WEAVING FABRICA AND RATIOCINATIO: An Inquiry into the Knowledge of Architecture in Vitruvian Theory (original) (raw)
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As is well known, the lexicon used to describe what we now refer to as “the creative process” shifted its focus during Early Modernity from imitation (imitatio) to invention (inventio). The latter category, though still considered an essential component of rhetoric, evolved a separate and yet still related meaning in the domains of poetry and the visual arts. Invention thus came to refer not only to the collecting of rhetorical arguments, but also to the origination and development of semantic artistic programs, which was explained by referencing the psychological concept of imagination (phantasia). While this overall development has received scholarly attention, there remain many lacunae. Indeed, the majority of the literature on invention focuses on literary invention, whether rhetorical or poetic. The domains of visual and manual invention, notwithstanding their evident relevance, remain understudied. This paper examines the 15th century book on architecture written by the Florentine sculptor Antonio Averlino, known as Filarete. Filarete wrote his Libro architettonico (as he calls it) in large part to teach his then-patron, Duke Franceso Sforza of Milan, how to be a good patron. In doing so, Filarete adduces a number of guidelines about how to find, evaluate, and cultivate architectural ideas. These guidelines resemble nothing so much as rhetorical/dialectical topics, which were traditionally recognized as the heart of the rhetorical canon of invention. This paper begins by offering a theoretical reading of the topics as an art that finds linkages between disparate concepts, locutions, and things. On that basis, the paper goes on to read Filarete’s Libro as an attempt to articulate what might be called an architectural topics, by which is meant a set of guidelines meant to govern architectural invention. In shedding additional light on the complex conflation of literary invention and artistic creativity in Early Modernity, this paper aims to improve our understanding of the relationship between rhetorical invention and artistic creativity.
CHOREIN, 2023
In the opening chapter of De architectura Vitruvius examines the knowledge required to practice architecture and the means to acquire it. These, he claims, are manual skills and rational thought on one hand, deductive reasoning on the other. While the former suffice to make sound buildings, the latter is needed to integrate the building-to-be in the world order. A scheme emerges: the knowledge required is both procedural and declarative. Vitruvius' approach was uncommon, because it put these two kinds of knowledge on the same footing. By associating manual skill with rational thought, and claiming that it creates new knowledge, as does deductive reasoning, Vitruvius places himself on the side of modern scholarship, rather, than on that of his contemporary philosophy, as much as he depended on it.
Architectural History, 2017
This article examines the relationship between architecture in painting and rhetorical theory, proposing that fictive buildings are often a powerful form of visual rhetoric aiming to entice the viewer and showcase the artist's skill. Illustrating the potential of a rhetorical approach for the interpretation of architecture more widely, the article focuses on Altichiero da Zevio's fresco cycle in the Oratory of St George in Padua (c.1379–84), suggesting that his structurally inventive and intricately decorated architectural settings can be interpreted through the rhetorical tropescopiaandamplificatio. It argues that fourteenth-century Padua was an environment particularly receptive to rhetorical theory, and suggests that viewers would have experienced Altichiero's fictive buildings as a visual equivalent of the persuasive strategies employed in contemporary textual composition. The analysis highlights the rhetorical messages of architectural forms, underscoring the porosi...
Leon Battista Alberti, probably the most innovative architect of early Renaissance Italy, has always fascinated scholars by virtue of the striking interpenetration of theory and practice manifest in his work. As an architect, Alberti was an autodidact. Without the benefit of the formative influence of a master or design education, the roots of his conception of architecture lie in his intellectual formation through humanistic rhetoric. The present study demonstrates with reference to a specific project — the Tempietto of the Holy Sepulchre in Florence — how Alberti’s humanist approach conditioned his method of architectural design. Leon Battista Alberti, der wohl innovativste Architekt der italienischen Frührenaissance, hat die Forschung von jeher deshalb fasziniert, weil in seinem Werk Theorie und Praxis eindrucksvoll ineinandergreifen. Als Architekt war Alberti Autodidakt. Ohne Vorprägung durch einen Meister oder eine Entwurfslehre liegen die Wurzeln seiner Architekturauffassung in seiner humanistisch-rhetorischen Formation. Die vorliegende Studie zeigt an einem konkreten Projekt – dem Heiliggrabtempietto in Florenz – auf, wie sich Albertis humanistische Denkweise auf seine architektonische Entwurfsmethodik auswirkt.
