Book, Dancing column on order in architecture, A[LS]

History, as we know, is much more than the succession and ordering of facts, it is an organic, dynamic, complex structure, full of voids and inaccuracies, which imposes itself, in each generation, as a contemporary interpretation of the world. The way each society organizes the available data, the allusions it makes, the way in which relationships are constituted determines the chain of past phenomena and, evidently, establishes the understanding of the present. We can, therefore, talk about not just one, but many stories competing simultaneously. Joseph Rykwert had just published The Idea of ​​the City, in 1963 (Perspectiva, 2006), making extensive and detailed use of archaeological, anthropological and historiographical studies, to defend the thesis that the genesis of the urban arises from cosmogonic models and cultural principles, opposing the functionalist formula of contemporary city planning, when Moma opens the exhibition and publishes the catalog Architects Without Architecture, establishing the thesis that many of the The most extraordinary and beautiful constructions at all times would have appeared dissociated from any cultural context. A nonsense for Rykwert, who reacted by publishing A Casa de Adão no Paraíso, in 1972 (Perspectiva, 2003), in which he discusses the genesis of the building, demonstrating its original link to the beliefs and cultural practices of the societies of the time, dismantling the thesis of abstraction and the chance of constructions. Because Joseph Rykwert was never an impartial researcher. His work clearly reveals itself as a work of resistance to the notion of the architectural object as a phenomenon in itself, devoid of social ties. In 1996, reaffirming the weight of culture and cosmogonic models in all human work and, more than that, affirming the presence of the human body as a structuring element of architecture from Antiquity to the present day, Rykwert brings us the extraordinary 'The Column Dancing: About Orders in Architecture', in which he combines historiographical research from different areas of knowledge, brings together data and evidence from a long period of time and associates physical, metaphysical and psychological elements to form and shape the ballast of architecture as a metaphor in the great human adventure .Essential, erudite and grandiose, 'The Dancing Column' shows that history is much more than a chronicle, it goes far beyond the facts themselves. It is a weapon and key to humanity’s cultural development and self-understanding. [SK]