Discussion on Claude Perrault’s Extract from “Ordonnance for the Five Kinds of Columns After the Method of the Ancient (1983)”

In the excerpt, Claude Perrault begins mundanely by recalling the Ancients’ belief in that the utilization of proportioning systems based on the human body would give aesthetic qualities and beauty to a building. Without a doubt, this topic of beauty, which resides from mathematical proportions, is readily discussed both visually and verbally through examples in all history and theory of architecture classes including Buildings, Texts and Contexts. However, what makes the text compelling to me is how Perrault brings into light the discrepancy in these proportioning systems that exists throughout history - from the antiquity through to the renaissance. It is said that although the building orders may conform to certain proportions as a whole, the constituent parts of buildings, such as the precise dimensions of the members and its profiles, does not pertain to any strict rules or to a consensus of opinions amongst architects such that the building’s ultimate beauty does not lie only in proportions. Perrault’s juxtaposition of the beauty of buildings with the beauty of a human face clearly give weights to his argument: “a face can be both ugly and beautiful without any change in proportions; the contraction of the eyes and the enlargement of the mouth can be the same when one laughs as one weeps”. Perrault also points out that even though there is no single absolute proportioning rules for beauty, there are certain limitations to which one can deviate before a building loses its elegance. Through these flexibility and variability of indefinite rules, Perrault points out that by no means is the proportions preserved in architecture, of which is perceived by our eyes, are akin to the ones that govern musical harmonies, gained through our ears, as they are of immutable precision. These two sensory faculties, the eyes and the ears, work in processing data in different ways according to Perrault: the ear processes data without intervention of the intellect whilst the eyes