Issue Editors Matthew A. Cohen and Maarten Delbeke
Prior to the advent of modern structural engineering, architects and builders considered proportional systems to be necessary tools for determining key dimensions of their works in terms of local units of measure. They also believed that proportional systems conferred upon their works a general condition of order that was integral to their notions of structural stability and beauty. As the conference devoted to this subject, held in Milan in 1951, evidenced, since the Middle Ages the phenomenon of proportional systems transformed and continued in various capacities as a complex framework of belief. On the sixtieth anniversary of that conference, in 2011 a conference at the University of Leiden looked anew at the history of proportional systems, and has in turn led to this special collection. The following papers explore proportional systems as design methods and modes of belief since Antiquity; current scholarly assumptions in light of the historiography of proportion; and the buildings themselves, using new tools and methods that increasingly replace preconception with precision.
Editorial
Interview
Research Article
Decoding the Pantheon Columns
Gerd Grasshoff and Christian Berndt
Volume 2 • Issue 1 • 2014 • Volume 2 • Art. 18
Also a part of:
Collection: Objects of Belief: Proportional Systems in the History of Architecture
Position Paper
Collections
-
The Two Mediterraneans that Live Apart, Together: Making Architectures and Writing Histories
Women’s display. Women’s exhibitions and exhibition design in the 20th century
Building Civic Identities. Communal Palaces in Italian Urban History (14th-17th Centuries)
Intersecting Practices: Architecture and the Visual Arts in Early Modern Europe - Italy and the Netherlands
The Geopolitical Aesthetic of Postmodernism
Architects as Global Entrepreneurs (1850-2000)
From Ration Cards to Refugee Camps: Architecture, Bureaucracy, and the Global State of Emergency during World War One
Comprador Networks and Comparative Modernities
Architectural Historiography and Fourth Wave Feminism
Marxism and Architectural Theory across the East-West Divide
Resilience in Architectural History
On Style
On the meaning of 'Europe' for Architectural History
Travel
Building Word Image: Printing Architecture 1800-1950
Objects of Belief: Proportional Systems in the History of Architecture
Culture of Crisis