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Architecture, Justice, Conflict, Measure

This submission is a sole-authored Commissioned Chapter – from the keynote given at the conference, "Architecture and Justice" held November 25-27, 2009 at Lincoln University, c. 12000 words.

The methodology is Phenomenological Hermeneutics - a philosophical-historical argument that takes the archaic affiliation of themes of justice, or a just order, with ratio and measure and shows how this is consolidated as "geometry" in the Greek Polis.

The essay clarifies the much-vexed theme of “geometry” as it pertains to architectural and urban order. It also supplies the missing background to Reviel Netz' The Shaping of Deduction in Greek Mathemetics, 2003, made famous through Bruno Latour's frequent endorsement of it as an example of how apparently abstract mathematics/geometry is embedded in social practice. Affiliated with justice and architecture since the practico-symbolic representations of the Ancient Near Eastern cities, the emergence of geometry proper in the Ancient Greek context is traced from Anaximander and the formation of the polis – with particular reference to Plato’s Divided Line in the Republic – to the Alexandrian context, with the establishment of apodictic geometry between Euclid and Apollonius of Perga. The “flattening” that geometry suffers under Vitruvius is then traced into a medieval Christian context, where it undergoes another substantial symbolic transformation before collapsing into an instrumental and aesthetic compositional device.

Baroness Stern observes in her foreword that a treatment of the general topic is long overdue, that “architecture and design matter” and hopes that “the book will be widely read”. The interdisciplinary nature of the book, and the inclusion of figures of the stature of Raymond Geuss should, also hopefully, make it relevant beyond architectural scholarship, indeed making a rare contribution from architecture to other disciplines.