ABSTRACT
The rules espoused by Vitruvius are not limits imposed for the sake of sameness per se. Genera and taxis, criticism and speculation, grammar and time, image and tense: in all these relationships, the second terms take as their necessary prefiguring assumption a pattern of resemblance to things or categories of things- people, places, ideas or symbols, known and codified in the former. Beyond the internal, cognitive linkages, representation and imagination are united within the field of meaningful grammars with the formation of episteme at all scales. "Human nature" is one such system, perhaps the meta-episteme. "Architecture" is another, smaller but perhaps important. High Gothic and Late Gothic, like Modernism and Postmodernism, are also epistemes, smaller still. To admit this scalar aspect of classification is not to reduce or limit the potential of architecture, whether understood as a whole or conceived only within the language of a particular style.
