When I was touring northern Italy and Spain I was struck by the timeless beauty of wrought-ironworks, fashioned out of the architecture of the buildings and into the garden trellises. It was not so much the ornate details that I found so interesting as I found the strength and durability of the material to be: it tested time, only growing more attractive. Later, back in the U.S.A. and practicing my profession as a Landscape Architect I found that wrought-iron was not often affordable except in only the most selective of projects (i.e. those with very, fat budgets).
I did design my share of wooden and hollow-tube trellises over the years but I was always looking for a material that would capture the essence of wrought-iron and at an affordable price. That is when I began experimenting with REBAR (reinforced iron for concrete building footings).

Rebar comes in a variety of diameters and surface patterns, usually in 20 foot lengths. It is the ‘poor cousin’ of construction-metals exclusively finding its’ way into concrete pours to reinforce the structural value of footings, walls and flat surfaces. I have not seen it utilized for much else.

There are quite a few good reasons why rebar works well as a trellis building material. Personally, I like the way it looks, it reminds me of Sahuaro Ribs and Ocotillo sticks used in the Southwest. It also takes on the look of knotty pine poles as well. Part of its attraction is that the knobby surface catches the light in a play of shadows throughout the day (and also in the nightime with directed, accent lighting).

Rebar does not have to be treated or painted; it looks best in its natural state of surface rust. It can, however, stain tile or fabric beneath it. In a rainy climate it is a good idea to spray a mat-sealer over those areas that may drip. Most landscape surfaces, however, are durable enough to handle these occasional drips. On one occasion we had the rebar elements, powder-coated with bright colors to go with the festive character of the project (powder coating is baked-on paint, like on a automobile). I do not recommend this treatment because of its expense but it does have its uses.

Although rebar does not sculpt well as wrought iron will, it can be bent within certain limits. In fact, the bending of the rebar can be best taken care of at the rebar yard itself, (look under rebar suppliers in the yellow pages). They receive

specifications from building contractors for all sorts or shapes and configurations to accommodate their building footings etc. They usually raise an eyebrow to such requests eg. rebar stock bent for a trellis, but more often than not they get into the spirit of the project and appreciate the change of pace.

I once designed and built a rebar trellis that we named “Double-Helix”, a vine trellis; the curve linear shapes of the trellis’s roof-line created a shadow of a double helix on the ground. You also saw the double helix form when walking by the trellis. Naturally, you can build a rebar trellis out of straight pieces of rod as well and eliminate the bending. A really nice look is to use different diameter rebar sticks and place them alongside one another in a descending pattern. They can also be cut to different lengths and also be placed in a descending pattern. It is really up to your imagination or that of your designer and landscape contractor.

Some of the ’straight-rod’ rebar trellises that we have designed and built were topped with another interesting material i.e. sheets of reinforced, metal used to reinforce concrete driveways. These sheets generally come in 7 foot widths and vary in lengths, of about 10 feet. Their box pattern is usually in 4 inch squares; this allows for plenty of air flow and a chance for the vines to trail throughout the webbing.

Lastly, anchoring a rebar trellis to the ground is quite simple. Basically all you need to do is to dig a 2 foot or better deep hole, set the rebar leg into it and pour your concrete mixture around it. You can also integrate all or part of the trellis’s legs into a patio wall, if the overall architectural design of the house and garden will benefit from this application. Naturally, have your construction details reviewed by your licensed landscape contractor.

The exact characteristics and origins of Modern architecture are still open to interpretation and debate.

Some historians see the evolution of Modern architecture as a social matter, closely tied to the project of Modernity and hence to the Enlightenment, a result of social and political revolutions.

Others see Modern architecture as primarily driven by technological and engineering developments, and it is true that the availability of new building materials such as iron, steel, concrete and glass drove the invention of new building techniques as part of the Industrial Revolution. In 1796, Shrewsbury mill owner Charles Bage first used his ‘fireproof’ design, which relied on cast iron and brick with flag stone floors. Such construction greatly strengthened the structure of mills, which enabled them to accommodate much bigger machines. Due to poor knowledge of iron’s properties as a construction material, a number of early mills collapsed. It was not until the early 1830s that Eaton Hodgkinson introduced the section beam, leading to widespread use of iron construction, this kind of austere industrial architecture utterly transformed the landscape of northern Britain, leading to the description, “Dark satanic mills” of places like Manchester and parts of West Yorkshire. The Crystal Palace by Joseph Paxton at the Great Exhibition of 1851 was an early example of iron and glass construction; possibly the best example is the development of the tall steel skyscraper in Chicago around 1890 by William Le Baron Jenney and Louis Sullivan. Early structures to employ concrete as the chief means of architectural expression (rather than for purely utilitarian structure) include Frank Lloyd Wright’s Unity Temple, built in 1906 near Chicago, and Rudolf Steiner’s Second Goetheanum, built from 1926 near Basel, Switzerland.

