Site of the Month – Great Buildings

If you are a period-style home renovator, a modern home renovator, an historian, someone with an interest in architecture, an architect, a man, a woman, black, white or something in between, then you should find this month’s Site of the Month fascinating!

We have stumbled upon greatbuildings.com, a searchable database of hundreds of beautiful, striking, odd, crazy, gravity-defying and otherwise amazing buildings, the world over.

You can search by a whole host of different criteria, including by Architectural Style, which makes this site an invaluable reference if you are doing your home up in a particular style (Victorian, Neolithic, Gothic, Art Nouveau etc). However, it is not limited to older, traditional styles of architecture – there is also an extensive modern section, as well as subcategories of modern architecture like postmodern, corporate modern and deconstructivist modern! Just for all the tens of thousands of deconstructivists that read our blog

Another great feature of this site is that if you know when your house was built, you can check out architecture from the same time period as it was built in, and also the same area it comes from (as long as you don’t live in the North Pole). While many of the entries only have exterior views, you will find notes on the interior in the commentary on things like joinery, facades, plasterwork, the design of interior spaces and the types of rooms it had (stables, porches, sunrooms, etc). You’ll find links to other pages with information about the building also, and in some of these places you’ll be able to see the interiors of the buildings.

You can check out all different sorts of construction types, handily grouped together (concrete, brick, masonry, timber etc), and can also see buildings grouped together by the climate that they are situated in. If you live in a desert climate, you can see how people throughout the ages have designed their house to keep it as cool and humid as possible. If you live in a tropical climate, you can see how other people have dealt with the possibility of storms, and made the most of the lovely weather.

You can also see different buildings by their context – homes that are built on cliffsides or hills, in villages, by water, and also the ever-present suburban and urban homes.

If you want to see some beautiful examples of arches, courtyards, domes, stairways or vaults, if your house happens to include any of these, you can also search by architectural element.

The searches that I’ve listed here are only the ones that you can do under architectural types. You can also search by architect (got a thing going on with Frank Lloyd Wright?), by place (so you can make your home as genuine as possible with regard to your country and region), and you can also look up 3d models of different homes and find architecture books. There is a Great Buildings cd, with high resolution images that are not available on the website. This costs $149.95 (US, I assume), but has over 2200 images, as well as 300 live 3d walkthrough models of famous buildings, and also thousands of drawings, for those who like to have a bird’s eye view.

A great stickybeak for anyone that is interested in what the inside of other people’s houses look like!

Photo credits: GE Building by Dan DeLuca