Witt A. Formulations. Architecture, Mathematics, Culture 2021 torrent

Textbook in PDF format

In Formulations, Andrew Witt examines the visual, methodological, and cultural intersections between architecture and mathematics. The linkages Witt explores involve not the mystic transcendence of numbers invoked throughout architectural history, but rather architecture's encounters with a range of calculational systems—techniques that architects inventively retooled for design. Witt offers a catalog of mid-twentieth-century practices of mathematical drawing and calculation in design that preceded and anticipated digitization as well as an account of the formal compendia that became a cultural currency shared between modern mathematicians and modern architects.Witt presents a series of extensively illustrated “biographies of method”—episodes that chart the myriad ways in which mathematics, particularly the mathematical notion of modeling and drawing, was spliced into the creative practice of design. These include early drawing machines that mechanized curvature; the incorporation of geometric maquettes—“theorems made flesh”—into the toolbox of design; the virtualization of buildings and landscapes through surveyed triangulation and photogrammetry; formal and functional topology; stereoscopic drawing; the economic implications of cubic matrices; and a strange synthesis of the technological, mineral, and biological: crystallographic design.Trained in both architecture and mathematics, Witt uses mathematics as a lens through which to understand the relationship between architecture and a much broader set of sciences and visual techniques. Through an intercultural exchange with other disciplines, he argues, architecture adapted not only the shapes and surfaces of mathematics but also its values and epistemic ideals.
Models, Machines, Manuals, and Cabinets
A Machine Epistemology: Encapsulated Knowledge and the Instrumentation of Architecture
Theorems Made Flesh: The Architectonics of Mathematical Maquettes
Alternate Dimensions: Measuring Space from Building to Hyperbody
A Virtuality Atlas: Stereoscopic Drawing and Geometric Dream Space
Illusion Engines: Drawing at the Speed of Light
Labyrinths, Topology, and Meinong's Jungle: Architecture's Impossible Objects
All You Need Is Cube: The Political Economy of Grid Space
Geometry's Mass Media: Broadcasting Technique in Architecture's Hyperbolic Era
Crystal Collectives: Architecture's Chemical Subcultures
Of Dabblers and Virtuosos