Ideas and Structures

This book is a scholarly inquiry into several dimensions of culture, exploring the close relationship between architecture and metaphysical ideas as well as religious and philosophical concepts in each period of human history, a relationship which has, however, been largely forgotten or neglected by modernity. Rather than being a specialized account of any particular epoch, it is an intellectual attempt to map out a general picture of how certain ideas have made their way into architectural structures or shaped them in one or another way, from classical Antiquity through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance to the present. The four essays it contains, focusing on light, water, color, and sound in architecture, are written by an author who is a historian and critic of architecture as well as literary scholar, who firmly believes in the value of discussing these issues from the perspective of the history of ideas. The author is conscious about the limits of any generalizations, but he believes that architecture should be studied not only as an art in its own right, but as something larger, enveloping many layers of culture and reflecting the bonds between human thinking and the practice of the art of building.