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De Re Aedificatoria

• Title - De Re Aedificatoria
  • Author - Leon Battista Alberti
  • Category - nonfiction
  • 
  • Queue status - completed

Synopsis

A guide to architectural principles and practice, ca. 1400.

Review

Alberti was the "Renaissance Man" referred to in the movie of that name starring Danny DeVito. He was an architect, writer, philosoper, swordsman, and athlete. I'm reading a reproduction of the 1755 Leoni translation, published in 1986 by Dover Press. It is an absolutely brilliant translation (I mean - it is very readable and accessible).

Alberti modelled his 10 books after the Roman architect Visuvius. It is fascinating to read works written during the early Italian renaissance, because they harken back to the ancient past and yet were in their own works inventing the modern. Alberti's only source of 'authority' was the writings of ancient Rome and Greece; but though he pays homage and gives due respect to the ancient authors, his intent is the thoroughly modern one of reporting those facts and observations that has made or verified himself.

A couple years ago I read A Pattern Language of Design by Christopher Alexander, mostly because that book was the inspiration for the patterns approach in software design, beginning about ten years ago. Though the pattern approach was a great insight and breakthrough, much of the actual content was derived from Alberti, as I can now see. Or maybe the basic architectural patterns actually derive from the ancients - such things as BigColumnsAtTheCorners, and StrongArches.

I was surprised to see how much construction detail Alberti covers. I expected a book on design and proportion, but the first 4 of the 10 books are concerned almost entirely with the nature of materials (wood, rock, sand, bricks, lime, mortar) and with the right way of building. He goes into amazing detail about the properties of many types of wood; even more detail about the properties of different types of rock. His description of the steps in constructing a building could almost be used as a guidebook.