Robin Evans recasts the idea of the relationship between geometry and architecture, drawing on mathematics, engineering, art history, and aesthetics to uncover processes in the imagining and realizing of architectural form. Anyone reviewing the history of architectural theory, Robin Evans observes, would have to conclude that architects do not produce geometry, but rather consume it. In this long-awaited book, completed shortly before its author's death, Evans recasts the idea of the relationship between geometry and architecture, drawing on mathematics, engineering, art history, and aesthetics to uncover processes in the imagining and realizing of architectural form. He shows that geometry does not always play a stolid and dormant role but, in fact, may be an active agent in the links between thinking and imagination, imagination and drawing, drawing and building. He suggests a theory of architecture that is based on the many transactions between architecture and geometry as evidenced in individual buildings, largely in Europe, from the fifteenth to the twentieth century. From the Henry VII chapel at Westminster Abbey to Le Corbusier's Ronchamp, from Raphael's S. Eligio and the work of Piero della Francesca and Philibert Delorme to Guarino Guarini and the painters of cubism, Evans explores the geometries involved, asking whether they are in fact the stable underpinnings of the creative, intuitive, or rhetorical aspects of architecture. In particular he concentrates on the history of architectural projection, the geometry of vision that has become an internalized and pervasive pictorial method of construction and that, until now, has played only a small part in the development of architectural theory. Evans describes the ambivalent role that pictures play in architecture and urges resistance to the idea that pictures provide all that architects need, suggesting that there is much more within the scope of the architect's vision of a project than what can be drawn. He defines the different fields of projective transmission that concern architecture, and investigates the ambiguities of projection and the interaction of imagination with projection and its metaphors.

Introduction by Mohsen Mostafavi The late Robin Evans (1944-1993) was a highly original historian of architecture whose writings covered a wide range of concerns: society's role in the evolution and development of building types, aspects of geometry, modes of projection, military architecture, representation of all kinds. No matter what the topic, however, he always drew on firsthand experience, arriving at his insights from direct observation. This book brings together eight of Evans's most significant essays. Written over a period of twenty years, from 1970, when he graduated from the Architectural Association, to 1990, they represent the diverse interests of an agile and skeptical mind. The book includes an introduction by Mohsen Mostafavi, a chronological account of the development of Evans's writing by Robin Middleton, and a bibliography by Richard Difford. CONTENTS Towards Anarchitecture The Rights of Retreat and Rites of Exclusion: Notes Towards the Definition of Wall Figures, Doors and Passages Rookeries and Model Dwellings: English Housing Reform and the Moralities of Private Space Not to Be Used for Wrapping Purposes Translations from Drawing to Building The Developed Surface: An Enquiry into the Brief Life of an Eighteenth-Century Drawing Technique Mies van der Rohes Paradoxical Symmetries

Conversant in contemporary theory and architectural history, Stan Allen argues that concepts in architecture are not imported from other disciplines, but emerge through the materials and procedures of architectural practice itself. Drawing on his own experience as a working architect, he examines the ways in which the tools available to the architect affect the design and production of buildings. This second edition includes revised essays together with previously unpublished work. Allen’s seminal piece on Field Conditions is included in this reworked, revised and redesigned volume. A compelling read for student and practitioner alike.

First published in 1982, this book describes a new kind of prison architecture that developed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The book concentrates on architecture, but places it in the context of contemporary penal practice and contemporary thought. Beginning with an exploration on the eighteenth-century prisons before reform, the book goes on to consider two earlier kinds of imprisonment that were modified by eighteenth-century reformers. The theory and practice of prison design is covered in detail. The later parts of the book deals with alliance between architecture and reform, and with the connection between the utilitarian architecture of the reformed prisons and academic neo-classicism. The overall aim of the book is to show the profound change that was being wrought in the nature of architecture, which was exemplified in the reformed prisons. Architecture, one emblem of the social order, was now one of its fundamental instruments.

In his writings, Hume talks of our 'gilding and staining' natural objects, and of the mind's propensity to 'spread itself' on the world. This has led commentators to use the metaphor of 'projection' in connection with his philosophy: Hume is held to have taught that causal power and self are projections, that God is a projection of our fear, and that value is a projection of sentiment. By considering what it is about Hume's writing that occasions this metaphor, P. J. E. Kail spells out its meaning, the role it plays in Hume's work, and examines how, if at all, what sounds 'projective' in Hume can be reconciled with what sounds 'realist'. In addition to offering some highly original readings of Hume's central ideas, Projection and Realism in Hume's Philosophy offers a detailed examination of the notion of projection and the problems it faces.

Between the late Renaissance and the early nineteenth century, the ancient arts of architecture were being profoundly transformed by the scientific revolution. This important book, which won the 1984 Alice Davis Hitchcock Award, traces the process by which the mystical and numerological grounds for the use of number and geometry in building gave way to the more functional and technical ones that prevail in architectural theory and practice today. Throughout, it relates the major architectural treatises of successive generations to the larger culture and the writings of philosophers, mathematicians, scientists, and engineers.Alberto Pérez-Gómez is Director of the School of Architecture at Carleton University in Ottowa.

This lively, stimulating account of non-Euclidean geometry by a noted mathematician covers matrices, determinants, group theory, and many other related topics, with an emphasis on the subject's novel, striking aspects. 1955 edition.