Measures and Proportions, in the Virgil's Dream

The idea that design is a mathematical exercise is fascinating and, at the same time, illusory. The result of this famous Colin Rowe text, The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa, is that, in different ways, architecture takes advantage of mathematics, uses it, folds it and transgresses it. But it is also true that this divide between the means (math) and the ends (architecture) does not diminish the importance of composition at all. On the contrary, is the architect's ease, the arbitrariness and the originality of his choices, which manage to transform mathematics into a process that generates order, proportion, form and meaning.