ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book traces a history of traditions of geometry as pertinent to Borromini and analyzes both the overall idea and details of the church using 20th-century art historical methods invested in Neo-Platonic ideas and symbols. It argues that for a ‘literally superficial’ geometry, where structure, form and space are on and of surface. The book offers possibilities of reading San Carlino itself as being slowly molded by the forces of time, environment and chance. The geometrical exegeses, rebirths or reinventions of San Carlino have occurred at moments of key stylistic and technological shifts in the history of modernism: at the end of the 19th century, the inter-war period, the post-modernist turn in the 60s and 70s, in the digital turn in the 90s.
