Query: Contemporary Architects and Mathematics

ORIGINAL QUERY:
Date: Monday, 1 November 2005
From: James McQuillan <MCQUILLAN@mopipi.ub.bw>

Do any contemporary architects understand enough about mathematics (beyond additive planning and accidental occurrences) to apply it in their work? And even if they did, why should they do so, given the collapse of ancient mimesis and related understanding until the 18th century, which was the foundation of such applications in the past?

Since I suspect that readers may believe that I have adopted an extreme position by my question, perhaps the following quotation from a recent book may sustain my question:

Nonetheless, most architects nowadays design with no sense of rational or effable proportions and imensions; with no idea of how musical ratios might play into architectural ratios; with no sense of the ways of symmetry, of geometrical attraction and reproduction; with no belief in hierarchies of shapes, ratios, and dimensions. Nor do conic sections and the intricate obliquities of perspective, projection, and the like seem to play a role - at least not as these things are worked out scientifically. That is, designers may call for complex lattices, crazy cones, and squeezed spheres, but they no longer do it by means of consciously applied geometry. These days, such things are done freehand and then translated into machine language by CAD (. . . ). This effectively lets the machine do the thinking. George L. Hersey, Architecture and Geometry in the Age of the Baroque, (The University of Chicage Press, 2000), pp. 203-204.

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