offices buildings of the city

- a big city

- rapidly growing city

a large city that is very important to the nation with high raised buildings, government offices and embassies like Delhi

a large city that is very important to the nation with high raised buildings

government offices and embassies like Delhi

    Lisboa in Portuguese, is the capital of Portugal and capital of the Lisbon district. The city population is just over half a million; greater Lisbon area contains at least 2.5 million. Located on the north bank of one of the greatest harbors in Europe, formed from the estuary of the Tagus River, which flows into the Atlantic, Lisbon has a long and illustrious history. A site of Phoenician and Greek trading communities, Lisbon became an important Roman city. Its name, Lisboa, in Portuguese and Spanish, is a corruption of its Roman name, Felicitas Julia. The city experienced various waves of invaders. Muslims seized it from the Visigoths in the eighth century, and after a long siege Muslim Lisbon fell to the Portuguese Christian forces of King Afonso Henriques in 1147.

   Lisbon, built on a number of hills, saw most of its major palaces and churches constructed between the 14th and 18th centuries. In the 16th century, the city became the Aviz dynasty's main capital and seat, and a royal palace was built in the lower city along the harbor where ships brought the empire's riches from Africa, Asia, and Brazil. On 1 November 1755, a devastating earthquake wrecked a large part of the main city and destroyed the major buildings, killed or displaced scores of thousands of people, and destroyed important historical records and artifacts. The king's prime minister, the Marquis of Pombal, ordered the city rebuilt. The main lower city center, the baixa ("down town"), was reconstructed according to a master plan that laid out a square grid of streets, spacious squares, and broad avenues, upon which were erected buildings of a uniform height and design. Due to the earthquake's destruction, few buildings, with the exception of the larger cathedrals and palaces, predate 1755. The Baixa Pombalina, as this part of Lisbon is known, was the first planned city in Europe.

   Lisbon is more than the political capital of Portugal, the site of the central government's offices, the legislative, and executive buildings. Lisbon is the economic, social, and cultural capital of the country, as well as the major educational center that contains almost half the country's universities and secondary schools.

   The continuing importance of Lisbon as the country's political heart and mind, despite the justifiable resentment of its northern rival, Oporto, and the university town of Coimbra, was again illustrated in the Revolution of 25 April 1974, which began with a military coup by the Armed Forces Movement there. The Estado Novo was overthrown in a largely bloodless coup organized by career junior military officers whose main strategy was directed toward the conquest and control of the capital. Once the Armed Forces Movement had the city of Lisbon and environs under its control by the afternoon of 25 April 1974, its mastery of the remainder of the country was assured.

   Along with its dominance of the country's economy, politics, and government, Lisbon's cultural offerings remain impressive. The city is a treasure house that contains hundreds of historic houses and squares, churches and cathedrals, ancient palaces, and castles, some reconstructed to appear as they were before the Lisbon earthquake of 1755. There are scores of museums and libraries. Among the more outstanding museums open to the public are the Museu de Arte Antiga and the museums of the Gulbenkian Foundation.

SUBJECT AREA: Architecture and building, Civil engineering

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Nervi early established a reputation in the use of reinforced concrete with his stadium in Florence (1930–2). This elegant concrete structure combines graceful curves with functional solidity and is capable of seating some 35,000 spectators. The stadium was followed by the aircraft hangars built for the Italian Air Force at Orvieto and Ortebello, in which he spanned the vast roofs of the hangars with thin-shelled vaults supported by precast concrete beams and steel-reinforced ribs. The structural strength and subtle curves of these ribbed roofs set the pattern for Nervi's techniques, which he subsequently varied and elaborated on to solve problems that arose in further commissions.

Immediately after the Second World War Italy was short of supplies of steel for structural purposes so, in contrast to the USA, Britain and Germany, did not for some years construct any quantity of steel-framed rectangular buildinngs used for offices, housing or industrial use. It was Nervi who led the way to a ferroconcrete approach, using a new type of structure based on these materials in the form of a fine steel mesh sprayed with cement mortar and used to roof all kinds of structures. It was a method that resulted in expressionist curves instead of rectangular blocks, and the first of his great exhibition halls at Turin (1949), with a vault span of 240 ft (73 m), was an early example of this technique. Nervi continued to create original and beautiful ferroconcrete structures of infinite variety: for example, the hall at the Lido di Roma, Ostia; the terme at Chianciano; and the three buildings that he designed for the Rome Olympics in 1960. The Palazzetto dello Sport is probably the most famous of these, for which he co-operated with the architect Annibale Vitellozzi to construct a small sports palace seating 5,000 spectators under a concrete "big top" of 194 ft (59 m) diameter, its enclosing walls supported by thirtysix guy ropes of concrete; inside, the elegant roof displays a floral quality. In 1960 Nervi returned to Turin to build his imaginative Palace of Labour for the centenary celebrations of Garibaldi and Victor Emmanuel in the city. This vast hall, like the Crystal Palace in England a century earlier (see Paxton), had to be built quickly and be suitable for later adaptation. It was therefore constructed partly in steel, and the metal supporting columns rose to palm-leaf capitals reminiscent of those in ancient Nile palaces.

