sweeping up

We also need to understand -- at least confront a very basic and very complicated problem: architecture's use of mathematics. Is it so simple that we just use mathematics? I mean, is it clear how we use it? Ok among the texts i am uploading for you, and you'll have email note about the ftp site, is Plato's Phaedo. Look at passage 75 for this coming week and read maybe a bit before and after. Consider the use of "Equal." Could the term, and the concepts to which it applies be replaced with, say, Triangle, or Square? Think also of the following: is there something beyond the world of flux? In otherwords, is all knowldge experiential? How do we have knowledge of things like geometry? And now ask yourself whether the fact that a triangle always has 180 degrees when you add the interior angles is a fact of our experience or something transcendent of that? And what is the implication? All of this has to do with the Platonic theory of Forms, what these share with ideality and mathematics and the strange problems we have in architecture when we talk about the use of mathematics. in the following week we will look at Vitruvius, Boullee and Durand to see that problem in relief