Review
"March has written a highly readable account of the relationship between architectural discourse and mathematics. The opening chapters on the development of mathematics and the significance of number provide the speculative architectural inquiries that follow with an authority which many other such studies have lacked. His findings are sure to provoke considerable debate across a broad scholarly base." (Professor Robert Tavernor, University of Bath)
"[This book signals] a further resurgence in the often inspired and brilliant career of one of the greatest theoretical minds of our time, in the field of architecture." (Professor Ivor Richards, University of Newcastle)
From the Inside Flap
Lionel March Architectonics of Humanism Essays on Number in Architecture 'March has written a highly readable account of the relationship between architectural discourse and mathematics. The opening chapters on the development of mathematics and the significance of number provide the speculative architectural inquiries that follow with an authority which many other such studies have lacked. His findings are sure to provoke considerable debate across a broad scholarly base.' Professor Robert Tavernor, University of Bath '[This book signals] a further resurgence in the often inspired and brilliant career of one of the greatest theoretical minds of our time, in the field of architecture.' Professor Ivor Richards, University of Newcastle Anyone seriously interested in computational aspects of design today will at some point in their investigation be taken back in history to times when mathematical concepts were applied to design. In these twenty-six essays, Lionel March examines the impact of the renaissance of classical mathematics on architecture before the First Moderns. In particular, he focuses on the arithmeticisation of geometry to which Piero della Francesca contributed significantly in the fifteenth century and which was applied to architectural works over the following 150 years. March takes the reader back to the foreign land that has been called the Renaissance. He shows that the way we think and see today is markedly different from the mentalit? of the inhabitants of that faraway country. Decoding the past afresh, the architectural practices of the Renaissance emerge as magical and alchemical, far from any mundane applications, or possible revivals of classical style today. Written, fifty years on, as a companion volume to Rudolf Wittkower's magisterial Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism, these essays make use of research in Renaissance mathematics, architecture, music and culture brought forward by scholars during the intervening period. In his study, March highlights the influence of classical arithmetic and geometric sources in the formulation of the architectural principles related by Wittkower to music theory; furthermore, he brings forward occult and cabalistic aspects which are ignored or underplayed in Wittkower's earlier presentation and, finally, he examines the assumed names of Alberti and Palladio and uncovers possible encrypted signatures and blessings in projects by these architects using contemporary letter-number substitutions. In a break with two millennia of architectural tradition, March's most daring speculation reveals the possibility that Vitruvius himself may be a fiction of a non-architect - the Roman polymath, Varro.
