Philip Steadman

Explores the possibility that Vermeer used the camera obscura to achieve the photographic qualities of his paintings and provides a history of the camera obscura, how it is used, and the composition of Vermeer's paintings.

Uncovering the Truth Behind the Masterpieces

Vermeer's Camera

Renaissance Fun is about the technology of Renaissance entertainments in stage machinery and theatrical special effects; in gardens and fountains; and in the automata and self-playing musical instruments that were installed in garden grottoes. How did the machines behind these shows work? How exactly were chariots filled with singers let down onto the stage? How were flaming dragons made to fly across the sky? How were seas created on stage? How did mechanical birds imitate real birdsong? What was ‘artificial music’, three centuries before Edison and the phonograph? How could pipe organs be driven and made to play themselves by waterpower alone? And who were the architects, engineers, and craftsmen who created these wonders? All these questions are answered. At the end of the book we visit the lost ‘garden of marvels’ at Pratolino with its many grottoes, automata and water jokes; and we attend the performance of Mercury and Mars in Parma in 1628, with its spectacular stage effects and its music by Claudio Monteverdi – one of the places where opera was born. Renaissance Fun is offered as an entertainment in itself. But behind the show is a more serious scholarly argument, centred on the enormous influence of two ancient writers on these subjects, Vitruvius and Hero. Vitruvius’s Ten Books on Architecture were widely studied by Renaissance theatre designers. Hero of Alexandria wrote the Pneumatics, a collection of designs for surprising and entertaining devices that were the models for sixteenth and seventeenth century automata. A second book by Hero On Automata-Making – much less well known, then and now – describes two miniature theatres that presented plays without human intervention. One of these, it is argued, provided the model for the type of proscenium theatre introduced from the mid-sixteenth century, the generic design which is still built today. As the influence of Vitruvius waned, the influence of Hero grew.

Renaissance Fun

Building Types and Built Forms weaves two books together in alternating chapters: one about the history of building types, the other about their geometry. The first book follows the histories of some common types of building: houses, hospitals, schools, offices and prisons. Examples are drawn from the 19th and early 20th centuries in France, America and Britain, with the central focus on London. They include the 'pavilion hospitals' associated with the name of Florence Nightingale, English Board and Modernist schools of the 1920s and 30s, tall office buildings in Chicago and New York, Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon penitentiary, and 'radial prisons' on the model of Cherry Hill and Pentonville. The second book takes these histories and uses them to explore how the forms of these buildings are constrained by some of the basic functions of architecture: to provide daylight and ventilation to the interior, to provide access to all rooms, or to allow occupants to see from one part of a building to another. A new way of thinking about these 'worlds of geometrical possibility' is introduced, in which the forms of many buildings can be catalogued and laid out systematically in 'morphospaces', or theoretical spaces of forms. As building types change over time, they come to occupy different positions within the worlds of possible forms. Building Types and Built Forms is filled with over 400 illustrations, many drawn especially for the book. It offers a new theoretical approach, combined with a series of historical accounts of building types, some well known, some less familiar. It should appeal to academics, practitioners, historians and students of architecture.

Building Types and Built Forms

Professor of Urban and Built Form Studies Philip Steadman

This book tells the history of the many analogies that have been made between the evolution of organisms and the human production of artefacts, especially buildings. It examines the effects of these analogies on architectural and design theory and considers how recent biological thinking has relevance for design. Architects and designers have looked to biology for inspiration since the early 19th century. They have sought not just to imitate the forms of plants and animals, but to find methods in design analogous to the processes of growth and evolution in nature. This new revised edition of this classic work adds an extended Afterword covering recent developments such as the introduction of computer methods in design in the 1980s and ‘90s, which have made possible a new kind of ‘biomorphic’ architecture through ‘genetic algorithms’ and other programming techniques.

Biological Analogy in Architecture and the Applied Arts

The Evolution of Designs

Lionel March

Originally published in 1971 The Geometry of Environment is a fusion of art and mathematics introducing stimulating ideas from modern geometry, using illustrations from architecture and design. The revolution in the teaching of mathematics and the advent of the computer in design challenge traditional ways of appreciating the space about us, and expand the ‘structural’ understanding of our surroundings through such concepts as transformations, symmetry groups, sets and graphs. This book aims to show the relevance of ‘new maths’ and encourages exploration of the widening intellectual horizons of environmental design and architecture.

Philip Steadman

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