Amazon.com: Architectonics of Humanism: Essays on Number in Architecture (Academy Editions): Lionel March, Rudolf Wittkower: Books

Book Description
Reinterpreting the architectural principles of the Renaissance period.

This book presents a fresh viewpoint on the use of symmetry and proportion in Alberti and Palladio with the help of new illustrations and examples. Covering the evolution of the Renaissance tradition into the twentieth century, this book offers a new evaluation which veers from Le Corbusier and the French school and moves toward the continuation and transformation in the Viennese and Chicago practices exemplified by Frank Lloyd Wright and the American school.

Lionel March (Los Angeles, CA) is a practicing architect and an avid follower of the Modernist tradition in architecture. He also teaches at the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at UCLA.

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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 mentalité 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.

Architectonics of Humanism: Essays on Number in Architecture (Academy Editions) (Paperback)

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