Alberto Pérez-Gómez, 1983. The Rational Horizon

…”The present work argues that modern architecture, and the crisis it faces, has its roots in a historical process touched off by the Galilean revolution, a process whose development is marked by two great transformations, the first of which occurred toward the end of the seventeenth century, and the second, toward the end of the eighteenth.
In the first transformation, the assumption, which had been inherited from medieval and Renaissance cosmology, that number and geometry were a scientia univeralis, the link between the human and the divine, was finally brought into question by philosophy and science. At the same time, technique and the crafts were freed from their traditional magical associations. In architecture, this laid the basis for a new approach. Architects began to consider their discipline a technical challenge , whose problems could be solved with the aid of two conceptual tools, number and geometry.
But in the eighteenth century, the transcendental dimension of human thought and action was sustained through the myth of Divine Nature. This myth lay at the root of Newtonian natural philosophy. The eighteenth century rejected as fiction the closed geometrical systems of seventeenth-century philosophers, but accepted Newton´s empirical methods as universally valid. The influence of Newton paved the way for the systematization and mathematization of knowledge, a knowledge that held that immutable, mathematical laws could be derived from the observation of natural phenomena, and that would eventually take on the form of nineteenth-century positivism. Implicit in eighteenth-century Newtonianism, though to the modern mind it may seem thoroughly empiricist, was a Platonic cosmology, usually complemented by some form of deism, in which geometry and number had transcendental value and power in and of themselves. Architectural theory absorbed the fundamental intentions of Newtonian science, and in doing so, it sidetracked earlier developments…”
Alberto Pérez-Gómez. The Rational Horizon, extracto incluído en "Architecture and the Crisis of the Modern Science". Cambridge. MIT Press 1983
Render complementario tomado de la web: MAD, propuesta para el Museo Nacional de China, 2012
Seleccionado por el arq. Martín Lisnovsky