Between Mechanics and Architecture

Patricia Radelet-de Grave is a historian of science with a background in physics and history of science. She has worked at the Catholic University of Louvain la Neuve in Belgium, the University of Genoa in Italy, the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris, France, and at the University of Pisa, Italy. With Edoardo Benvenuto, in 1993 she started the conference series titled “Entre mécanique et architecture”, which saw the participation of well-known scholars in the field.

• Preface. What Do We Mean by Between Mechanics and Architecture?.- Chapter 1. Relations between Mechanics and Architecture through the History of the Parallelogram Law of Forces from Antiquity to 1800.- Chapter 2. Mathematics, Architecture and Mechanics in the School of François d’Aguilon and Grégoire de Saint-Vincent.- Chapter 3. Is the Flat Vault a Lost Proposition in John Wallis’s Work?.- Chapter 4. The Use of a Particular Form of the Parallelogram Law of Forces for the Building of Vaults (1650-1750).- Chapter 5. The De curvatura fornicis of Jacob Bernoulli: The Introduction of the Infinitely Small into the Calculation of Arches.- Chapter 6. The Catenary, or How Differential Calculus Appeared on the Public Square.- Chapter 7. The Bernoullis and the Elastica: From Leibniz’s Nova methodus to Euler’s Methodus inveniendi.- Chapter 8. The Theory of Vaults of Pierre Bouguer.- Chapter 9. The Entasis of Columns from Blondel to Lagrange: Mathematical Games in Search of the Greatest Stability.- Chapter 10. A Study of Coulomb’s Application of the Rules of Maxima and Minima to Problems of Statics.- Chapter 11. Jacques-Germain Soufflot and the Relationship between Rules and Taste.- Chapter 12. The Catenary as Inspiration.- Chapter 13. The Study of the Stability of Vaults by the Viscount of Nieuport.- Chapter 14. On Mascheroni’s “New Researches on the Equilibrium of Vaults”.- Chapter 15. The Supports Problem: A Dead-End Street in the History of Stability of Structures.- Chapter 16. The Discovery of General Methods for Elastic Systems, 1852-1875.- Chapter 17. The Industrial Revolution and its Consequences. Part I: Iron Frameworks and Cullmann’s “Graphostatics”.