Alberto Perez-Gomez Architecture Paperback sku-30530215

Alberto Perez-Gomez's Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science is a paperback listed under Collectible Comics N.E., sku-30530215. It won the 1984 Alice Davis Hitchcock Award. The book traces how the mystical and numerological uses of number and geometry in building gave way to functional and technical approaches in architectural theory and practice.

It places this change between the late Renaissance and the early nineteenth century, as the scientific revolution transformed architecture. Pérez-Gómez relates architectural treatises to the wider culture and to the work of philosophers, mathematicians, scientists and engineers.

He examines the controversy around Claude Perrault's seventeenth-century writings, which questioned the absolute aesthetic value of the classical orders and the supposedly perfect proportions inherited from Pythagorean times. The book then follows eighteenth-century developments in mechanics and structural analysis as they entered treatises and practice, often through civil and military engineers.

It also covers nineteenth-century changes to architectural rendering and drawing brought by descriptive and projective geometries. Pérez-Gómez challenges common accounts of modern architectural history and suggests that buildings lost some capacity to express a culture's mathematical, mystical and magical worldview.