A cognitive history of the emergence of modern architecture

Cutting across disciplinarian and institutional divisions as we know them today, this book reconstructs developments within the framework of a cognitive history of the past. Modern is here taken to mean the radical re-thinking of architecture from the end of the tenth century in Europe to the end of the eighteenth century.

Among the key debates that mark the period are those that oppose tradition to innovation, canon to discovery, geometrical formality to natural picturesqueness, and the functional to the hedonistic.