Beauty Memory Unity – Introduction

In the early 1990’s Your present author began to develop a course on ‘Proportion in Classical Architecture’. The content of the course was an attempt to create an aesthetic system rooted in Pythagoreanism, Platonism and Neo-Platonism. The goals were to present geometrical methods for creating classical compositions that designers could utilize in the design process.

This idea was a syntheis of my study of Plato on the one hand and the numbers and geometry of the Five Orders of Classical Architecture on the other hand. These Orders are described in the classical references by number and geometry. The course was designed to answer the question; Could the descriptions of ancient harmony and geometry of the Platonic system be utilized to create correct and vital classical architectural compositions?

The original course called ‘A Theory of Proportion in Architecture’ consisted of twelve sessions. The first four sessions treated the subjects of what is nown as the Quadrivium – Arithmetic, Geometry, Music or Harmony, and Astronomy. These are four of the seven subjects that came to be known as the Liberal Arts. The other three being Grammer, Rhetoric and Dialectic, which may be called the Trivium or the communicative, verbal arts while the Quadrivium are numerical or visual arts. These studies are called liberal because they were intended to allow the soul to be liberated from its entrapment in matter.

The next eight sessions were devoted to historical periods and included live demonstrations of calssical archetypes. The periods included 1, Prehistory, 2, Early Civilization, including India and China, 3, Greece, 4, Rome, 5, the Middle Ages, 6, the Italian Rennaissance, 6, Baroque, 7, the Enlightenment, 8, the 19th and 20th centuries. But life in New York being as compressed and even hysteric as it is, no one has twelve weeks in a row to attend non-mandatory classes. The producers at the ICAA urged your present author to shorten the course, first to four sessions and eventually to a single day of six hours.

Because of the esoteric nature of the material your present author felt it was necessary to leave a record of the subjects with the students so they could review the material on their own. A two hour demonstration would not be enough to grasp these unusual and little known subjects. So began the practice of producing notes for each class. These notes quictly became voluminus and as the syllabus got shorter the material got condensed into a narrative essay called ‘Beauty Memory Unity’.

When the book version was published that became the title for the whole work. What had been the essay became Book I of the book. But when it came to the history sections of Book III, they had to be much reduced and the sessions on the Quadrivium, Prehistory, India, China and the Modern Era had to be cut completely, To make up these cuts these sections are offered here. They are meant to complement the book version.

When your present author was studying the Platonic system my teacher constantly challenged the synopses of ancient writers that I was producing so I began to copy large sections literally so as not to be misunderstood. This habbit continued into the writing of the notes for the course but was substantially abandond when the book was published. I have left most of these sections as they were as it would have been too much to have rewritten it all now.