[AbouT] Journal of Architecture
Summer, 2023
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Abstract -
The idea of domestic architecture in the West has undergone a slow, but dramatic transformation since the Industrial Revolution. By contrasting the traditional notion of the home, or household, with the Revolutionary assumptions that underlie Modernist theories of housing, the collapse of the home is presented as a function of secular, political imperatives.
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Summer. 2023
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Abstract -
The Temple of Hera at Olympia has confused scholars and onlookers for over a century, Archaeologists have advanced numerous theories in order to explain the odd, and irregular form of its peristyle. The most popular and persistent misconception is that the columns were originally wooden, and were replaced one-by-one by different architects over a long period of time. Academic consensus therefore presumes the variable form of each column and capital is down to the stylistic sensibility of whichever architect supplied it, with no care paid toward the holistic character of the temple. This essay advances a novel theory, which accounts for the peristyle's divergent aesthetic while only requiring one architect, one construction period, and allowing for the temple to have been built in stone from the very beginning.
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Tower Quarterly
Spring. 2023
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Abstract -
Although ancient authors tell us that the god Sabazios was of Thracian origin, modern scholarship came to disagree—placing the origin of his cult in Phrygia instead, for the simple reason that no evidence of the cult existed in the Thracian archaeological record. That recently changed. The most prominent symbols of the Sabazian cult are lavishly decorated, votive right hands. Cast in bronze and covered with all manner of esoteric symbols, the Sabazian hands were formed to top ritual staves and be carried in processions by priests. Study of the iconography of the Hand of Sabazios remains piecemeal, broad to a fault, and scarce. This essay reasserts the Thracian origin of Sabazios and his cult through philological analysis, and, offers a substantial discussion not only of the specific form of the votive gesture, but also of two key symbols present on every example: The serpent and the fulmen.
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Tower Quarterly
Winter. 2022
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Excerpt -
"Kheiromancy is, historically, among the most widely perverted and diffuse practices. And yet, in modern times, its erstwhile consideration is rather loudly ignored in level discussion of the Western esoteric crafts. Surely the reason for its glossing by serious regard, for now something like over a century, is due to the quasi-scientific fog thrown up around the tradition by dilettantes, beginning with the Renaissance and carrying through (and beyond) the age of surgical theater. Then, just as now, the most dangerous sort of instructor is the one who manages to become well-read without also learning to dispel, with prejudice, the pretensions of his particular time. ..."
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Architectural Symbolism of the Scepter
Tower Quarterly
Summer. 2022
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Excerpt -
"Because we are men, the universe appears to us in terms of man. What it is we see, that is, what we can grasp through comparison, or can measure by computation—those two quarreling twins of all mentality—is necessarily constrained in terms of how we see. Therefore, the universe possesses a fundamentally anthropomorphic quality, because it is man who regards it and passes judgement upon it. Said another way, the hammer sees only a world of things to be struck. ..."
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Tower Quarterly
Summer. 2022
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Excerpt -
"Unfortunately even for the late-Renaissance mystics from whom the bulk of that writing comes, the forefinger’s linkage to Jupiter and to the liver is something that can only be stated, but scarcely explained. Manly P. Hall wrote, in his 1950 volume on the history of the ancient healing arts, “It is well to remember that all myths yield readily to reasonable interpretation.” Our task is just such a reasonable interpretation. ..."
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Tower Quarterly
Spring 2022
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Excerpt -
"That is what we mean, when we say that proportion is a mystical methodology, not a style. The aesthetic of the proportional method is, itself, incidental. Mistaking a manner of making, with a manner of looking, is one of the most garish symptoms of modernity. ..."
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in Verum Fictum, by Brian Delford Andrews
Culicidae Architectural Press
Winter, 2021
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Excerpt -
"The following paper is a constellation of twenty discrete remarks, or theses; a collection of violent images from the vivisection of an architect, which is undertaken in order to study how Brian Delford Andrews adapted to the hostile modern environment. They are, in many ways, words of warning. ..."
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Tower Quarterly
Winter, 2021
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Excerpt
"The tower is the mature, architectural formulation of these ancient cosmological principles. Its sibling aspects are expressed in the form of two essential qualities: Esoteric wisdom, and the vivifying feminine. The feminine element belongs to the descending gateway, or pillar—to birth; and the masculine element belongs to the ascending gateway, to death. As Porphyry writes, “natural philosophers named these the Gates of the Sun. ...”
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in Single-Handedly, by Nalina Moses
Princeton Architectural Press
Summer, 2019
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Excerpt
"In a proposed memorial to the seven astronauts killed in the 1986 Challenger explosion, a soaring white stone cenotaph rises out of the murky waters agains a dark and ominous sky. The space around the structure is rendered in a field of dense, parallel pencil strokes that yield a luxurious depth. Portraits of the astronauts, with their eyes covered, hover over the site plan, as if floating in space. The drawings recall the tragedy without literalism or sentimentality." -Nalina Moses
ATELIER FORD