"The central part of the book addresses the question of divided representation - the tension between the instrumental and the communicative roles of architecture - in the period of the baroque, when architectural thinking was seriously challenged by the emergence of modern science. Vesely sees the restoration of this communicative role of architecture as the key to the restoration of architecture as the topological and corporeal foundation of culture; what the book is to our literacy, he argues, architecture is to culture as a whole."--BOOK JACKET.