the country — a shrine with an upstairs, almost unheard of — and behind it Fuji’s snowmelt comes out of the lava as a pond, which is why the shrine sits in town and not on the peak.

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