Good news: the Suppe Architecture Guide is going under an extreme makeover! New format, new organisation and an important new feature, a chronological index ordered by colours, to facilitate the search for each period's works, classified in accordance to each historical context as the following:
2010-... : from now on, the most recent works - let's see if little by little we get a glimpse of what's to come next (towards an actual "green" future?)...
before 1750: I know there's a whole lot more there, but for now I have to work within certain limits. Who knows, in the future, I may get to expand the guide?!?
I've originally created this guide when I first arrived as a doctorate fellowship student in Berlin in 2008, as a study tool for myself, to plan the visits to buildings and sites related to my research project and of my personal interest. I've formatted the content of the markers in order to objectively present the basic data of each listed building: location, authorship, dates and a photo.
As it turned out, I realised the potential of it, for it could be infinitely expanded to other cities, to the whole world at last. Then, each time I planned a trip, I started to mark places I wanted to visit, which made it grow considerably. And whenever I bumped into an interesting piece of architecture... you know. As you also know, time is never enough though (especially in times of finishing a doctorate thesis!), so its development has been quite irregular... but it goes on. Even my own hometown São Paulo has been quite neglected until now (which I intend to quickly compensate). By the amount of red markers in the map, you will notice that my initial interest has been mainly focused on contemporary architecture. I am gradually including more buildings from other periods as well.
It is not exactly a critical guide (which could eventually be also an amazing project). Although I do select what I want to be listed or not, the aim here is to collect as much information as possible, and leave it to you to make your own choices and to interpret for yourself whatever you get in contact with. I may occasionally add some personal comments or extra information on specific issues (sometimes it's really hard to resist), but that doesn't mean I'm analysing and judging anything... I'm just having fun!
The idea of creating the chronological index has been haunting me for a while, and now I've finally achieved a format which seems to work pretty fine. Maybe too eurocentric, I guess, but I had to somehow find a way to divide at least the western's recent history in general eras (and it actually fits quite well to the Brazilian history too), also corresponding to the main shifts in the vast and heterogeneous architectural production. With time, I will update the marker of each already registered file to the corresponding colour.
Next step: to transform it into a proper webpage... let's see.
Any comments or suggestions are always more than welcome!
Hope it may be useful (or simply amusing) and you have fun!!
