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A historical study of Vitruvius's De architectura, showing that his purpose in writing "the whole body of architecture" was shaped by the imperial Roman project of world domination. Vitruvius's De architectura is the only major work on architecture to survive from classical antiquity, and until the eighteenth century it was the text to which all other architectural treatises referred. While European classicists have focused on the factual truth of the text itself, English-speaking architects and architectural theorists have viewed it as a timeless source of valuable metaphors. Departing from both perspectives, Indra Kagis McEwen examines the work's meaning and significance in its own time. V...
a rich and poetic exploration of architectural beginnings and the dawn of Western philosophy in preclassical Greece
Perrault argues that rules of architecture be determined by reason, not by ancient precedent.
This collection of previously unpublished essays from a diverse range of well-known scholars and architects builds on the architectural tradition of phenomenological hermeneutics as developed by Dalibor Veseley and Joseph Rykwert and carried on by David Leatherbarrow, Peter Carl and Alberto Pérez-Gómez. Taking an interdisciplinary approach and drawing on ideas from beyond the architectural canon, contributors including Kenneth Frampton, David Leatherbarrow, Juhani Pallasmaa, Karsten Harries, Steven Holl, Indra Kagis McEwen, Paul Emmons, and Louise Pelletier offer new insights and perspectives on questions such as the following: Given the recent fascination with all things digital and novel...
This book brings to light central topics that are neglected in current histories and theories of architecture and urbanism. These include the role of imitation in earlier centuries and its potential role in present practice; the necessary relationship between architecture, urbanism and the rural districts; and their counterpart in the civil order that builds and uses what is built. The narrative traces two models for the practice of architecture. One follows the ancient model in which the architect renders his service to serve the interests of others; it survives and is dominant in modernism. The other, first formulated in the fifteenth century by Leon Battista Alberti, has the architect use...
Building in Words explores the relationship between text and architecture in the Roman world from the perspective of architectural process. Ancient Romans frequently encountered buildings under construction - they experienced noisy building work, disruptive transportation of materials, and sometimes spectacular engineering feats. Bettina Reitz-Joosse analyzes how Roman authors responded to the process of building and construction in their literary works. Roman authors tell stories of architectural creation to give meaning to finished monuments. Their narratives can stress technological or logistic mastery or highlight morally problematic aspects of construction, particularly in large-scale e...
Bringing together contributions from art history, architectural history, historiography and history of law, this volume is the first comprehensive exploration of the manifold meanings of foundation, dedication and consecration rituals and narratives in early modern culture.
Professionalism is political. This book offers a new assessment of the Roman architect Vitruvius and his treatise, On Architecture, dedicated to Augustus in the 20s BCE. Once reviled by scholars, Vitruvius emerges as an imperial expert par excellence when read alongside literary coevals through an intertextual lens. No building of Vitruvius' name survives from antiquity, but his treatise remains a formidable literary construction that partakes of Rome's vibrant textual culture. The book explores Vitruvius' portrait of the ideal architect as an imposing "Vitruvian man" at the dawn of Augustus' empire. In direct dialogue with his republican model, Cicero's ideal orator, the architect embodies a distinctly imperial civic ethos in which technically skilled partisans supersede old elites as guarantors of Augustan authority. Vitruvius promises to shape not only the emperor's legacy with architecture, but also the notion of a Roman citizen through his ideal architect.
Volume I in the new series Chora: Intervals in the Philosophy of Architecture explores fundamental questions concerning the practice of architecture and examines the potential of architecture.
Architects, however, tend to deny this, fearing contingency and preferring to pursue perfection.