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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.
Originally published in 1971 The Geometry of Environment is a fusion of art and mathematics introducing stimulating ideas from modern geometry, using illustrations from architecture and design. The revolution in the teaching of mathematics and the advent of the computer in design challenge traditional ways of appreciating the space about us, and expand the ‘structural’ understanding of our surroundings through such concepts as transformations, symmetry groups, sets and graphs. This book aims to show the relevance of ‘new maths’ and encourages exploration of the widening intellectual horizons of environmental design and architecture.
Originally published in 1976, The Architecture of Form is a collection of fourteen contributions by ten authors towards a quantitative approach to architectural design. The volume opens with an extended editorial introduction on the logic of design and the question of value, which places the papers into a decision-theoretic framework of descriptions, predictions and evaluations, and these are taken as the headings of the three parts of the volume. This book should be of wide interest to architects, building scientists, systems designers, operational research workers and computer scientists.
This is a digitally reprinted edition of Urban Space and Structures, first published in 1972. This first volume in the Cambridge Urban and Architectural Studies series is a compilation outlining the growth of a particular line of research work which was taking place at the Centre for Land Use and Built Form Studies in Cambridge at the time. It attempted to understand some of the factors which, at a theoretical level, condition the range of choices that are available, whether in a building, the nodal point in a city or the complete urban system.
Leon Battista Alberti was an outstanding polymath of the fifteenth century, alongside Piero della Francesca and before Leonardo da Vinci. While his contributions to architecture and the visual arts are well known and available in good English editions, and much of his literary and social writings are also available in English, his mathematical works are not well represented in readily available, accessible English editions have remained accessible only to specialists. The four treatises included here – Ludi matematici, De Componendis Cifris, Elementi di pittura and De lunularum quadratura – are extremely valuable in rounding out the portrait of this multitalented thinker. The treatises are presented in modern English translations, with commentary that is intended to make evident the depths of Alberti’s knowledge as well as address the treatises’ mathematical, historical and cultural context, their classical Greek roots, and their relationship to later works by Renaissance thinkers.
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Scientists debate the role of scientific research in the military-industrial complex and consider the complicity of academic science in American wars. On March 4, 1969, MIT faculty and students joined together for an extraordinary day of protest. Growing out of the MIT community's anguish over the Vietnam War and concern over the perceived complicity of academic science with the American war machine, the events of March 4 and the days following were a “positive protest”—a forum not only for addressing political and moral priorities but also for mapping out a course of action. Soon afterward, some of the participants founded the Union of Concerned Scientists. This book documents the Mar...
The Evolution of Designs tells the history of the many analogies that have been made, since the end of the eighteenth century, between the evolution of organisms and the human production of artefacts – especially buildings.
This book presents an expansive overview of the development of architectural and environmental research, with authoritative essays spanning Dean Hawkes’ impressive 50-year academic career. The book considers the relationship between the technologies of the environment and wider historical and theoretical factors, with chapters on topics ranging from the origins of modern ‘building science’ in Renaissance England to technology and imagination in architecture. It includes numerous architectural examples from renowned architects such as Christopher Wren, Peter Zumthor, Alvar Aalto, Robert Venturi and Carlo Scarpa. Aimed at students, scholars, and researchers in architecture and beyond, this illustrated volume collates important and wide-ranging essays tracing the definition, scope and methodologies of architectural and environmental studies, with a foreword by Susannah Hagan.
Composed of autobiographical sketches by a number of eminent comparatists, chiefly of the generation that has either recently retired or is approaching retirement, it anchors the intellectual and scholarly aspirations of the post-War period, through the personal narratives of those who shared in them and promoted them, in the experience of war, uprooting, racial and religious intolerance or persecution, and a deep longing for peaceful exchange and international understanding.