Nexus IV. Architecture and mathematics

This fourth book in the Nexus series offers papers that further broaden the horizons of studies in architecture and mathematics. Over the years, Nexus has truly shown itself to have created a just that: a nexus between disciplines, between “languages”, between cultures. This new collection of papers carries on the splendid interdisciplinary variety that has characterized the previous three volumes: architects, historians, theoreticians, mathematicians and scientists from Australia, Canada, China, France, Italy, Portugal, Turkey, the United Kingdom and the United States, present papers on subjects as diverse as shape grammars, amphitheaters, neo-Platonism, Stonehenge, scientific rationalism, Vastu geometry, cubic equations and systems of proportion. Western architecture of almost every period is examined: Egyptian, Roman, medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, Enlightenment, twentieth-century, as is the architecture of China, India and Islam. Containing such diversity in a single volume is quite a feat; that is, it is a volume as rich as the Nexus conferences themselves.

Table of Contents
Lionel March
Architecture and Mathematics since 1960
Alberto Pérez-Gómez
Architecture as Verb and the Ethics of Making
Robert Tavernor
Measure, Metre, Irony:
Reuniting Pure Mathematics with Architecture
Marie-Thérèse Zenner
Structural Stability and the Mathematics of Motion
in Medieval Architecture
Sylvie Duvernoy
Architecture and Mathematics in Roman Amphitheatres
Steven Fleming
Louis Kahn's Platonic Approach to Number and Geometry
Rumiko Handa
Coelum Britannicum:
Inigo Jones and Symbolic Geometry
John Hatch
The Science behind Borromini's Divine Geometry
Andrew I-Kang Li
Algorithmic Architecture in Twelfth-Century China:
The Yingzao Fashi
Vini Nathan
Vastu Geometry: Beyond Building Codes
Alpay Özdural
The Use of Cubic Equations in Islamic Art and Architecture
Richard Padovan
Dom Hans van der Laan and the Plastic Numbers
Peter Proudfoot and Graham Pont
From Cosmic City to Esoteric Cinema:
Pythagorean Mathematics and Design in Australia
Peter Schneider
Old Shoes, New Feet:
The Puzzle of the First Square in Ancient Egyptian Architecture
Anthony Scibilia
Perspective Before Perspective:
The Spaces of Medieval Architecture
Randy Swanson
Practical and Theoretical Applications of Geometry
at Claude Perrault's Observatoire de Paris
João Pedro Xavier
António Rodrigues, a Portuguese Architect
with a Scientific Inclination