William L. MacDonald (1921––2010)

Although we remember him primarily for his contributions to our understanding of Roman architecture and urbanism, William L. MacDonald, who died on 6 March 2010, described his main interest broadly as the history of architecture with an emphasis on classical architecture, its variations, and its influence on Western culture. The breadth of classicism from Greece to Gehry, seen through the eyes of antiquity, occupied his creative and inquisitive mind to the end, when he had been working on a reflective volume on Vitruvius's "eleventh book" and another on climbing famous buildings inside and out. He contributed numerous essays and articles to journals and anthologies, but Bill MacDonald was mainly a writer of books that mattered and changed the way we looked at architecture. The three short chapters of his first book, Early Christian and Byzantine Architecture (1962), are harbingers of his...