Beyond Measure. Measuring Systems, Order, and Proportions in the Configuration of Architecture

Abstract

Considering what underlies the concept of measure inevitably entails a reflection on its meanings, its prerogatives within compositional practice, and its dimensional and qualitative roles in the configuration of spaces and forms. It is therefore necessary to ask where to begin in order to analyse the explicit and hidden content of architectural dimensioning, fundamentally based on the relationship between proportions and units of measurement, the ordering modules of a eurhythmic system that over the course of history has established its own priorities. The extension of number as the regulating foundation of every aesthetic perfection constitutes the premise of many philosophical theories which attribute symbolic and proportional meanings aimed at defining the design of the cosmos, from which architecture descends by symbiosis. The search for universal harmony, filtered through Neoplatonic thought and Christian doctrines, also governs the configuration of cities, laid out according to modular schemes and geometries from which their alignments are derived and from which the design of the perfect form unfolds.
This gives rise to an architectural lexicon founded on ordering systems that compose both the whole and the subdivisions of the work. In this sense, investigations into compositional processes of the past still succeed in revealing significant insights into the knowledge and construction methods adopted over the centuries by our predecessors. It is striking that in the third millennium ancient architectures are still able to surprise us and prompt questions about how they were conceived, dimensioned, and built. These questions, today, in the age of artificial intelligence, urge us to reconsider and retrace the mathematical concept of proportion, order, and measure as guiding themes that, from the past, continue to define design systems up to the contemporary age.