The Parthenon and Other Greek Temples

The oldest surviving treatise on architecture, in Morgan's translation. Vitruvius sets out the ratios for temples and derives them from the proportions of the human body, the passage that later produced Vitruvian Man.

Vitruvius

Lethaby reads buildings as cosmology: the dome as sky, the pavement as earth, the four squares of the plan as the four quarters. An architect explaining why sacred buildings keep repeating the same geometry.

W. R. Lethaby

Hankin reverse engineers Islamic star patterns and shows the hidden construction lines that generate them. Once you see the method, the patterns stop looking impossible to draw.

E. H. Hankin