Athanasius Kircher's Turris Babel

Among the vast assembly of Biblical mythology, the tower of Babel stands as an exclusive representation of the limits of human endeavor. As a paradigmatic extremity, it circumscribes the field of civic artifice. Babel is the absolute limit, and in that regard, its presence is enduring and timeless. The legacy of exegetic readings are textual shades, emanating from the point source of the paradigm. Athanasius Kircher's Turris Babel is an appropriate and intentional unfolding of this condition.Firstly, that in the awakening of the Baroque scholar to history, origin materializes as the sole legitimate chronological reference.Secondly, that the paradigmatic extremities collapse into the empirical standard of the theoretical discourse.This thesis is a speculative study of architecture, drawn through Turris Babel, in the shadow of the paradigmatic limits of Babel. Written in three parts, each dealing with the implications of artifice in confrontation with the post-Babel adversaries of dispersion, tyranny, and decay