ARCHITECTURAL RESEARCH, 2016
This thesis explores Vitruvius and his impact upon other Renaissance architects who compare a city to a building or a building to a city, who match the city and the building into a human body, and who develop their own works. The objective of this study is to furnish an interpretation of their theory and practice through their literature and designs. In this point of view, this article takes notice of Vitruvius' s six concepts coined from venustas and divides them into two parts: i.e. aesthetic quality (ordinatio, dispositio, and distributio) and technical activity (eurythmia, symmetria, and décor) each. This thesis indicates that Vitruvius' s successive impacts from the concepts bring about concrete design principles through proportional measurements, placing together, and hierarchic values for the former, as well as appropriate use through beautiful look, symmetrical harmony, and appropriate uses for the latter, tracking notions between a city as a house and vice versa, and either the ideas of the house or the city in the synthesis of the human body, which follows the perfect number and module based on the human body. The thesis shows that the representations of architecture and the city take place with the form of a circle and a square that express the religious belief and the cosmos, substantiating the connection between the proportions of the human body and numbers, and ultimately satisfying a concept of centrality, which is slowly extended to the enclosed plaza at the urban level from chambers, atrium, and corridors at the residence level.
Mario Ridolfi: l’architettura come pratica artigianale / Architecture as a craft
2002
momento di grande importanza la riconsiderazione della figura di Mario Ridolfi le cui ricerche sul modo di pensare e fare architettura continuano ancora oggi, a di stanza di quasi vent'anni dalla sua morte, a •raccontarci " dell'avi dità e di quell 'ansia conoscitiva che hanno "guidato" le infinite in quietudini dell'architetto romano sempre attento al rapporto tra ma ero e micro e agli aspetti di un'espressività ricca di valenze plasti che che si sono formalizzate in architetture che oltre che dalla loro stereometria sono precisate da una quanto mai necessaria e rawici nata lettura del dettaglio. Dalla fine degli anni '20, Ridolfi ha porta to avanti questa personale attività progettuale senza interruzioni, impegnandosi in prima persona su tutti i fronti, da quello didattico a quello professionale, ma rimanendo nello stesso tempo sempre in disparte rispetto al clamore suscitato dagli altri architetti più diretta mente coinvolti nel dibattito architettonico. Le ragioni per cui tanta elaborazione teorica e pratica sia passata in sordina, se non proprio sotto silenzio, sono da ricercare nel carattere stesso del suo lavoro. Un impegno che si è andato sempre più concentrando sui propri aspetti più specifici e più intimi , sino quasi a circoscriversi all'inter no di un'ossessiva variazione sul tema, come sembrano dichiarare gli ultimi progetti elaborati nello splendido isolamento delle "Marmore", in cui il lavoro sul particolare diventa il vero problema attorno cui far ruotare l'intera operazione progettuale. Il dettaglio, esasperato allora sia dimensionalmente che nella sua stratigrafìa segnica, diventa il "tutto", sino ad assumere in sé una connotazione simbolica che invece l 'intero progetto tende ad evitare, condotto com'è, sul filo di una continua ricerca di una corrispondenza alla realtà e di immediata rispondenza alle esigenze primarie della co struzione e della fruizione. Nell'immediato secondo dopo guerra si colloca la prima svolta im portante nell'itinerario progettuale di Ridolfl, e non tanto in riferi mento alle opere costruite in quel periodo che, semmai, presentano ancora carattere di continuità con le opere della sua prima formazio ne professionale e quelle più propriamente razionaliste, quanto piut tosto per il configurarsi di una vera e propria ideologia architettoni ca, comune a lui e ad altri architetti della sua generazione. Questa sì presenta strettamente legata al ruolo che l'edilizia deve svolgere in quel periodo dì ricostruzione in Italia e trova nell'elaborazione del "Manuale dell'architetto" (1946). da Ridolfi redatto con Calcaprina, Cardelli e Fiorentino. per conto del C.N.R. e deii'U.S.I.S., il più diret to veicolo di trasmissione. Ed è proprio quel manuale ad esaltare l'architettura come mestiere, mantenuto, quanto più possibile, nell'alveo della tradizione , e la professione come artigianato, seppure nella sua espressione più al-Francesco Moschlnl lt is always a moment of of great importance when we reconsider the work of Mario Ridolfi and his research into the way we think about archìtecture and practice it, stili now, almost twenty years after his death, when we recall the avid curiosity and desi re for knowledge that drove the Roman architect