A timeless architect of the future

Marcus Vitruvius Pollio's De Architectura is still relevant after 2000 years

Some 2000 years ago, Marcus Vitruvius Pollio wrote "Fame escaped me. I'm not well known, and I can only hope in posterity." His lack of fame with his contemporaries is proven by the scarcity of news about him; his luck with posterity is proven by the success of his De Architectura, history's first architecture handbook which fascinated Leonardo da Vinci and hosts of architects. It also anticipated the ideas of the Renaissance.
Marcus Vitruvius Pollio lived during the times of Caesar and Augustus (Vitruvius dedicated his work to the latter, and probably wrote it in his adult age, around 27 B.C.). In regards to his birthplace, many Italian towns claim the honour: Verona, Piacenza, Fano, Formia. The most likely contender is Formia because the gens Vitruvia was originally from there, and several inscriptions mention the name Vitruvius. That's all we know.
We learn a lot more about Vitruvius from the pages of his masterpiece. De Architectura is not just a handbook on civil engineering and construction techniques, but also a philosophy treatise. The author compiled his technical knowledge and his outlook on life as well, describing his own personality better than any biographer could do. And that's where our interest lies.
The book is a heavyweight (10 tomes), and reveals how the Romans built so many roads, bridges, buildings, and aqueducts. It contains precise descriptions of methods, scale drawings, machines for lifting large stones and beams, and what would now be called construction site organization.
For instance, it makes us understand why Roman roads have such a long and useful life. They were to be made in four layers, Vitruvius wrote: the first of crushed stone, the second of fist-sized stones. Before laying them, these materials were to be mixed with lime, and after laying them (for a total height of at least 23 centimetres) they were to be accurately beaten with large logs in order to compact them. Over these two layers went at least 15 centimetres of nucleus, i.e. a mortar composed of ground terracotta and lime. Finally, the fourth layer was the pavimentum, i.e. the pavement of large flat stones. As an alternative to the double foundation layer, Vitruvius suggested the use of gravel and pozzolana, natural cement that could create a very strong foundation. Nowadays we would call it a sort of concrete.
"Faced with knowledge and technical rules this specific, drawn from the expertise of hundreds of architecti even less known than Vitruvius, the 300,000 kilometres of roads of the Roman Empire, the 10 aqueducts supplying Rome with a million cubic metres of water per day, and other surprisingly bold constructions, such as the 43.5-metre dome of the Pantheon, begin to make sense," wrote Guido Weiller.
The treatise does not contain just technical notions. Vitruvius required good architects to know other disciplines as well, because they were all interconnected. Today that is taken for granted, but for the ancients scientific speculation and practical application were totally separated. This is where Vitruvius departs from his contemporaries, but also where we understand a little more about him. If he was giving this recommendation to his colleagues, most likely he had already practised it.
His forerunning the ideas of the Renaissance is, however, testified by his posing the ideal man to the centre of knowledge of his time. Obviously, to him the ideal man is an architect, but not because of any prejudice or trade pride. Architects daily embody architecture, and Vitruvius saw architecture as the science that most contributed to the development of civilization, insofar as building houses brought people together and allowed them to create families, the building blocks of society.
We shouldn't be surprised, then, when we read that this ideal man, so loaded with responsibilities, recommended gnomonics, i.e. the art of building sundials. Vitruvius did not require architects to be able to actually build a time-measuring device, just to realize how time is measured and how important it is in building anything. Today, this is commonly referred to as time study.
Vitruvius went even further. Architects need to know music to train their ear to the "tune" the ropes of catapults and ballistas for their best performance. In fact, those war machines were in optimal condition when the ropes propelling their projectiles "sang" with the same note.
They also had to know medicine, so that they might understand the influence of weather on humans and build adequate dwellings, sewers, aqueducts, and drain marshes.
But most of all, architects needed to know the human body. In his De Architectura, Vitruvius draws a parallel between a building and the human body: both must have eurhythmics, i.e. a harmonic distribution of the different parts. In order to explain this concept, he displayed some surprisingly good notions of anatomy which he used to identify the man of ideal proportions, like Leonardo did much later.
"Nature, which an architect must imitate, composed the body of the ideal man so that his face, when measured from his chin to the root of his hair, corresponds to one tenth of his height. The height of the face is divided in three equal parts: from the chin to the base of the nostrils, from the nostrils to the eyebrows, and from there to the root of the hair. If a man laid down with spread arms and legs, a compass centred in his navel would draw a circle touching his fingertips and toe tips."
This meticulous study of the human body, taking up a whole tome (the third), is transposed by Vitruvius into the design of temples and public and private buildings, many of whom still stand, proving that his calculations were sound. If nowadays we can speak of Imperial Rome from an architectural standpoint, we know whom we are indebted to.
The Renaissance, which posed man at the centre of the universe after centuries of marginalization, discovered an unexpected forerunner in Vitruvius, and not just in architecture. Leonardo designed a "perfect man" from the studies of the great Roman architect; and Leon Battista Alberti, architect, man of letters and father of Renaissance art, also drew from De Architectura in order to elaborate his artistic theories and design his buildings, dominated by an absolute harmony of shapes and spaces.
We have the works of Leon Battista Alberti, and also of Filippo Brunelleschi, another top Renaissance architect. Nothing remains of Vitruvius' designs, only his De Architectura, but it's more than enough. It's almost as if Vitruvius was the co-author of Alberti's Malatestian Temple, or of Brunelleschi's dome of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence. The eurhythmics he theorized centuries before became a monument to the man who mastered creation because he learned its rules. Architect Vitruvius had designed the future.

Publication Date: 2001-12-09
Story Location: http://tandemnews.com/viewstory.php?storyid=705