Joseph Rykwert is one of the major architectural historians of this century, and The Dancing Column is his most controversial and challenging work to date. A decade in preparation, it is a deeply erudite, clearly written, and wide-ranging deconstruction of the system of column and beam known as the "orders of architecture," tracing the powerful and persistent analogy between columns and/or buildings and the human body.
About the Author
Joseph Rykwert is Paul Philippe Cret Professor of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania.
Endorsements
"This essay on our profound and daily relationship to classical formsis fairly boggling in its scholarship, its scope, its freedom fromcant, and also in Rykwert's fresh reading of meanings vested in theorders that 'have dominated Western architecture for nearly threemillennia.'" —Village Voice Literary Supplement
Awards
Winner, Alice Davis Hitchcock Award, Society of Architectural Historians, 1998.
, Second Edition