ABSTRACT
In the 1960s, architects involved with academic research turned to mathematics in efforts to deliver the ideals of rationality and efficiency avidly spearheaded, but ostensibly unfulfilled, by the interwar modern architecture. A common motivation driving such efforts was to build a truly modern discipline of architecture, free from aesthetic preferences and unfounded conventions vexing the International Style. When architects turned to mathematics in the 1960s, they did not find a discipline of numbers but one of “structures.” A new relationship between architecture and mathematics seemed to be possible—one beyond metrics and measures. In architecture, graphs allowed the visualization of relations between entities of architectural significance that could be represented and reasoned mathematically. They also enabled operations of mapping and matching between abstract structural representations. For March the discovery isomorphisms among different problems and knowledge domains was a fundamentally aesthetic and creative endeavor.
