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Edificio Del Seguro Médico, Havana
The Edificio del Seguro Médico is a commercial building in El Vedado, HavanaBuilt between 1955 and 1958, it was designed as a mixed use building for apartments and offices for the headquarters of the National Medical Insurance Company by Antonio Quintana Simonetti. In regards to Edificio del Seguro Médico an architect from the Universidad de Oriente, Santiago de Cuba, Carlos Alberto Odio Soto made the following observation: Today the building houses the Cuban Ministry of Public Health and the Prensa Latina Agency. The only complete package of information about the building is the slides that were presented for the architectural contest, collected in the magazine 'Arquitectura', nº 269, of 1955 published by the College of Architects of Havana. History The project arose as a result of 1955 architectural competition for the new headquarters of the Cuban Colegio de Médicos (National Medical Association) and offices of the Medical Insurance Company. Because of the high cost of t ...
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Modern Architecture
Modern architecture, or modernist architecture, was an architectural movement or architectural style based upon new and innovative technologies of construction, particularly the use of glass, steel, and reinforced concrete; the idea that form should follow function ( functionalism); an embrace of minimalism; and a rejection of ornament. It emerged in the first half of the 20th century and became dominant after World War II until the 1980s, when it was gradually replaced as the principal style for institutional and corporate buildings by postmodern architecture. Origins File:Crystal Palace.PNG, The Crystal Palace (1851) was one of the first buildings to have cast plate glass windows supported by a cast-iron frame File:Maison François Coignet 2.jpg, The first house built of reinforced concrete, designed by François Coignet (1853) in Saint-Denis near Paris File:Home Insurance Building.JPG, The Home Insurance Building in Chicago, by William Le Baron Jenney (1884) File:Const ...
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United Nations Secretariat Building
The United Nations Secretariat Building is a skyscraper within the headquarters of the United Nations in the Turtle Bay neighborhood of Manhattan in New York City. It contains the offices of the United Nations Secretariat, the executive organ of the United Nations (UN). The building, designed in the International Style, is tall with 39 above-ground stories. It was designed by a group of architects led by Wallace Harrison. Although the building is located within the United States, the site is under UN jurisdiction, so the building is exempt from some local regulations. The Secretariat Building is designed as a rectangular slab measuring ; it is oriented from north to south and is connected with other buildings in the UN headquarters. The wider western and eastern elevations of the facade are glass curtain walls, while the narrower northern and southern elevations are made of marble. The Secretariat Building contains of space. The lowest stories contain press offices, staff ...
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Curtain Wall (architecture)
A curtain wall is an outer covering of a building in which the outer walls are non-structural, utilized only to keep the weather out and the occupants in. Since the curtain wall is non-structural, it can be made of lightweight materials, such as glass, thereby potentially reducing construction costs. An additional advantage of glass is that natural light can penetrate deeper within the building. The curtain wall façade does not carry any structural load from the building other than its own dead load weight. The wall transfers lateral wind loads that are incident upon it to the main building structure through connections at floors or columns of the building. A curtain wall is designed to resist air and water infiltration, absorb sway induced by wind and seismic forces acting on the building, withstand wind loads, and support its own weight. Curtain walls may be designed as "systems" integrating frame, wall panel, and weatherproofing materials. Steel frames have largely given w ...
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Wifredo Lam
Wifredo Óscar de la Concepción Lam y Castilla (; December 8, 1902 – September 11, 1982), better known as Wifredo Lam, was a Cuban artist who sought to portray and revive the enduring Afro-Cuban spirit and culture. Inspired by and in contact with some of the most renowned artists of the 20th century, including Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, Lam melded his influences and created a unique style, which was ultimately characterized by the prominence of hybrid figures. This distinctive visual style of his also influences many artists. Though he was predominantly a painter, he also worked with sculpture, ceramics and printmaking in his later life. Early life Wifredo Lam was born and raised in Sagua La Grande, a village in the sugar farming province of Villa Clara, Cuba. He was of mixed-race ancestry: his mother, the former Ana Serafina Castilla, was born to a Congolese former slave mother and a Cuban mulatto father and his father, Yam Lam, was a C ...
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Tesserae
A tessera (plural: tesserae, diminutive ''tessella'') is an individual tile, usually formed in the shape of a square, used in creating a mosaic. It is also known as an abaciscus or abaculus. Historical tesserae The oldest known tesserae date to the 3rd millennium BC, discovered in the ancient city of Shahdad in Kerman province, Iran. In early antiquity, mosaics were formed from naturally formed colored pebbles. By roughly 200 BC cut stone tesserae were being used in Hellenistic- Greek mosaics. For instance, a large body of surviving material from the Hellenistic period can be found in the mosaics of Delos, Greece, dating to the late 2nd century BC. Ancient Roman decorative mosaic panels and floor mosaics were also produced during the 2nd century BC, particularly at sites such as Pompeii. Marble or limestone were cut into small cubes and arranged into representational designs and geometric patterns. Later, tesserae were made from colored glass, or clear glass backed w ...
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López Serrano Building
The López Serrano Building was the tallest residential building in Cuba until the construction of the FOCSA Building, FOCSA in 1956. Designed by the architect Ricardo Mira in 1929, who in 1941 who also designed La Moderna Poesia bookstore on Obispo Street (Havana), Obispo Street for the same owner, it is often compared to the Bacardi Building (Havana), Bacardi Building in Old Havana built two years before the López Serrano Building because of their similarity in massing and central tower. The congressman, senator, and presidential candidate Eduardo Chibás was living on the fourteenth-floor penthouse when he committed suicide in August 1951 on the air at CMQ (Cuba), CMQ Radio Station. History The construction of the building was promoted by José Antonio López Serrano, a publisher who ran La Moderna Poesía. He was the son of Ana Luísa Serrano and José López Rodríguez, "Pote", a banker with ties to publishing.} Pote arrived in Cuba as a poor and illiterate teenager who be ...
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Window Blind
A window blind is a type of window covering. There are many different kinds of window blinds which use a variety of control systems. A typical window blind is made up of several long horizontal or vertical slats of various types of hard material, including wood, plastic or metal which are held together by cords that run through the blind slats. Vertical blinds run along a track system which can tilt open and closed and move side-to-side. Window blinds can be manoeuvred with either a manual or remote control by rotating them from an open position, with slats spaced out, to a closed position where slats overlap and block out most of the light. There are also several types of window coverings, called shades, that use a single piece of soft material instead of slats. The term window blinds can also be used to describe window coverings more broadly. In this context window blinds include almost every type of window covering, whether it is a hard or soft material; i.e. shutters, roll ...
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Concrete Masonry Unit
A concrete masonry unit (CMU) is a standard-size rectangular block used in building construction. CMUs are some of the most versatile building products available because of the wide variety of appearances that can be achieved using them. Those that use cinders ( fly ash or bottom ash) as an aggregate material are called cinder blocks in the United States, breeze blocks (''breeze'' is a synonym of ''ash'') in the United Kingdom, and hollow blocks in the Philippines. In New Zealand and Canada they are known as concrete blocks (a name common in the United States also). In New Zealand, they are also called construction blocks. In Australia, they are known as Besser blocks or Besser bricks, because the Besser Company was a major supplier of machines that made concrete blocks. Clinker blocks use clinker as aggregate. In non-technical usage, the terms ''cinder block'' and ''breeze block'' are often generalized to cover all of these varieties. Composition Concrete blocks are ma ...
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