Foreword

In a time when the profession increasingly gravitates toward pedantic gamesmanship and neo-avant-gardism, it is salutary to recall that architecture was once rendered as a more substantial art.

It was only through the rationalist filter of an Augustus Welby Pugin or Eugene Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc that the modern concern with enhancing or articulating the logic of construction began to overshadow these others forms of tectonic expression.
Carl Botticher elevated this tendency to another level of theoretical refinement with his distinction between the core form and symbolic art form, that is by interpreting the degree of curvature of Greek entablature molding more abstractly as an artistic response to the intensity of the load placed upon it.
ontological form: this notion of empathy for Robert Vischer was in no way a merely figurative reading of form. It presumed both our physiological and emotional engagement with the world and therefore was corporeal and emotive rather than conceptual or intellectual.
He seeks in this way to reaffirm that very ancient connection between the artificer and the artifice, between the designer's initial conception and design's hard-won ingenuity. In such a view ornament indeed becomes, as he interprets Scarpa's work, a "Kind of writing", but it is now an embellishment more germane and indeed intrinsic to the tectonic process. It is manifest in the creative act rather than in its figurative appropriation.
decided that architecture could only renew itself by becoming emphatically "realist", which he defined as the most scrupulous fulfillment of the demands of function, convenience, health, and sachlichkeit, in addition to taking into account the local materials, landscape, and historically conditioned ambiance of a building's milieu.