Ancient Architecture - Greek, General & Miscellaneous Architectural History & Criticism, Victorian & Edwardian Period Architecture

Dancing Column On Order in Architecture

Name: Dancing Column On Order in Architecture
Author: Joseph Rykwert
ISBN: 9780262181709

by Joseph Rykwert

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Overview

Joseph Rykwert is one of the major architectural historians of this century, whose full humanistic understanding of architecture and its historical significance is unrivaled. The Dancing Column is certain to be his most controversial and challenging work to date. A decade in preparation, it is a deeply erudite, clearly written, and wide-ranging deconstruction of the system of column and beam known as the "orders of architecture," tracing the powerful and persistent analogy between columns and/or buildings and the human body. The body-column metaphor is as old as architectural thought, informing the works of Vitruvius, Alberti, and many later writers; but The Dancing Column is the first comprehensive treatment to do this huge subject full justice. It provides a new critical examination of the way the classical orders, which have dominated Western architecture for nearly three millennia, were first formulated. Rykwert opens with a review of their consequence for the leading architects of the twentieth century, and then traces ideas related to them in accounts of sacred antiquity and in scientific doctrines of humor and character.

About the Author, Joseph Rykwert

Joseph Rykwert is Paul Philippe Cret Professor of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania.

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Editorials

The Village Voice

This essay is fairly boggling in its scholarship, its scope, its freedom from cant, and also in Rykwert's fresh reading of meaning vested in the orders that "have dominated Western architecture for nearly three millennia." -- Village Voice Literary Supplement