Rulers of Architecture

12" Wooden Ruler made in U.S.A. of American-grown basswood. A combination of art and science, architecture affects all of us who spend time in buildings, which means pretty much everyone. As an art form Ancient Greece, Rome and the Islamic World have had the greatest influence on the buildings that we inhabit today. As a science, technology has evolved tremendously since those early days. The evolution of style is more apparent in architecture than in most other disciplines, witness the evolution from Romanesque to Gothic, first encountered with Abbot Suger (1081-1151) at Saint Denis near Paris, and then on to the Renaissance in Florence, Italy, where Filippo Brunelleschi (1377-1446) built his magnificent dome atop the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore. Our ruler moves to the Baroque in England, exemplified by Inigo Jones (1573-1652) and Christopher Wren (1632-1723) and then on to the revival styles which dominate American architecture of the 18th and 19th centuries. In the 20th cent