The Projective Cast: Architecture and Its Three Geometries
Author | : | |
Rating | : | 4.58 (922 Votes) |
Asin | : | 0262550385 |
Format Type | : | paperback |
Number of Pages | : | 456 Pages |
Publish Date | : | 2015-06-08 |
Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
We are carefully taken through them, stage by stage, so that the mysteries of a complex form are uncovered, or an apparently simple form is shown to be more complex than it seemed. The explanations of the geometries are captivating. Robin Evans, in his brilliant (sadly posthumous) book The Projective Cast, explores some of the properties of intersecting arcs, flying lines and similar triangles in a series of essays which work both as an introduction to a range of geometries, and as impressively well-informed accounts of episodes in cultural history. (Andrew Ballantyne Times Literary Supplement)
Architect, teacher, historian, and theoretician, Robin Evans (1944-1993) was Visiting Professor, Graduate School of Design, Harvard University; Lecturer, University of Westminster, London; and Visiting Lecturer, Architectural Association, London.
A must read! This book is a must read for any architect interested in the geometries and shapes of buildings (which I hope is every architect) If you have second thoughts about buying it, buy it it is informative, entertaining the diagrams and pictures are beautiful and it will take 2 (amazing) months to go through it.. Typical Evans. Clear, breath takingly obvious. A Customer Robin Evans has a knack of getting right to the point of many a subject with expertise. Extremely versatile and knowledgable, he uses this base to write profoundly. Evans takes criticism to another level by getting to 'the obvious' quickly, then building on pre conceived theory with frightening clarity to form an original alternative view. Ron Jelaco said Evans should be emulated. There have been times when after reading an assignment from this book, my students will ask me how the subject-matter was pertinent to what we had been studying. I tell them: in no way. I just want them to read Robin Evans so that they can learn how to write. No one writes like Evans.
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. He d