The Pantheon in Rome is without doubt one of the grand architectural statements of every age. This richly illustrated ebook isolates the explanations for its ordinary affect on Western structure, discussing the Pantheon as a building in its time but in addition as a building all the time.
Mr. MacDonald strains the historical past of the construction for the reason that its final touch and examines its progeny–domed rotundas with temple-fronted porches constructed from the second one century to the 20 th–concerning them to the unique. He analyzes the Pantheon’s layout and the main points of its generation and building, and explores the that means of the building at the foundation of historic texts, formal symbolism, and architectural analogy. He sees the sizeable unobstructed inner, with its disk of sunshine that marks the solar’s passage throughout the day, as an architectural metaphor for the ecumenical pretensions of the Roman Empire.
Past discussions of the Pantheon have tended to heart on layout and construction. Those are however the start line for Mr. MacDonald, who is going on to turn why it ranks–along side Cheops’s pyramid, the Parthenon, Wren’s church buildings, Mansard’s palaces-as an architectural archetype.
