- Paperback: 616 pages
- Publisher: MIT Press; New edition edition (8 April 1998)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0262681013
- ISBN-13: 978-0262681018
- Product Dimensions: 26.4 x 21.6 x 3.3 cm
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 951,487 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- See Complete Table of Contents
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More About the Author
Product Description
Product Description
Joseph Rykwert is one of the major architectural historians of this century, whose full humanistic understanding of architecture and its historical significance is unrivaled. The Dancing Column is certain to be his most controversial and challenging work to date. A decade in preparation, it is a deeply erudite, clearly written, and wide-ranging deconstruction of the system of column and beam known as the "orders of architecture," tracing the powerful and persistent analogy between columns and/or buildings and the human body.The body-column metaphor is as old as architectural thought, informing the works of Vitruvius, Alberti, and many later writers; but The Dancing Column is the first comprehensive treatment to do this huge subject full justice. It provides a new critical examination of the way the classical orders, which have dominated Western architecture for nearly three millennia, were first formulated. Rykwert opens with a review of their consequence for the leading architects of the twen tieth century, and then traces ideas related to them in accounts of sacred antiquity and in scientific doctrines of humor and character.The body-column metaphor is traced in archaeological material from Egypt, Asia Minor, and the Levant, as well as from Greece, drawing on recent accounts by hi storians of Greek religion and society as well as the latest discoveries of archaeologists. Perhaps most important, Rykwert reexamines its significance for the formation of any theoretical view of architecture.Chapters cover an astonishing breadth of material, including the notions of a set number and a proportional as well as an ornamental rule of the orders; the theological-philosophical interpretatio Christiana of antiquity on which the domination of the orders relied; the astrological and geometrical canon of the human figure; gender and column; the body as a constantly refashioned cultural product; the Greek temple building and the nature of cult; and the endurance of ornamental forms and the function of symbols.
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4.0 out of 5 stars (1 customer review)
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
erudite...as usual, 30 April 2000
By A Customer - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: The Dancing Column: On Order in Architecture (Hardcover)
we came to expect from Joseph Rykwert works of great erudition, which incessantly delve into their subject matter to uncover its deepest folds and hidden meanings...[perhaps a "deconstruction" without the fancy of that attribute], and this work is no exception to this. This is a thick investigation into the meanings of the column, and from that into the associations of body and building, into the meanings of classical architecture. For the erudite, a pleasure; for the professional, a necessary though at times difficult read. Not a coffee table book, though...amateurs beware.
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