RIBA Creation From Catastrophe

I have always been interested in architecture and especially when it comes to architectural history, I was therefore very excited to visit the Creation from Catastrophe exhibition at the Royal Institute of British Architecture. Before visiting I researched what the exhibition would display and I was excited to learn that it would show and teach me about how areas all over the world were rebuilt after such catastrophic events such as the Great Fire of London and Chicago. 

The exhibition itself was set out in a timeline like fashion which I was a fan of. I was interested to find out that after catastrophes such as the Great Fire of London many, many architects produced plans to rebuild the city which I had never really thought about before. Architects such as Valentine Knight. Sir Christopher Wren, Sir John Evelyn and Richard Newcourt are just a few that were showcased at the exhibition with their plans for London after the great blaze. I was particularly intrigued by how detailed a small scale plan can be. Most of the plans displayed were of A3 size, and captured therefore displayed the part of London that needed rebuilding on a significantly smaller size, yet still included key details, some that were too small to read unless you were up especially close. 

I had heard about the Chicago Fire of 1870 but know of hardly any details regarding the event. For example I learnt at the exhibition that the fire 'paved the way for a huge city expansion leading ultimately to the first skyscrapers'. I thought that this was very interesting and wondered what the area affected by the fire would be like now if there wasn't a fire to begin with. Would it have remained largely the same? Would there have been a city expansion? Would it have been to the scale that the expansion was? And would there be as many skyscrapers and how much later would they have started to be built? 

Another interesting part of the exhibition was finding out, in more depth, about catastrophes that have occurred in my life time that I shockingly knew little about. Some of these catastrophes include the Napal earthquake that occurred barely a year ago, the Hiroshima earthquake in 2001 and Pakistan which has been victim to multiple earthquakes over the years. 2005, 2013 and 2015 to name a few. From a simple google search I have learnt that there was in fact an 4.8 magnitude earthquake in the early hours of this morning (20/04/16) in Afghanistan.