ABSTRACT
By reintroducing the eighteenth-century term of technography for the discipline of architectural drawings, architecture can be placed within technometry, a workable and dual system of human measures and elegant technology. 1 Technometry is a comprehensive procedure, elaborated within the blueprint for a Puritan technological encyclopedia, proposed by the philosopher and theologian, William Ames, a leading figure of American Protestantism. 2 His cultural encyclopedia—the circle of the arts—is an interpretation of the Ramist intellectual system; this Puritan system was based on encyclopedic outlines of all knowledge. Ames defined it as a measure or survey of art, namely technometry, a locution which later readers had interpreted synonymously with technology. Using the sensible context of technometry, drawings and edifices can be analyzed to discover how the faculties of building well and living well can be incorporated into the complex nature of architectural factures. Through the elegant and mediated representations, it is possible to trace the vestiges of the virtue of architecture.
