Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science

Perez-Gomez takes you on an amazing trip from the discoveries of Galileo the arguments of Durand towards the 19th Century.The explanation of the way in which we lost the mythic aspect of the architecture discipline is devastatingly logical and to the point.This book is nothing short of a must-read for anyone interested on understanding how things got to be the way they are.

From the very title Alberto Pérez-Goméz 's remarkable study refers to Edmond Husserl's phenomenolgy. Using Husserl and Heidegger's thought Pérez-Goméz analyses the crisis of the methaphorical role of architecture. The advent of Cartesianism is for him the starting point of a process that has, from that time, developed until our contemporary epoch. Scientific thinking has instrumentalized architectural thinking changing architecture into a merely purposeful activity. Architecture has; in this way; losen its role of metaphor of universal meaning and it has more and more become a pragmatic and non-representational culture. At the very beginning of this crisis the author places Claude Perrault's theories on architectural orders. They reveal quite clearly that orders have become only guidelines for design rather than portrayers of a divine, poetic reality as they were in the Classical tradition. Pérez-Goméz very profoundly analysises theories of architecture from that time until the end of 19th century, focusing on the central role played by Durand, the French theorist who more than any other stigmatized this trend. The book, firstly written as a doctoral thesis, focuses upon geometry and the changed use of it within architecture. To this regard very insightful are those parts where Guarino Guarini and Girard Desargues are dealt with. The book constitues one of the best reflections on the modern condition in architecture and it manages to suggest a path for a correct rethinking of architecture within modern culture.