The Dancing Column: On Order in Architecture.

By Joseph Rykwert. London: The MIT Press. 1996. 49.95 [pounds sterling]

Rykwert's 10-year project can be seen as both his re-writing of Vitruvius and the summation and completion of his own earlier essays: Meaning and Building (1957), The Idea of a Town (1963), The Corinthian Order (1965) and On Adam's House in Paradise (1972). Its subject is building's ancient function as a metaphor for man's body and thereby for his world which was itself seen as a kind of body. This metaphor `is an essential part of the business of building, as of all human activity ... I have come to think that it may direct the way all men and women relate themselves to what they build'.

After recounting the history of various analogies (body-column, body-church, body-city, body-world, art-nature), Rykwert devotes six of his 12 chapters to a minutely documented study of Greek temple architecture (with excursions into Egyptian, Anatolian, Phoenician and Etruscan), and specifically the technical origin and gender-character of the Doric, Ionic and Corinthian orders. One cannot but be impressed -- and sometimes oppressed -- by the sheer weight of this accumulated erudition, this mass of archaeological and ethnographical data. But the reader (at least if he is an architect) is bound to ask: where does all this lead? Vitruvius, after all, intended his work as advice to his contemporaries on how to build.

The answer -- foreshadowed in the first chapter, where Gaudi, Asplund and Loos are shown reacting against the gradual debasement of the orders from metaphor to fancy-dress -- is withheld to the last. It is largely negative. In the late twentieth century, the production of income has replaced all other values as architecture's main social function: `buildings ... have become raw commodity disguised as gift-wrapping'. The speaking building-as-body, stripped down (by Mies) to mute skin-and-bones, has made way for the decorated shed.

Rykwert denies, however, that this surrender to post-capitalist alienation is inevitable. The architect need not become the slave of anonymous historical forces, nor need historians and critics compete in a kind of `downstream historical swimming contest'. Every artist, in every age, has the `common human duty of acting by reason and choice'-- that is, freely and creatively. And since no human being can create `out of nothing', our making must always be `an assemblage and an imitation'. Not, however, `making something that looks like something else, but rather something that has a way of being like something else'. My house need not look like me; but it must `occupy a place in the world' in the way that I myself take my stand in it. The problem, which I think Rykwert fails to make clear, is that such mimesis was never direct. Ancient builders imitated nature through art: not the body only, but the body transmuted in the orders. Having let go of the orders, can we pick up that poetic thread? Rykwert's only modern example of such attempted recovery is the Modulor. Le Corbusier sought to humanise building by literally incorporating in its dimensions the measures and proportions of the body. Is that enough?