There's another reason if we consider it in terms of interior design. It's related to directionality, the space is always divided into two parts. Whether it's a moving space or a staying space, but if we want to use it most efficiently...

Hi, Watson! Now today, let's talk about “why there are so many rectangular buildings?” If you look around, most of the buildings are in the form of boxes, and if you look at the representative apartment buildings in Korea, they are rectangular. 

If you ask me why, I think there are three or four main reasons. The first reason is the economy. If you imagine when buildings were built in the past, all of our buildings are made of wood. And four wooden pillars are used. 

And on the four pillars, the roof needs to be on top. To support the roof, the wooden supports that are named ‘보(bo)’ in Korea are needed on pillars. In fact, the wooden supports are more powerful than pillars when constructing buildings. 

For example, let's say we're holding a matchstick. When you press it from the top like this way, regarding this as a matchstick, If you press it like this, it doesn't break easily. But if you break it like this, it breaks!

The wood doesn't break well if you compress it when it's in this vertical direction, but it breaks well if you turn it 90 degrees to the side. What that means is that the wooden supports are more likely to break than the wooden pillars.

So that is the reason why we need to use stronger wooden supports. So the most expensive and best tree for building is used for wooden supports. That's why I used to watch wooden support as a reference point to determine how rich people live in Korean TV shows.

So there's a problem that we have to use a big tree for the wooden supports. That's why we need to use the wooden supports more efficiently. Since a person's average height is only 5 to 6 feet, so the wooden pillars are needed to be about 6 feet 5 inches.

So we use short trees. But the wooden supports that support the building need to use longer trees, and the question is how to adjust the length. Let's say we went to the forest and cut down the trees. But some trees are long and some trees are short. There must be trees of various lengths.

I don't think that all trees have the same length. Then the carpenter has to decide. If we want to make a square building, all four wooden supports have to be the same length. Then guess what will happen? We have to cut the other three according to the smallest length.

Then it's a huge waste. In this situation, the architect thinks like this. There is only one way to waste the least. As you can see, these two have to be the same length. So cut the long one according to the short one of the two longest ones, and cut the third one according to the length of the third and fourth one.

Then two long ones come out and two short ones come out. If we make wooden supports with two long ones and two short ones, we can make a rectangular wooden support as you can see like this. So this becomes the structure that supports this building.

So, as you can see, for economic reasons, we make two for long and two for short, and that results in a rectangular plane. That's the first reason. The second reason is directionality. All spaces, in fact, get their directionality depending on the given conditions.

There are few cases where the width and length are composed of the same length. We can think of Manhattan as an example. We call the road in the north-south direction "avenue". The avenue is wide and open in a straight line. Starting with First Avenue, it's numbered to 10th Avenue.

On the other hand, the one that goes vertical to that is called "street". The street is very narrow. Instead, it's tightly placed. The reason is that if you look at the island called Manhattan, the island is long in the north-south direction.

That's why a long street in the north-south direction should be the main road. There must be more traffic in the north-south direction. The east-west direction is narrow. So the street is narrow because there is little traffic.

So the main traffic is going to the avenue, and then when you come to the street, you just have to get out of the street you want. If a space has a direction and is long in the vertical direction, there is a main road axis according to it.

Anyway, the direction is determined according to the shape of the land. Because of that, a certain direction is long and a certain direction is short, an axis like this is created. So buildings are also more efficient in rectangular form. And the third reason is that if it's a rectangle, it's good to get sunlight.

Let's say we're building a house that's 100 square meters, and what happens if we make this square in the forward direction is that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. So we know that the south side is the most sunlit part, so if we make it square, it's only 10 meters under the sun.

But if it's just 100 square meters, if you make it long horizontally, the length of the side facing south can be much longer. That means you can stay warmer in the winter. If you ask if it's a problem because it's hot in summer, we can just pull out the eaves long.

Then we can block the summer sun. Another advantage is that if we make a square like this, the area where the sun comes in will end up just to this much. So this background is bound to be a dark space.
But if you make it long horizontally, sunlight comes in on almost every side.

So, the longer we make a building in the east-west direction, 
the more advantageous we can make a building in heating or lighting. Then you can ask this question, "if the sun goes up, 
if it goes up in a circle, don't you think you can make the surface round?"

If you apply it here, 
the half of the circle will be a zone where the sun doesn't come in.  So, in fact, it has the advantage of being able to receive sunlight 
much more effectively when it's made into a rectangle than a circle.

But there's another reason in terms of the interior design.
It's also related to directionality. The space is always divided into two parts.  Whether it's a moving space or a staying space, and what is a moving space, it is like a corridor. And the places you stay are like 
living rooms and classrooms.

