ABSTRACT
When we look into our past, we see some things and not others. Even the word look, which frames the search for history as a predominantly visual affair, is suggestive: the cultures of alphabetic writing and print, as well as those of television and digital media, prioritize the ordering and aestheticizing of things according to appearance. So it is no wonder that architectural meaning has often been sought in the visible arrangement of its parts. This has been especially true of proportion. Understood as a visible manifestation of the mathematical order of nature, proportion has a particular hold on the architectural imagination. Classical Greek temples, with their rows of columns and frontal entablatures, have lent themselves to endless geometric speculations carried out through diagrams overlaid on reconstructed elevations; and the limbs of Greek figural sculptures have likewise been subjected to the kind of scrutiny that one might have thought reserved for the physiognomic nude ‘posture photos’ of the mid-twentieth century.