relentlessly to try to understand the relationship between the infinitely large and the infini tely small and the aspects of expressìvity rich in plastic values that are formalized In architecture and that beyond their stereometry are de manded by a necessary, as in no other field, reading of the details. After the end of the Twenties. Ridolfi carried on this personal design activity without interruption, engaged in first person on every front, from the didactic to the professional, but at the same time remaining outside of the clamor raised by other architects more directly involved in the architectural debate. The reasons for why much theoretical and practical work has gone to a great extent, but not entirely unnoticed are to be found in the very na ture of his work. His attention was concentrated more and more on the specific, most Intimate aspect, almost to the point of limiting himself to the obsessive variation on one theme, as his last works created in the splendid isolation of the "Marmore mountains seem to declare, in which his work on details becomes the real problem, around which the entire project seems to revolve. The details, exaggerated even dimensionally in his project design, be come ·everything" to the point where they take on a symbolic ~onnota tion that the project as a whole seems to avoid, on the other hand. carried out on the line of a constant search for a meeting ground between reality and the immediate response to primary requisites of construction and utilization. Soon after World War Il , we find the first important turning point in the career of Ridolfi, not so much with reference to work built during that period that. if anything, stili bear some relation to those of his early ca reer and his more rationalist period, than, rather, observing the confi guration of a real architectural ideology, shared by him and other archi tects of his generation. This is closely related to the role that the building was to perform in that period of reconstruction in ltaly and finds, in the elaboration of the "Architect's Manual " (1946), edited by Ridolfl with Calcaprina, Cardelli and Fiorentino, for the. C.N .R. and the U.S.I.S., the most direct vehicle of transmlssion. And it is just this manual that exalts architecture as a trade, maintai ned, as much as possible, in the niche of tradition, and the profession as a craft, although in ìts highest expression, to guarantee in this way the role of buìlding as a sack to raid for unqualified labor from the south or the country, in a view of ungoverned speculation and the 188
Better Inventive Thinking through Manual Practice: Lessons for Rhetoric from Architecture
As is well known, the lexicon used to describe what we now call “the creative process” shifted its center of gravity during early modernity from imitation (imitatio) to invention (inventio). The latter category, though still considered an essential component of rhetoric, evolved separate—though still related—meanings in the domains of poetry and the visual arts, coming to refer to the origination and development of programs for paintings, buildings, and even whole cities. Artistic invention was explained largely by referencing the psychological concept of imagination (phantasia). While this overall development has received scholarly attention, there remain many lacunae, such that the domains of visual and manual invention, notwithstanding their evident relevance, remain understudied. This paper seeks to illuminate invention in general by examining the discussion of architectural invention in the 15th-century Libro architettonico written by the Florentine sculptor Antonio “Filarete” Averlino. In his Libro, Filarete recommends the practice of disegno (“drawing”) not only as the best catalyst for developing excellent architectural ideas, but also as the best way to train one’s inventive capacity in general. He also strikingly insists that practicing disegno improves one’s ability to understand both architectural drawings and actual buildings. Architectural invention thus turns out to be a practice. Filarete argues that all practices share a common psychological basis in the faculty that he calls ingegno (“ingenuity”), such that excellence attained in any one will improve one’s performance in all others. The specificity of each practice remains bound up in the characteristic matter with which it works, but all practices in general rely upon a cognitive process of “finding” or “invention” for which ingengo serves as the engine. The rhetorical canon of Inventio thus turns out to be the most venerable site in our tradition wherein the basic principles of practical thinking—phronesis, prudentia—have been articulated. And the so-called topoi of invention, which constitute the heart of Inventio, turn out to be the most authoritative model for construing the form of rationality that underwrites all artistic endeavor.
