Nexus Network Journal 12,3 Architecture and Mathematics

We grasp and transform the world through interplays of quantification and qualification. The cross pollination of geometric and literary figures is deeply embedded in our cognitive habits, instruments of inquiry and the constructed environment. Through time, thought has reflected on the visible processes and products of material craft to explain and train the invisible workings of the mind. Recursively, material craft embodies a tradition of splitting ideas into categorical parts and compositional units for reassembly. Although the mathematical and verbal arts are often placed in contrast, human inventions manifest a weave of alphanumerics. Mythic parables, geometric proofs, memory arts, poems, algorithms, buildings and cities emerge from the intercourse of measure and explication. This special issue of the Nexus Network Journal considers architectonic examples of past, present and potential geometries of rhetoric.

Letter from the Guest Editor.- Geometries of Rhetoric: An Introduction.- Geometries of Rhetoric.- “A Strange Catalogue of Things”.- Chiasmus, Artificial Memory, and the Arts of Arrangement.- Geometries of Reading, Light of Learning: Louis I. Kahn’s Library at Phillips Exeter.- Encountering the Geometry and Rhetoric of Lamb’s House, Leith, Edinburgh, Scotland.- From Circle to Ellipse: Footnotes to a Photographic Essay.- Friendly and Beautiful: Environmental Aesthetics in Twenty-First-Century Architecture.- Infinite Sequences in the Constructive Geometry Of Tenth-Century Hindu Temple Superstructures.- Computational Organicism: Examining Evolutionary Design Strategies in Architecture.- Topology Catastrophe: Catastrophe Narrativization of Urban Morphologies.- Geometry and Rhetoric: Thinking about Thinking in Pictures.- Book Reviews.- Geometrische Grundlagen der Architekturdarstellung.- Der geometrische Entwurf der Hagia Sophia in Istanbul. Bilder einer Ausstellung.