Trabeation is a short film about why buildings look like they do. Good and bad things happen and architecture provides a kind of theatre or more specifically, stage set. Any good production is most enjoyed when watched beginning to end. That is, story is important. And the same is true for architecture. Trabeation is where architecture began. This short film is a loose educational framework about design. The fabric of which should help clarify why buildings look like the do, or at the very least where some of their traits came from. The film is a kind of story about where architecture began and where it currently resides. It’s focus includes the architecture of antiquity but mostly of the greatest architects and buildings of the western world in the last few centuries. So join me on a 50 minute journey through time and space as we to decode some history and the wonderful mosaic language of architecture. After all the more we know about the past the better we understand the present. And furthermore, how can we know what something could be if we don’t know what came before it. And If everything is judged by what it looks like instead of how it got that way, we’re missing half the story.
"Very informative, intelligently done, beautifully presented, and highly understandable."
"Wonderful voice to the narrator: compelling, authoritative, melodious"
- Dr. Craig Zabel, Associate Professor and former Head of the Art History Dept. Penn State University 1998 - 2017.