Reality and methaphor at the core of architecture

Abstract

Architecture has crossed with mathematics via a doubled-faced and intricate manifold, where reality and myth have met continuously. We may regard as metaphors ideas such as the canons of antiquity and their relationship to the cosmos and human body, but the geometrico-mathematical framework was intended to be a precise description rather than metaphor. In the search for a cosmologic order, metaphor appears as a path to fallacy rather than a way to apodictic knowledge that a mathematical order can provide. This way of thinking has proved to be remarkably influential through the whole of history since Greek philosophers questioned the geometric-mathematical order of the universe. From that time on two different questions arose. Is there an actual geometric order, or rather, are we simply constructing a rational framework to understand reality as it is. Pythagoreans took the first idea to an extreme as they believed that everything is number. Others seemed to rely on the idea of a framework that establishes relations between numbers, where the numbers represent things. Therefore, it is a constructed thing that, nonetheless must match our experience of the visual world and cosmos as ‘It Is’. At the core of ambiguity, architecture, or rather, architectural theoreticians and architects, play a double game when looking for some rational framework in which to ground architecture. However, mathematics cannot be confined to a visual display that architects may feel is attractive and Architecture cannot be confined to Mathematics. Mathematics uses symbols but metaphor is not its realm. Mathematics does not need metaphors to describe things as they are. Furthermore, Mathematics must not need metaphor. But Mathematics has shown to be extremely effective in describing immutable geometric properties of two and three-dimensional spaces which are accessible visually to some extent. Metaphor, however, is not a free chaotic entity to provide meaning for it also needs some rational reference and thus can metaphor actually meet mathematics at the core of Architecture?