Essays in Architectural Theory

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Ananda K. Coomaraswamy (1877-1947) pioneered one form of "cultural studies" early in this century, not as an anthropologist but as an advocate of "the idea of Tradition". His penetrating attention to both the substance and mind of India's great civilizations has provided several generations of Asian and European scholars a variety of models: that of the geologist, carefully attentive to facts and strata, that of the art historian, embedding chronology and variation within regional and cultural contexts, and that of the philosopher, weaving together texts from both eastern and western traditions to demonstrate what he in his later years called a "philosophia perennis". This second volume, Ananda K. Coomaraswamy: Essays in Architectural Theory, presents in consecutive form the essays that best represent Coomaraswamy's rapidly developing thinking on the hermeneutics of architecture - its "why" not "how". These can best be understood in the order in which they were written. As Michael W. Meister says in his Preface, "Only by being presented in such a fashion can Coomaraswamy's architectural ideas accumulate a structure comparable to their substance.