Introduction: Building Platforms

To “laie the foundation or platforme” for a book requires clearing a space for writing, marking the outlines of a design that will slowly be realized, performed, inscribed materially. On a much grander scale, early modern England strove to “laie the foundation or platforme” for a novel field: architecture. This foreign term, derived from the Greek αρχι (head) and τέκτων (maker), entered the English lexicon with the advent of treatises such as John Shute’sThe First and Chief Grounds of Architecture(1563).¹ Staking out new “grounds” to build a discourse on space, these sixteenth- and seventeenth-century treatises promoted architecture as