Mark Burry Re-natured Hybrid Central to his erudite tour de force. Dancing Column: On Order in Architecture, Joseph Rykwert uses that most ro- bust and ubiquitous structural element, the column, to distil a history of western civilization, and more crucially the values enshrined within two millennia of western ar- chitecture. The column-and-beam element is, in itself, a constitu- ent of the man-made, of the artificial world. It is also part of an all-encompassing metaphor that makes hu- man shelter an embodying, an m-corporation.' He begins by explaining the origins of a career-long fasci- nation with the five orders, then spends almost six hundred pages roaming widely in cultural, geographical, practical, etymological, and ultimately epistemological domains, concluding with a rather sober observation: I therefore hope that I have presented Greek architec- ture as the most entrancing and forceful, the exem- plary art of building, an architecture which still invites dialogue and touch, which requires physical contact across the millennia. It cannot teach us - history never can. But we may learn from it.^ The book is directed more at revealing the cultural enrich- ment that comes from an encyclopedic tracing of the lineage of each manifestation of the column back to its source than to exploring the diverse wealth inherent in the familial, cultural, and historical web that begets it. Pos- sibly as an implied critique of the postmodern applique of the orders, Rykwert refers to projects by Loos, Asplund, and Gaudf as evidence of three architects who, having assimilated the 'Greekness' of the Doric order, offered it back through their projects, reconstituted but original. For Gaudi. he selects the hypostyle market place in the Pare Guell (1900 - 1914) (Figure 1). But other major and innovative architects adapted the existing orders to their own use. Antoni Gaudi was a conspicuous example, perhaps because he made the appeal so sparingly And of course he was much more 'Gothic' than 'classical,' a self-confessed disciple of Viollet-le-Duc. In one important building, he used the Doric order impressively; the Pare Guell in Barcelona, which was to have been the central open space (called by Gaudi 'the Greek Theater') of a new garden-city.^ Rykwert is highly selective here, as there are more intrigu- ing examples of references to ancient Greek culture in Gaudi's other work. Despite his assertion that it is Gaudi's "only explicit reference to Greek architecture...," Rykwert's priorities are evident:" Asplund and Gaudi and Loos in their very different ways were tributaries to an ancient and grandiose - but apparently buried or broken - tradition: that the Greek orders enshrined and transmitted values of primordial as well as perennial validity. Until the eighteenth century the core notions of that tradition could be taken for granted: from the beginning of the nineteenth, the different historians and architects who wrote about the orders needed to plead and vindicate. That may be why attention clung so insistently to the Greek Doric order, and why my three salient twentieth- century examples are of Greek Doric. It seemed older, nobler - or at least notionally more 'primitive' and therefore less 'historical' - than the others.^ The Pare Guell hypostyle has a compositional connection to its temple antecedent, and the interpretation of the Doric order and associated motif is overt: hence Rykwert's interest. It is odd that he makes no reference to the soli- 38 Burry