Nervi's aim was always to create functional buildings that simultaneously act by their aesthetic qualities as an effective educational influence. Functionalism for Nervi never became "brutalism". In consequence, his work is admired by the lay public as well as by architects. He collaborated with many of the outstanding architects of the day: with Gio Ponti on the Pirelli Building in Milan (1955–9); with Zehrfuss and Breuer on the Y-plan UNESCO Building in Paris (1953–7); and with Marcello Piacentini on the 16,000-seat Palazzo dello Sport in Rome. Nervi found time to write a number of books on building construction and design, lectured in the Universities of Rio de Janiero and Buenos Aires, and was for many years Professor of Technology and Technique of Construction in the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Rome. He continued to design new structures until well into the 1970s.

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offices, buildings w śródmieściu or centrum post

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adjective ((American) the part (of a city) containing the main centres for business and shopping: downtown Manhattan.) śródmiejski

SUBJECT AREA: Architecture and building

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Mies van der Rohe was the son of a stonemason and his early constructional training came from his father. As a young man he gained experience of the modern school from study of the architecture of the earlier leaders, notably Peter Behrens, Hendrik Berlage and Frank Lloyd Wright. He commenced architectural practice in 1913 and soon after the First World War was establishing his own version of modern architecture. His building materials were always of the highest quality, of marble, stone, glass and, especially, steel. He stripped his designs of all extraneous decoration: more than any of his contemporaries he followed the theme of elegance, functionalism and an ascetic concentration on essentials. He believed that architectural design should not look backwards but should reflect the contemporary achievement of advanced technology in both its construction and the materials used, and he began early in his career to act upon these beliefs. Typical was his early concrete and glass office building of 1922, after which, more importantly, came his designs for the German Pavilion at the Barcelona Exposition of 1929. These designs included his famous Barcelona chair, made from chrome steel and leather in a geometrical design, one which has survived as a classic and is still in production. Another milestone was his Tugendhat House in Brno (1930), a long, low, rectilinear structure in glass and steel that set a pattern for many later buildings of this type. In 1930 Mies followed his colleagues as third Director of the Bauhaus, but due to the rise of National Socialism in Germany it was closed in 1933. He finally left Germany for the USA in 1937, and the following year he took up his post as Director of Architecture in Chicago at what is now known as the Illinois Institute of Technology and where he remained for twenty years. In America Mies van der Rohe continued to develop his work upon his original thesis. His buildings are always recognizable for their elegance, fine proportions, high-quality materials and clean, geometrical forms; nearly all are of glass and steel in rectangular shapes. The structure and design evolved according to the individual needs of each commission, and there were three fundamental types of design. One type was the single or grouped high-rise tower, built for apartments for the wealthy, as in his Lake Shore Drive Apartments in Chicago (1948–51), or for city-centre offices, as in his Seagram Building in New York (1954–8, with Philip Johnson) or his Chicago Federal Centre (1964). Another form was the long, low rectangle based upon the earlier Tugendhat House and seen again in the New National Gallery in Berlin (1965–8). Third, there were the grouped schemes when the commission called for buildings of varied purpose on a single, large site. Here Mies van der Rohe achieved a variety and interest in the different shapes and heights of buildings set out in spatial harmony of landscape. Some examples of this type of scheme were housing estates (Lafayette Park Housing Development in Detroit, 1955–6), while others were for educational, commercial or shopping requirements, as at the Toronto Dominion Centre (1963–9).

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road, agreement blokować (zablokować perf); ( COMPUT) wyróżniać (wyróżnić perf)

- block up

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1) (a flat-sided mass of wood or stone etc: blocks of stone.) blok

2) (a piece of wood used for certain purposes: a chopping-block.) kloc

3) (a connected group of houses, offices etc: a block of flats; an office block.) blok

4) (a barrier: a road block.) zator, zapora, bariera

5) ((especially American) a group of buildings bounded by four streets: a walk round the block.) kwartał

- blockade

The ships blockaded the town.) dokonywać blokady

- blockage