Lionel March – författare

Originally published in 1971 The Geometry of Environment is a fusion of art and mathematics introducing stimulating ideas from modern geometry, using illustrations from architecture and design. The revolution in the teaching of mathematics and the advent of the computer in design challenge traditional ways of appreciating the space about us, and expand the ‘structural’ understanding of our surroundings through such concepts as transformations, symmetry groups, sets and graphs. This book aims to show the relevance of ‘new maths’ and encourages exploration of the widening intellectual horizons of environmental design and architecture.

Originally published in 1971 The Geometry of Environment is a fusion of art and mathematics introducing stimulating ideas from modern geometry, using illustrations from architecture and design. The revolution in the teaching of mathematics and the advent of the computer in design challenge traditional ways of appreciating the space about us, and expand the ‘structural’ understanding of our surroundings through such concepts as transformations, symmetry groups, sets and graphs. This book aims to show the relevance of ‘new maths’ and encourages exploration of the widening intellectual horizons of environmental design and architecture.

The integration of the location of activities in space and the use of transport has been a theoretical planning issue for many years. However, most books on this subject treat each component of the land use and transportation system with different, sometimes even conflicting, theories. The purpose of this book is to present the issue in the light of a single and consistent theoretical framework, that of random utility theory and discrete choice models. This is achieved in a methodical way, reviewing microeconomic theory related to the use of space, spatial interaction models, entropy maximising models, and finally, random utility theory. Emphasis is given to the concepts of decision chains and hierarchies. Spatial input-output models are also discussed, followed by chapters specifically dealing with the location of activities, the land market and the transport system. The book ends with the description of a number of real case studies to show how the theory can be used in practice.

This is a digitally reprinted edition of Urban Space and Structures, first published in 1972. This first volume in the Cambridge Urban and Architectural Studies series is a compilation outlining the growth of a particular line of research work which was taking place at the Centre for Land Use and Built Form Studies in Cambridge at the time. It attempted to understand some of the factors which, at a theoretical level, condition the range of choices that are available, whether in a building, the nodal point in a city or the complete urban system.

Originally published in 1976, The Architecture of Form is a collection of fourteen contributions by ten authors towards a quantitative approach to architectural design. The volume opens with an extended editorial introduction on the logic of design and the question of value, which places the papers into a decision-theoretic framework of descriptions, predictions and evaluations, and these are taken as the headings of the three parts of the volume. This book should be of wide interest to architects, building scientists, systems designers, operational research workers and computer scientists.

Leon Battista Alberti was an outstanding polymath of the fifteenth century, alongside Piero della Francesca and before Leonardo da Vinci. While his contributions to architecture and the visual arts are well known and available in good English editions, and much of his literary and social writings are also available in English, his mathematical works are not well represented in readily available, accessible English editions have remained accessible only to specialists. The four treatises included here – Ludi matematici, De Componendis Cifris, Elementi di pittura and De lunularum quadratura – are extremely valuable in rounding out the portrait of this multitalented thinker. The treatises are presented in modern English translations, with commentary that is intended to make evident the depths of Alberti’s knowledge as well as address the treatises’ mathematical, historical and cultural context, their classical Greek roots, and their relationship to later works by Renaissance thinkers.