Other historians regard Modernism as a matter of taste, a reaction against eclecticism and the lavish stylistic excesses of Victorian Era and Edwardian Art Nouveau.
Whatever the cause, around 1900 a number of architects around the world began developing new architectural solutions to integrate traditional precedents (Gothic, for instance) with new technological possibilities. The work of Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright in Chicago, Victor Horta in Brussels, Antoni Gaudi in Barcelona, Otto Wagner in Vienna and Charles Rennie Mackintosh in Glasgow, among many others, can be seen as a common struggle between old and new.

Modernism as dominant style
By the 1920s the most important figures in Modern architecture had established their reputations. The big three are commonly recognized as Le Corbusier in France, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius in Germany. Mies van der Rohe and Gropius were both directors of the Bauhaus, one of a number of European schools and associations concerned with reconciling craft tradition and industrial technology.
Frank Lloyd Wright’s career parallels and influences the work of the European modernists, particularly via the Wasmuth Portfolio, but he refused to be categorized with them. Wright was a major influence on both Gropius and van der Rohe, however, as well as on the whole of organic architecture.

In 1932 came the important MOMA exhibition, the International Exhibition of Modern Architecture, curated by Philip Johnson. Johnson and collaborator Henry-Russell Hitchcock drew together many distinct threads and trends, identified them as stylistically similar and having a common purpose, and consolidated them into the International Style.
This was an important turning point. With World War II the important figures of the Bauhaus fled to the United States, to Chicago, to the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and to Black Mountain College. While Modern architectural design never became a dominant style in single-dwelling residential buildings, in institutional and commercial architecture Modernism became the pre-eminent, and in the schools (for leaders of the profession) the only acceptable, design solution from about 1932 to about 1984.

Architects who worked in the international style wanted to break with architectural tradition and design simple, unornamented buildings. The most commonly used materials are glass for the facade, steel for exterior support, and concrete for the floors and interior supports; floor plans were functional and logical. The style became most evident in the design of skyscrapers. Perhaps its most famous manifestations include the United Nations headquarters (Le Corbusier, Oscar Niemeyer, Sir Howard Robertson), the Seagram Building (Ludwig Mies van der Rohe), and Lever House (Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill), all in New York. A prominent residential example is the Lovell House (Richard Neutra) in Los Angeles.

Detractors of the international style claim that its stark, uncompromisingly rectangular geometry is dehumanising. Le Corbusier once described buildings as “machines for living”, but people are not machines and it was suggested that they do not want to live in machines. Even Philip Johnson admitted he was “bored with the box.” Since the early 1980s many architects have deliberately sought to move away from rectilinear designs, towards more eclectic styles. During the middle of the century, some architects began experimenting in organic forms that they felt were more human and accessible. Mid-century modernism, or organic modernism, was very popular, due to its democratic and playful nature. Alvar Aalto and Eero Saarinen were two of the most prolific architects and designers in this movement, which has influenced contemporary modernism.

Although there is debate as to when and why the decline of the modern movement occurred, criticism of Modern architecture began in the 1960s on the grounds that it was universal, sterile, elitist and lacked meaning. Its approach had become ossified in a “style” that threatened to degenerate into a set of mannerisms. Siegfried Giedion in the 1961 introduction to his evolving text, Space, Time and Architecture (first written in 1941), could begin “At the moment a certain confusion exists in contemporary architecture, as in painting; a kind of pause, even a kind of exhaustion.” At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a 1961 symposium discussed the question “Modern Architecture: Death or Metamorphosis?” In New York, the coup d’état appeared to materialize in controversy around the Pan Am Building that loomed over Grand Central Station, taking advantage of the modernist real estate concept of “air rights”, In criticism by Ada Louise Huxtable and Douglas Haskell it was seen to “sever” the Park Avenue streetscape and “tarnish” the reputations of its consortium of architects: Walter Gropius, Pietro Belluschi and the builders Emery Roth & Sons. The rise of postmodernism was attributed to disenchantment with Modern architecture. By the 1980s, postmodern architecture appeared triumphant over modernism, including the temple of the Light of the World, a futuristic design for its time Guadalajara Jalisco La Luz del Mundo Sede International; however, postmodern aesthetics lacked traction and by the mid-1990s, a neo-modern (or hypermodern) architecture had once again established international pre-eminence. As part of this revival, much of the criticism of the modernists has been revisited, refuted, and re-evaluated; and a modernistic idiom once again dominates in institutional and commercial contemporary practice, but must now compete with the revival of traditional architectural design in commercial and institutional architecture; residential design continues to be dominated by a traditional aesthetic.

