Crystal Ballroom

Crystal Ballroom is a name associated with various buildings and ballrooms worldwide, including:

The Crystal

The Crystal is a building on Royal Victoria Dock in east London that contains a permanent exhibition about sustainable development. It is owned and operated by Siemens. It is part of the Green Enterprise District policy that covers much of East London. The site is 18,000 square metres in size at the west end of the dock. Using solar power and ground source heat pumps to generate its own energy, it has set a high benchmark for sustainability. The building is the first to achieve the highest sustainable building accolades from the world’s two leading accreditation bodies, LEED and BREEAM, Platinum and Outstanding respectively.

Design

The building was designed by Pringle Brandon (Fit-Out, design leader) and Wilkinson Eyre Architects(shell and core) with Arup Group Limited who were the building and civil engineers, and Townshend Landscape Architects who designed the public realm.

Public Realm

The surrounding landscape was designed to be a sustainable urban landscape to help encourage a shift in the broader social ideology, making ‘sustainability’ more attractive and allowing people to participate in social activities within the site, which includes local food programmes and community gardens to help foster this principle. The landscape is public open space and is managed by the London Borough of Newham.

Ballroom

A ballroom is a large room inside a building, the designated purpose of which is holding large formal parties called balls. Traditionally, most balls were held in private residences; many mansions contain one or more ballrooms. In other large houses, a large room such as the main drawing room, long gallery, or hall may double as a ballroom, but a good ballroom should have the right type of flooring, such as hardwood flooring or stone flooring (usually marble).

Ballrooms are generally quite large, and may have ceilings higher than other rooms in the same building. The large amount of space for dancing, as well as the highly formal tone of events have given rise to ballroom dancing. The largest balls are now nearly always held in public buildings, and many hotels have a ballroom. They are also designed large to help the sound of orchestras carry well throughout the whole room.

A special case is the annual Vienna Opera Ball, where, just for one night, the auditorium of the Vienna State Opera is turned into a large ballroom. On the eve of the event, the rows of seats are removed from the stalls, and a new floor, level with the stage, is built.

Crystal

A crystal or crystalline solid is a solid material whose constituents, such as atoms, molecules or ions, are arranged in a highly ordered microscopic structure, forming a crystal lattice that extends in all directions. In addition, macroscopic single crystals are usually identifiable by their geometrical shape, consisting of flat faces with specific, characteristic orientations.

The scientific study of crystals and crystal formation is known as crystallography. The process of crystal formation via mechanisms of crystal growth is called crystallization or solidification. The word crystal is derived from the Ancient Greek word κρύσταλλος (krustallos), meaning both “ice” and “rock crystal”, from κρύος (kruos), "icy cold, frost".

Examples of large crystals include snowflakes, diamonds, and table salt. Most inorganic solids are not crystals but polycrystals, i.e. many microscopic crystals fused together into a single solid. Examples of polycrystals include most metals, rocks, ceramics, and ice. A third category of solids is amorphous solids, where the atoms have no periodic structure whatsoever. Examples of amorphous solids include glass, wax, and many plastics.

Live at the Crystal Ballroom

Live at the Crystal Ballroom is a concert video by American rock band The Black Keys. It was released on November 18, 2008 and was produced and directed by Lance Bangs. The concert was filmed on April 4, 2008 at their show in Portland, Oregon at the Crystal Ballroom.

Track listing

All songs written by Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney.

Personnel

References