If you think of the school, it's horizontally long. 
The sunlight has to come into the classroom well, so it's facing south. But if you look there, there's always a corridor in the north and a corridor in the middle.

If the floor plan is like this, you can see the hallway in the back and the classrooms are divided toward the south. So this classroom is a place to stay, and this hallway is a place to move. 
You move from side to side in the hallway and go into the classroom to live.

But in order for us to use space most efficiently, 
the least amount of space to move is the most efficient. If this space is close to the right direction, we have to double-hole the hallway like south-north and east-west. That's why there's a situation where four classrooms are split up like this.

But if we make this into a rectangle, we just have to put it in the hallway on one side where the sunlight isn't good and pierce it like this. So we can use the space more efficiently. If this goes to a smaller room, every room actually needs space to travel and stay in it.

When I put the furniture, when I put the bed or the desk, 
the desk is actually a rectangular shape, right? Because even if you make it square, you can't use the space in front of you where you can't reach your arms.

The space that I actually read books or write in my notebook is only about 2 feet wide from my chest. So there's no reason to make it wider than that. If you put a rectangular desk and a rectangular bed in a square shape, there's a lot of space that's thrown away like this.

But if this space is kind of like this... 
Then there's a space where you can use it more efficiently.  So we're usually made of rectangles, and everything that we do actually starts on a human scale, and our body is also shaped like a long rectangle up and down.

And when you move, it's often rectangular. 
Because cars are rectangular and the reason why they are is that they have a direction to move forward, so we don't make them long in the east-west direction. There's a direction of people in the direction of movement.  All the objects we use whether they’re moving or staying, they are shaped like rectangles like this. 

So when we put them in a rectangular space, we can see that it's easy to put them in one by one. But there are buildings that are not rectangular.  As I explained before, the circular space is very inefficient. 
As I said in a previous video, power is created when there’s a waste.

So on the contrary, the prototype of the wasteful planes can be a design that represents authority or proves that there is power.  So, if you look at the Pantheon, it's a circular structure and there's a building called Temple of Heaven where rituals are held in China. 

If you look at those, they’re shaped in a circle. 
And there are many cases where religious structures are circular.  It's because it's basically a space that's not used in everyday life.
But in the case of the chapel, it's rectangular. 

Because it's the most efficient way to make the biggest space because there's a functional reason why many people have to gather. If you look at the most representative churches in Europe, most of them have rectangular floor plans and chairs. There's a foundation on the front

If you imagine when they make this, the size of this building is decided by the strength of the building material that can make the space between the columns. And if you look at the cross section, they have to make a pillar and the roof needs to go in. Then, the roof goes in an upside down V shape.

For example, let's say we brought the longest member of the framework. If you stack two of them in an upside down V shape, the width of the building comes out. Then we decide on the width of the tree that we can get, and the length of the tree called 'a' now determines the width of this building called 'b',

and then if we copy this system called 'a' in one direction, the length of the building called 'c' comes out. Therefore, this is the most effective way to create a large space. That is because it's bound to be a rectangle. So what they did during the Roman period is a building called the Basilica. The Basilica was used as a market or as a presiding judge's court.

So, it's a space where a lot of people need to go to trial or gather around as an indoor space. But suddenly, when Christianity became a state religion in Rome, many people had to gather in the chapel. So where is the biggest place to gather? The Basilica.

So they gathered in the Basilica and worshiped, and the Basilica was made with this roof based on the principle that I mentioned and copied it to one side. But this isn't too religious. Since it's not religious, so they decided to make a dome for this like many other religious architectures that was shaped in a circular form, wasting space.

So they put the dome of the Pantheon over here. And the dome on the floor plan of the Basilica is typical of St. Peter's Basilica or something like that. Also, they thought it would be better to have a floor plan symbolizing a cross than a straight one, so they made a floor plan in the shape of a cross.

and get domes at the intersection of the two horizontals and verticals is now the prototype of a common chapel. Because of the movement line system I mentioned earlier, 
it's inevitable to come out as rectangles when we make a building. Anyway, if we want to use this interior space, we have to move from a to b space, then there's bound to be a hallway.

If we make it square, it'll be hard to divide the space. And it's easy to get a room without windows. In order for the window to somehow contact the outside air and improve lighting and ventilation, it is better to make it rectangular.

If not, it is the case of using one large room like a gym or a stadium. We don't have to worry about such things in these cases. It's a structure that surrounds the surrounding area to watch 
the main event in the middle, 

so in that case, we don't divide the interior space 
and use it for various purposes. So, when we design an art museum or a stadium, we have to think that the approach is different. So, of course, the shape is bound to come out differently.

So this time, we have talked about why there are so many rectangles in the building. And let's continue to talk about something else next time.

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