Characteristics
Modern architecture is usually characterized by:
• a rejection of historical styles as a source of architectural form (historicism)
• an adoption of the principle that the materials and functional requirements determine the result
• an adoption of the machine aesthetic
• a rejection of ornament
• a simplification of form and elimination of “unnecessary detail”
• an adoption of expressed structure
• Form follows function

There is a connection from the classical days of the design of building to the modern day style. In the overall decision of the design, the whole inside to the outer accessibility area to include common, modern day, and casual access, but in timed sequenced. Making available the areas of use for whatever purpose chosen, in the designated parts of the building. This accessibility includes the population of the area surrounding the building; availability of such a resource is a step towards combining a highly technological possibility, with a social aspect. By integrating and applying a technological implementation, to include a larger mass of people, is in need of the insights of the many different degrees of intuitional thinking. A process that should, as a principal include the natural light of the sun, as a devised source of the natural habitual construction of the design.

Architecture is a perspective in one view, of what is considered contemporary art. The style or design of the homes across the market that has a demand or need of the usually accepted form of what is considered, “enough.” This is a reflection of the society based value system that could be utilized for a broader understanding of living within proximity of others. There is a thread of the institutional factors of the development of the higher ends of society. Which spends on the majority of the manufacturing singularities, which is a process that includes the debts, in the amount spread out in the purchases, such as homes.

In a concept, architecture can be a reflection on the historical value that brought the first inclusion of art into the creation of buildings. In this art integrated type of creating a building was a combination; with what was held as important to the people,

who were in relation to the structures. The connection to the economy of a city, and, or the rulers of the nation, and to the creators, was a valued construction that was symbolic for the accomplishments of a technological state of the art, design.

In knowing the relation to human life and the good emotional states provided by the natural world, invites a concept for the environment of a habitual atmosphere, to be a vital reason for life in the design. This is according to the mass numbers of people that are spread out across the world, but have a certain place where they call home. The place from where they originated in decent of ancestry heritage. The inclusion of a place for the goodness of living, can be as the commonwealth of investment of a society, that can respect the artistry of architecture, as a place of healthy living in relation to the other life forms in the natural environmental surrounding.

Looking to the history of then, when the days of living was as though the king kept the city, and gave the protection of the people in his care. As too the surrounding area was in relation towards the other people in the environmental relation towards other nations of the area. Why should a government provide material to other countries, when the government can construct the buildings, and be in the development plans of a whole situated place, that is available for accessibility, for commercial, recreational, and habitual living? Instead of taxing people and major corporations – in fractions – when where those industries and individuals invest in the markets of other countries, and are accumulating billions of net worth each year?

Architecture has the value in the accessibility of common living in relation to the structure of time in the availability of the quality of life. Being able to live in an integrated area, that is, in a concept of homes and the buildings of development, is an investment for the health of a community and a larger whole of society.

Today people can look back and see the integration of society, at the time of the constructed architectural building of magnificent artistry. The modern day style of building, is in a transitional state of awakening, to the mass market of the many billions more of people, now alive today around the world. Including the same freedoms depicted in the creation of the most magnificent buildings has a connection to the ever-closing fast paced future of economical arising construction of habitual designs. Can the new forms of buildings, which, could be built with the availability of the material from the very government, that, could provide the accessible tools, be used for the collaboration or individual and personal approach of designs?

In the aspect of the individual and personal approach the architecture of a home should have the geometrical beauty of the natural sunlight being accessible for the person who is building the home. Major projects of construction should reflect the personal design of homes; the architectural blueprint should be effective in every space created. The future is a place of vast possibilities and the architect of buildings to hold masses of people, can be an accessible and available places of society integrated interaction of schooling, work, and recreational activities.

In the opposite subjection, the housing of the masses of people can be an isolating closed in and degrading dark place that can seem like in all absolution as a penitentiary for the whole of society and the individual soul. The solution is in the design of a plan, and in the creation of freedom in the basis of what is considered and implemented as important. When accounting for the larger scores of people who could benefit in the production of architectural buildings, that is possible with the ever increasing technological advancements in the creation of buildings that are both: accessible, and available.

The past shows of many great artistries of then modern man, today shows the evolution of the creations and in the materials used in the constructions. Tomorrow things get refined and there are even more breakthroughs, in the state of the art of architectural design and building. Examining the history and seeing how the created designs, had their place in the valued system of the people then. To now the influence, shows that the political and religious sectors were involved in the concepts that first started as a line from a pencil on a paper and became the cities of today, designed on a blueprint.