Non Solum Doctrinis: The Vitruvian Virtuoso Work in progress, citation only by permission
Not much seems clearer in the history of architectural thought than that there is a distinction between classicism and modern architectural theory. While the exact character of this division is often fuzzy, whether one looks for it in writing, practice, or education, that some division is present is of little dispute. In seventeenth-century treatises, most notably those of François Blondel and Claude Perrault, the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns played out in the debate over how to ground architectural proportions-whether in an idealized and naturalized, often overwrought, framework to be adapted to the particulars of implementation or, in contrast, in a modernized, simplified, and methodically rationalized system that to varying degrees allowed for the influence of taste. 1 In the eighteenth-century, as theory moved away from petty disputes over proportional systems that remained within the classical style, the more pressing questions of classical versus modern architectural theory were engaged within larger developing systems of professionalization, in particular in the contrasts between the architect and engineer. 2 And while, as has been emphasized in recent scholarship, the most extreme contrasts are found in writing rather than in actual practice, the theoretical divisions between architecture and engineering over the structure of knowledge, the place of nature, and the meaning of form where pronounced. 3 For example, theory for Jacque-François Blondel at the École des Arts was essentially humanistic knowledge of the classical art of architecture and its general principles, while for engineers like Jean-Rodolphe Perronet, and even more so for his successor at the École des Pont et Chaussées, Gaspard de Prony, theory meant mathematical and physical calculation. The nineteenth-century saw little relief from the division, as it began to be internalized within architectural discourse itself. With the attempted reformation of the École des Beaux-Arts in the 1860s throwing classically-oriented conservatives like Quatremère de Quincy and modernizing liberals like Félix Duban, Henri Labrouste, and Eugène Viollet-le-Duc into battle over the future of architectural education, 4 the distinction of classicism and modernity began to look like a distinction between looking backwards and looking forwards-modernism was developing into a new architectural tradition, for which engineering had been the nineteenthcentury unconscious, as Sigfried Giedion famously saw it. 5 In the early-stages of formation in the later half of the nineteenth-century, the American architectural education system saw this tension playing out between the inheritors of the Beaux-Arts tradition and those, like William Ricker at the University of Illinois, who promoted the German polytechnic model. 6 And with the influx of Bauhaus influence in American schools in the early twentieth-century, the contrast became conservative classicism and forward-looking modernism became even more pronounced, and ideological. The well-known rhetoric of Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, and others, and the further developing tensions between historicism (and in particular the German art historical project), and forward-looking, almost ahistoricist, modernist design, produced a contrast cemented into the very conception of architectural theory today: either something to be historicized, e.g., 'classical rules,' or a tool for generating new architectural possibilities, e.g., parametricism. 7 The story of the distinction between classicism and modernity is of course much more complex than recounted here, taking many ironic twists and turns and with each side appropriating the other in various ways, but nonetheless the prima facie tension between classicism and modernity raises an immediate skepticism: could Vitruvius, the guiding figure in Vitruvius' own 6.2), Alberti says "beauty is that reasoned harmony (certa cum ratione concinnitas) of all the parts within a body, so that nothing may be added, taken away, or altered, but for the worse," and, as in book 9, he hastens to add that that it must be the result of certa ratio, which Rykwert, et al. render as alternately "consistent theory" and "consistent method." Later, in 9.5, Alberti describes concinnitas as a lex, a law. Concinnitas is then a harmonious proportional composition of number, outline, and position, achieved by the use of an absolute (absolutus), certain (certus), perfect (perfectus), primary (primarius) and nomic reason (ratio). Alberti has often been read as theoretically consonant with Vitruvius, differing only in detail, Alberti's stated opposition to Vitruvius being dismissed as mostly and merely rhetorical and stylistic. Rudolf Wittkower's highly influential Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism takes the consonance between Alberti and Vitruvius on principles as a given. 14 Rykwert identifies Alberti's categories for assessing architecture with Vitruvius' own, even though Alberti's terms differ from Vitruvius. 15 Kruft takes exception to the general trend, arguing that Alberti's differences with Vitruvius are fundamental. 16 He concedes Alberti's need
ARCHITECTURAL THEORY REVIEW, 2023
The present paper offers a new reading of Vitruvius' opening statements in De Architectura I.1; it understands that the Roman author attempts to explain what architecture is by describing how architecture-related knowledge is acquired. It further understands that Vitruvius claims that the architect's scientia is born out of the bodily involvement with construction, as well as out of the exercise of the proper deductive reasoning. The knowledge required for the design and erection of sound buildings that can be integrated into the world order is akin to what we today name the "designerly" way of thinking and knowing, enriched with expertise on the realization of the design produced. Finally, it proposes a new translation of I.1 that produces a coherent text with no logical gaps.