This intriguingly titled volume is a rare attempt to address some of the more theoretical and philosophical aspects of classical architecture. The “art of building” of the title is primarily the craft of architectural drawing, through which the architect’s vision is translated into a finished structure, here primarily the temple. It takes as its starting point Vitruvius’s three types of projection (dispositio): ground plan (ichnographia), elevation (orthographia), and perspective (scaenographia) (De architectura I.ii.2). Although the title highlights linear perspective, the book focuses far more on the ground plan, and particularly on reduced-scale drawing as an essential and transforming element of architectural design, because it is the only aspect of a structure that is not normally perceptible in the finished form. This is an important observation: understanding a plan as the distillation of a building implies accepting an abstract pattern as a...

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