Newly out in the United States is Nikos Salingaros's new book, Twelve Lectures on Architecture, originally published in (I think) Greece last year. I've written several columns about Salingaros's thinking, here, here and here, which has to do with how biology and architecture intersect in mankind's unconscious perceptions. They do so in ways that cause traditional architecture to be perceived intuitively by most people as more natural and life-affirming than modern architecture.
Two illustrations by Salingaros at left, from the book, represent his thinking, nikoschurches.jpgin that the top drawing leads to the bottom drawing.
In this latest book of his, Salingaros does me the honor of devoting the rear cover to a a blurb of mine that reads: "The work of Nikos Salingaros shines a light on the instinctive workings of every human's internal architecture critic. His explanation of why certain buildings and places speak to our hearts illuminates many of our old assumptions about taste. With Nikos as our guide, we see through the invisibility of the emperor's new clothes, and we laugh (or cry) all the harder at the joke played on mankind by modern
Salingaros is the archetypal deep thinker. Much of his analysis concerns mathematical theory about fractals and other phenomena that characterize what we know about how nature's structure builds as it grows, and how it evolves. There are diagrams and formulae that will titillate the cognitive sense of adventure that animates the minds of many people. For those who see it passing by overhead as a sort of impressive but indecipherable bank of clouds, the explanation in the text is often more than just lucid but invigorating.
That it has the importance to change the world might be an additional incitement to travel into the mind of Nikos Salingaros.
Read more
Two illustrations by Salingaros at left, from the book, represent his thinking, nikoschurches.jpgin that the top drawing leads to the bottom drawing.
In this latest book of his, Salingaros does me the honor of devoting the rear cover to a a blurb of mine that reads: "The work of Nikos Salingaros shines a light on the instinctive workings of every human's internal architecture critic. His explanation of why certain buildings and places speak to our hearts illuminates many of our old assumptions about taste. With Nikos as our guide, we see through the invisibility of the emperor's new clothes, and we laugh (or cry) all the harder at the joke played on mankind by modern
Salingaros is the archetypal deep thinker. Much of his analysis concerns mathematical theory about fractals and other phenomena that characterize what we know about how nature's structure builds as it grows, and how it evolves. There are diagrams and formulae that will titillate the cognitive sense of adventure that animates the minds of many people. For those who see it passing by overhead as a sort of impressive but indecipherable bank of clouds, the explanation in the text is often more than just lucid but invigorating.
That it has the importance to change the world might be an additional incitement to travel into the mind of Nikos Salingaros.
Read more
