This is the only book dedicated to the Geometry of Polycentric Ovals. It includes problem solving constructions and mathematical formulas. For anyone interested in drawing or recognizing an oval, this book gives all the necessary construction and calculation tools. More than 30 basic construction problems are solved, with references to Geogebra animation videos, plus the solution to the Frame Problem and solutions to the Stadium Problem. A chapter (co-written with Margherita Caputo) is dedicated to totally new hypotheses on the project of Borromini’s oval dome of the church of San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane in Rome. Another one presents the case study of the Colosseum as an example of ovals with eight centres. The book is unique and new in its kind: original contributions add up to about 60% of the whole book, the rest being taken from published literature (and mostly from other work by the same author). The primary audience is: architects, graphic designers, industrial designers, architecture historians, civil engineers; moreover, the systematic way in which the book is organised could make it a companion to a textbook on descriptive geometry or on CAD.

At first glance, Borromini's architecture is a flight of Baroque fantasy, the product of limitless imagination. A closer look reveals an almost ruthlessly logical geometry underlying his creation. Blunt shows how the combination of revolutionary inventiveness and intellectual control gives Borromini's work its great appeal.

The church of San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, also called San Carlino, is an architectural artefact that continues to attract numerous hypotheses and geometric analyses attempting to explain its form and meaning. Numerous investigations have attempted to reveal its underlying geometrical principles, without, however, reaching a consensus. Finding San Carlino presents an edited collection of perspectives on Borromini’s famous Baroque church from a range of established and emerging scholars in architectural history and theory, including Werner Oechslin, Karsten Harries, Michael Hill and Lauren Jacobi amongst others. This book offers the reader different means of engaging with, enjoying and articulating San Carlino’s complexity, non-consensus and ambiguity. It is precisely such a unique disposition that motivates this book to explore multiple modes of architectural enquiry and delve into a series of theoretical and historiographical questions such as: why was Borromini not able to post-rationalize his architecture with his drawings? What is San Carlino’s exemplary value, and why does it continually engender exegetical and hermeneutic desire? What is the role of geometry in architecture, in history and today? Written for researchers, scholars and postgraduate students in architectural history and theory, the book uses San Carlino as an enigmatic centering point for a set of significant contemporary voices to explore new modes of confrontation and comparison.

Architects and artists have always acknowledged over the centuries that Rome is rightly called the 'eternal city'. Rome is eternal above all because it was always young, always 'in its prime'. Here the buildings that defined the West appeared over more than 2000 years, here the history of European architecture was written. The foundations were laid even in ancient Roman times, when the first attempts were made to design interiors and thus make space open to experience as something physical. And at that time the Roman architects also started to develop building types that are still valid today, thus creating the cornerstone of later Western architecture. In it Rome's primacy remained unbroken -- whether it was with old St Peter's as the first medieval basilica or new St. Peter's as the building in which Bramante and Michelangelo developed the High Renaissance, or with works by Bernini and Borromini whose rich and lucid spatial forms were to shape Baroque as far as Vienna, Bohemia and Lower Franconia, and also with Modern buildings, of which there are many unexpected pearls to be found in Rome. All this is comprehensible only if it is presented historically, i. e. in chronological sequence, and so the guide has not been arranged topographically as usual but chronologically.This means that one is not led in random sequence from a Baroque building to an ancient or a modern one, but the historical development is followed successively. Every epoch is preceded by an introduction that identifies its key features. This produces a continuous, lavishly illustrated history of the architecture of Rome -- and thus at the same time of the whole of the West. Practical handling is guaranteed by an alphabetical index and detailed maps, whose information does not just immediately illustrate the historical picture, but also makes it possible to choose a personal route through history.