I spent the afternoon in the wonderful world of architectural epistomology. Padovan is the author of the book "Dom Hans van der Laan, Modern Primitive" which was the best presentation of the ideas of van der Laan I came across while writing my thesis. I hesitated to pick up "Proportion" because I mistakenly thought I had read it already (recognising the name from way back then).

So far I'm 200-and-change pages in. Good read, though for my purposes I find the bulk of the derivations of the proportions rather uninspiring. I assume that geometric relations fall out of geometric transformations, it doesn't actually capture my imagination to see it proved again and again :) .

I'd like to have more discussion of non-western proportional systems, but I suppose that wouldn't have really helped much with the polemic of the book.

Anyway, very enjoyable day. Following are my rough notes.