Architecture — platter #

A reading platter for foundational architectural treatises: the proportion, order, and modular-composition systems that architecture wrote down before software existed. A sub-platter within the papers platter, parallel to rhythm-platter and corporate-graphics-platter.

Two openers, chosen as a matched pair:

• Palladio, The Four Books of Architecture (Venice 1570; Isaac Ware's London 1738 English folio, Getty Research Institute scan on the Internet Archive). The canonical proportional system: the five orders, villa plans, civic works, Roman temples — 212 plates of ratios made visible.
• Durand, Précis of the Lectures on Architecture (École polytechnique 1802–1805; Getty Research Institute Texts & Documents translation, 2000, intro. Antoine Picon, trans. David Britt). The counter-move: Durand throws out Vitruvian proportion for a modular grid, combinatorial assembly of standard elements, and economy as the governing criterion — architecture restated as a generative procedure. The pair brackets the shift from proportion as authority to composition as algorithm.

Posture #

Index and citation only. No source text is reproduced in this repo:

• PDFs are fetched into sources/ by fetch-sources.mjs from their public hosts — the Internet Archive for Palladio, the Getty Virtual Library for Durand. sources/ is gitignored — the fetch is reproducible, the mirror is not committed.
• The Getty Durand translation is in copyright, distributed free by Getty. Cite it; never redistribute it.
• Full bibliography with fetch URLs and verification status: sources.json.

Shelves #

More shelves (commentary, computational readings, pattern languages) can be added as the platter grows.

Fetch #

node papers/architecture-platter/fetch-sources.mjs

Fetches both PDFs (~44 MB total) and converts each to text with pdftotext (both carry text layers — the Internet Archive scan includes OCR).