Explores the relation between architectural forms and philosophical structures throughout Western culture. Chapters on Egypt, Archaic Greece, Francesco Borromini, Guarino Guarini and Bernardo Vittone, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Gianbattista Piranesi, the Gothic Romance, Jacques Lacan and Roger Caillois, Sigmund Freud and The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari, Georges Bataille and Frederick Kiesler, and The Body in the Theory of Making. Examines such philosophical concepts as the Ennead and the zodiac, numerology and cosmology, Hermeticism and Neoplatonism, the tetractys, circuitus spiritualis, Celestial Hierarchies, complicato/explicato, coincidentia oppositorum, Structural Rationalism, the sublime, the unconscious, dream images, psychophysiological space, psychasthenia, the informe, the gaze, the libido, optical theory, and the heterogeneous, in relation to architectural design.