The Dancing Column: On Order in Architecture
- ISBN-10
- 0262681013
- ISBN-13
- 9780262681018
- Category
- Architecture
- Pages
- 598
- Language
- English
- Published
- 1998-02-06
- Publisher
- MIT Press
- Author
- Joseph Rykwert
Description
Joseph Rykwert is one of the major architectural historians of this century, whosefull humanistic understanding of architecture and its historical significance is unrivaled. TheDancing Column is certain to be his most controversial and challenging work to date. A decade inpreparation, it is a deeply erudite, clearly written, and wide-ranging deconstruction of the systemof column and beam known as the "orders of architecture," tracing the powerful and persistentanalogy between columns and/or buildings and the human body.The body-column metaphor is as old asarchitectural thought, informing the works of Vitruvius, Alberti, and many later writers; but TheDancing Column is the first comprehensive treatment to do this huge subject full justice. Itprovides a new critical examination of the way the classical orders, which have dominated Westernarchitecture for nearly three millennia, were first formulated. Rykwert opens with a review of theirconsequence for the leading architects of the twen tieth century, and then traces ideas related tothem in accounts of sacred antiquity and in scientific doctrines of humor and character.Thebody-column metaphor is traced in archaeological material from Egypt, Asia Minor, and the Levant, aswell as from Greece, drawing on recent accounts by hi storians of Greek religion and society as wellas the latest discoveries of archaeologists. Perhaps most important, Rykwert reexamines itssignificance for the formation of any theoretical view of architecture.Chapters cover an astonishingbreadth of material, including the notions of a set number and a proportional as well as anornamental rule of the orders; the theological-philosophical interpretatio Christiana of antiquityon which the domination of the orders relied; the astrological and geometrical canon of the humanfigure; gender and column; the body as a constantly refashioned cultural product; the Greek templebuilding and the nature of cu
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