October 30th, 2011  Posted at   Home Improvement

The Hollywood Hills, an affluent and expensive residential area in California, has been linked with beauty and glamor. It lies in the eastern end of Santa Monica Mountains and includes foothills, green hill, and a number of beautifully designed homes. This picturesque location is the home of many celebrities and boasts of many idiosyncratically styled homes, ranging from architectural homes of 1900s to modern designer houses. The architectural designed homes in Hollywood Hills naturally add more splendors and grandeur to this beautiful city.

You can find various types of houses, including Spanish charmers, hillside cottages, gated estates, Tudor style estates, Tudor homes, mid century homes, American style bungalows and Mediterranean villas in this area. The architectural designed homes in Hollywood Hills are noted for their unique features and characteristics. This article tries to pinpoint the salient and major features of some important architectural styles found here.

Tudor style architectural designed homes in Hollywood Hills typically have many characteristic features, such as massive chimneys with decorative half timbering, sharply pitched roofs, prominent cross gables, high and narrow windows, and small window panels. Some Tudor homes may have wonderfully patterned stonework or brickwork, low walls, and gables. In America, the Tudor architecture is commonly referred to as Tudor Revival Style.

The Mediterranean style architectural designed homes in Hollywood Hills are renowned for their beautiful exterior colors, stucco type architecture design, low pitched red tile roof, arched entrance doors, and domed windows. Many homes are built in this type of architecture. The mid century homes possess certain characteristic features of their own. Mostly, these houses have post and beam construction style, flat roofs, and expansive windows. Hollywood Hills also have Modern style homes. These homes usually have simple designs, comfortable style, and open floor plans. Homes built in American bungalow style may have features like one and half stories, central living room, low pitched roof with a horizontal shape, fitted shelves, cabinets, and seats, connecting rooms, absence of hallways, and efficient floor planning. Read more… »

October 29th, 2011  Posted at   Architecture and Interior Design

Modern Architectural design refers to the real-time design and planning of spaces. Architecture design covers many different elements such as layout, construction and the lighting. Architects sometimes also deal with the ways to craft practical and functional spaces using available materials.

The term architecture refers to various specialized fields. Modern architects focus on specific types of architecture, rather than architecture as a whole. A building architect only works on residential structures while a landscape architect concentrates only on designing landscapes.

An architect must take into account space, textures, structure, shapes, materials and costs while designing any landscape or building. An architect should have a good insight to engineering, mathematics and related analysis.

Professional architectural firm specializes in providing various architectural design and visualization services to clients. Such companies hire architects along with support staff to assist the architects. Sometimes they form a part of a larger company who handle various aspects of the design and planning process.

A conventional architectural design firm offers a wide variety of design services, from drafting, rendering, modeling and drawing up plans for providing ground design of a structure or remodeling. In addition to drafting, the firm can also render models to visualize how a structure will look like and consult with owners to optimize the whole process. Architects can also be called upon over the course of a job as conditions change and modifications are required to the original design.

Outsourcing architectural design services offers many benefits such as competitive edge, lower cost, enhanced performance, skilled labor, reliability and security. That is why architectural design outsourcing is the most sought after industry in AEC industry today. Read more… »

October 28th, 2011  Posted at   Home Improvement

Architecture design is a scientific and artistic concept of building structures and understanding various building materials and forms. Generally the architect works in coordination with the internal and external environment of the structure, but when designs go against human tastes and cultural preferences the result is disastrous. An example of this are the drab and indistinguishable cities lined with uniform box structures – such as identical houses, office complexes and high rises.

Design in architectural language means the sum total of plan of building, the elevation, section, figure, proportion, ground, scale, ratio to external unit measure and grids. Even though we regard architecture as an art form, an indispensable principal in architectural design is a keen mathematical and analytical understanding of forms. Without mathematical hypothesis to guide us, we would have skewed designs and patterns.

Beginning with Romanesque architecture, design was defined in strong, simple, massive forms graduating into the ribs and piers of the 11th century and on to the perfect form of 13th-century Gothic architecture. With each century the concepts and designs changed, ranging from Baroque (17th century), Georgian (18th century), Classical and Gothic revival (19th century) to expressions of technology and modernistic art (20th century), giving credence to Victor Hugo’s prophecy of doom that ‘the word will kill stone’.

The reason for these strong words was that before the popularity of visual media it was art and architecture that gave expression to our creative sensibilities. The history of a city or country could be gleamed from the structures and buildings. With World War II the ground rules were being regulated by omnipresent media, mobility and economic wealth, making us witness architecture designs ranging from burlesque to grandiose to just plain simple. The environmental degradation of natural resources turned our focus to environmentally-sensitive or sustainable designs even as architects turned towards eco-friendly material. Architecture designs became case-sensitive – appealing to nature as a metaphor for cities, buildings or residential complexes.