Vitruvius | EPFL Graph Search

Vitruvius (vɪˈtruːviəs; c. 80–70 BC – after c. 15 BC) was a Roman architect and engineer during the 1st century BC, known for his multi-volume work titled De architectura. He originated the idea that all buildings should have three attributes: firmitas, utilitas, and venustas ("strength", "utility", and "beauty"). These principles were later widely adopted in Roman architecture. His discussion of perfect proportion in architecture and the human body led to the famous Renaissance drawing of the Vitruvian Man by Leonardo da Vinci. Little is known about Vitruvius' life, but by his own description he served as an artilleryman, the third class of arms in the Roman military offices. He probably served as a senior officer of artillery in charge of doctores ballistarum (artillery experts) and libratores who actually operated the machines. As an army engineer he specialized in the construction of ballista and scorpio artillery war machines for sieges. It is possible that Vitruvius served

Il demone dell'analogia: Ovvero affinità e divergenze fra il compagno aristotele e noi

Nicola Braghieri

This laconic discourse uses the Aristotelian authority to define the role of the analogical procedure in the government of the architectural composition. Respecting its ambiguous balance between mathematical method and attitude of the imagination, analogy is here intended as the relationship between fragments of the structure and the structure in its entirety. Specifically, it is considered as a procedure through which the human being is capable to mutually associate entities of different nature to process and elaborate formal similarities and differences. The philosophical tradition, since beginning of time, introduces this associative model to emancipate the primitive concept of comparison between two entities from a mere “formal similarity between the entities themselves” to a “proportional correspondence between a couple of measures of different entities “. The treatises of Humanism, following the Vitruvian though congenitally permeated by Aristotelian philosophy, introduce in architecture a system of general validity to overcome any particular approach coming from the visual association of apparent or evident forms. ‘Ça va sans dire’ that the analogy permeates every discourse on architecture and, more or less explicitly, guides every project practice from its genesis to its signification. Not accidentally, Vitruvius literally uses the Greek word ‘analogon’, only later translating it into Latin ‘proportio’. As a proportion he means the correspondence between the measures of the different elements that make up a single work. ‘Analogon’ is thus an instrument necessary to mathematically regulate the principles of the design of a building, specifically a temple. Vitruvius therefore intends analogy as a function related to logical-dialectical rather than to the universe of sensory perception. Therefore, he means the analogy in a very different sense and meaning from the intuitive one that will then use the romantic aesthetic and modern philosophy. The analogical procedure for Vitruvius is the “way” through which the elements of the order are regulate, as it was for Aristotle the way to construct the proportional metaphor, considered “the mother of all the rhetorical figures”. In these terms the analogy works as a “proportioning machine” between different entities, but it is not to be considered as an idea of universal metaphysical order. Following this logic construction, it could be said that for Aristotle the human being is an “analog machine”. This machine proceeds by processes of affinity and similarity, sometimes through linguistic metaphors abstracted from the “logic of facts”, to operate according to what is properly defined as “logic of opinion”. The logic of opinion, or even more properly, the “logic of affection”, is constituted through a continuous game of analogies with the “world of the surrounding and memory”, therefore with the objects of the outside reality and their inner representations. The affinities that are established between objects, then between architectures, arise from external, formal relations, subsequently become affective, sympathetic, finally spiritual. It is this aura of spirituality that paradoxically brings them closer to the abstraction of the Euclidean analogy.

2021

Symposium ‘Ghost Writers: Collectors, Creators, Archives, and Memory’

Matthew Skjonsberg

Design practice depends heavily on display of drawings or photographs – representations of buildings and landscapes – from architecture schools to competitions and from client meetings to the final publicity of a completed project. Archives and other records of memory serve an essential role in architectural creation as well in that designing a real building, one that stands solidly, is attractive, and functions – in fulfillment of the Vitruvian triad – is a complex process and having access to as many sources as possible of how other architects handled these questions is fundamental to the overall process and design and the ongoing education of an architect. While designers are always looking for their next commission, their antennae are also open to interesting projects, whenever they were built. The exhibition “The Living City: Park Systems from Lausanne to Los Angeles” displays works that come from archival collections and are assembled with the intention to open and influence discussion about landscape issues still of great importance. Exhibitions about historical architecture and surviving documents that represent or interpret those works speak to an essential part of the architectural consciousness. Indeed most architects have an internal archive of buildings seen or experienced that are fundamental to their understanding of what a building is for them.

2019

Il demone dell'analogia: Ovvero affinità e divergenze fra il compagno aristotele e noi

Nicola Braghieri

2021