Architectural Histories, the open access journal of the European Architectural History Network, has launched a new special collection:

Objects of Belief: Proportional Systems in the History of Architecture, co-edited by Matthew A. Cohen and Maarten Delbeke.

Prior to the advent of modern structural engineering, architects and builders considered proportional systems to be necessary tools for determining key dimensions of their works in terms of local units of measure. They also believed that proportional systems conferred upon their works a general condition of order that was integral to their notions of structural stability and beauty. As the conference devoted to this subject, held in Milan in 1951, evidenced, since the Middle Ages the phenomenon of proportional systems transformed and continued in various capacities as a complex framework of belief. On the sixtieth anniversary of that conference, in 2011 a conference at the University of Leiden looked anew at the history of proportional systems, and has in turn led to this special collection. The following papers explore proportional systems as design methods and modes of belief since Antiquity; current scholarly assumptions in light of the historiography of proportion; and the buildings themselves, using new tools and methods that increasingly replace preconception with precision.

Introduction: Two Kinds of Proportion
Matthew Cohen

Proportional Systems in the History of Architecture: A Conversation with James S. Ackerman
Matthew Cohen

Canons of Proportion and the Laws of Nature: Observations on a Permanent and Unresolved Conflict
Mario Curti

Decoding the Pantheon Columns
Gerd Grasshoff, Christian Berndt

1, 2, 3, 6: Early Gothic Architecture and Perfect Numbers
Elizabeth den Hartog

Plotting Gothic: A Paradox
Stephen Murray

Divining Proportions in the Information Age
Andrew Tallon

Dynamic Unfolding and the Conventions of Procedure: Geometric Proportioning Strategies in Gothic Architectural Design
Robert Bork

To Build Proportions in Time, or Tie Knots in Space? A Reassessment of the Renaissance Turn in Architectural Proportions
Marvin Trachtenberg

Philibert Delorme's Divine Proportions and the Composition of the Premier Tome de l'Architecture
Sara Galletti

Early Modern Netherlandish Artists on Proportion in Architecture, or ‘de questien der Simmetrien met redene der Geometrien’
Krista De Jonge

Proportional Design Systems in Seventeenth-Century Holland
Konrad Ottenheym

Were Early Modern Architects Neoplatonists? The Case of François Blondel
Anthony Gerbino

The Composto Ordinato of Michelangelo’s Biblioteca Laurenziana: Proportion or Anthropomorphy?
Caroline van Eck

Conclusion: Ten Principles for the Study of Proportional Systems in the History of Architecture
Matthew Cohen

Articles by Franco Barbieri, Francesco Benelli, Lex Bosman, Jean-Louis Cohen, Sigrid de Jong, Francesco P. Di Teodoro, Jeroen Goudeau, Emanuele Lugli and Caroline Voet will be added over the course of the following weeks.

http://journal.eahn.org/collections/special/objects-of-belief-proportional-systems-in-the-history-of-architecture