The Dancing Column: On Order in Architecture

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 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

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