An architectural design may begin with a generalized image of the building desired—which can include interior features as well as exterior—and proceed to accommodate the pro- grammatic functions inside the structure as best they may fit. Or, by contrast, it may begin by determining how the func- tions ought to be accommodated on the interior and proceed to generate a design that will fulfill the requirements. Al- though this inside-out approach has been preferred by most forward-looking planners throughout the twentieth century, the outside-in version prevailed from antiquity right up to the modern era (even occasionally in modernist architecture as well). This is the architecture of the ideal image, issuing from a venerable theoretical tradition that deserves to be respected and appreciated alongside the currently favored option.
In theoretical writing, the architecture of the ideal im- age begins with Vitruvius. The heart and soul of his pre- scriptions for building—the explication of the orders—is set in the context of a discussion of the building type that actually spawned the orders, namely the peripteral temple (fig. 4-1). It is important to recognize that Vitruvius’s peripteral temple embodied a Greek rather than a Roman format, one rarely employed in Rome until after his
lifetime. He was therefore adopting as an architectural ideal a format that to him was both foreign and relatively ancient. Its value to him was that it was the format to which other building types were related by virtue of their having em- ployed the orders for part of their structure or decor or having borrowed some version or aspect of the peripteral temple’s plan. Although Vitruvius discussed the amphithe- ater and the private house in almost equal detail, the am- phitheater was of interest mainly as a pretext for explicating a geometric technique for regularizing a plan, the house for working out a program of functional considerations. Al- though all three were well established as conventional types, it was the temple that served as the paragon of beauty in ar- chitecture and had accordingly acquired the status of ideal. The message was not lost upon his later readers, who made further assumptions about ideals based upon that Figure 4-1
The classical ideal, represented by the temple of Hera II, Paestum (FH).
paragon. Renaissance theorists assumed that the orders should be regarded as indispensable to the design of beau- tiful buildings, indeed the sine qua non of dignified archi- tecture. They considered the regulations for the orders as doctrine no accomplished architect could fail to master. The format of the peripteral temple itself was not useful to them, but it could be taken provisionally as an ideal proto- type because it had nurtured the orders. Its format was hard to absorb because there were not many to be seen in Italy among surviving Roman ruins, which the Renaissance the- orists were aware of, having surveyed Roman architecture for themselves. They also recognized that the peripteral temple could not be readily adapted to the building types already established in their own culture.
Accordingly, they instinctively sought in Roman archi- tecture other exemplars that could serve as prototypes. The applied orders (with columns not freestanding but embed- ded in a wall or other structure) could be more readily as- similated. As models of that usage, two prominent Roman monuments served admirably: the Colosseum exterior (fig. 4-2), with its superposed ranks of different orders, was appropriate for multistory facades; and the triumphal arch, especially that of Constantine (fig. 4-3), was appro- priate for grand fronts and transition points of interiors. Alberti memorably employed the stacks of orders for the Palazzo Rucellai in Florence (fig. 4-4) and the triumphal arch motif (combined with the temple front) for the church of Sant’Andrea in Mantua (fig. 4-5). As a model for the freestanding orders, the prostyle temple, with its columnar porch approached by monumental stairs, was more use- ful than the peripteral format. Exemplars still standing in a complete state were the Temple of Fortuna Virilis at Rome and the Maison Carrée at Nîmes, providing paradigms that could be readily adapted as the entry feature on any grand building, as occurred first with Antonio da Sangallo’s
Medici villa at Poggio a Caiano. Vitruvius’s conceptual ideal, then, could be honored through substitution and variation.
From the tradition of Roman architecture Alberti identified yet another architectural ideal, one that would have extraordinary appeal and durability in Western archi- tecture thereafter: bilateral symmetry. The Renaissance concept of symmetry was substantially different from Vi- truvius’s, and much simplified. Whereas Vitruvius had re- garded symmetry as the harmonious relationship of all the parts to one another and to the whole—a perfectly cali- brated proportional system—Alberti defined symmetry to
Figure 4-2
The paradigm of superimposed orders: Colosseum, Rome (© Ali- nari/Art Resource, NY).
mean the balance of parts identically arranged with refer- ence to a central axis. As he put it,
So agreeable is it to nature that the members on the right side should exactly answer to the left . . . [that] the very first thing we are to take care of must be that every part be disposed with an exact correspondence as to the number, form, and appear- ance, so that the right may answer to the left, the high to the low, the similar to the similar. . . . Even statues, pictures, or any other ornaments of that sort with which we embellish our work must be so disposed as to seem to have sprung up natu- rally in the properest places and to be twins. (De re aedificato-
ria IX.7; translation attributed to James Leoni, 1726)
Figure 4-3
The paradigm of the triumphal arch: Arch of Constantine, Rome (© Alinari/Art Resource, NY).
Figure 4-4
Renaissance superimposed orders: Palazzo Rucellai, Florence, by Alberti (© Alinari/Art Resource, NY).
The lack of clamor with which he introduced this defini- tion, inserted into the category of “arrangement” and sub- ordinated to it, suggests that it may have been a received notion and not of his own invention. Nevertheless, his statement did introduce into the written theory of architec- ture the definition of symmetry that is still current, namely the mirror-image arrangement of parts along a central axis, Figure 4-5
Renaissance triumphal arch-cum-temple front: Sant’Andrea, Mantua, by Alberti (© Alinari/Art Resource, NY).
and it entered the theoretical tradition as an inseparable as- pect of the classical ideal.
If Alberti, and to a lesser extent Serlio, reinforced Vi- truvius’s exaltation of an ideal image by adopting various Roman monuments as guiding exemplars, Andrea Palladio reinvigorated the concept by unconsciously creating several new ideals, each firmly rooted in the antique models. Palla- dio’s attempt to revive the authentic classical tradition cre- ated a context in which he was able to conceive and exploit a number of bold inventions. Almost all of them occurred in his designs for houses. For all their subtle formal varia- tions, Palladio’s town palaces were basically a refinement of the traditional urban house with flat street facade and inner courtyard, which had evolved from the time of the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. But the rural villa, taking the place of traditional farmhouses and feudal strongholds, intro- duced a major new building type into the repertory of West- ern architecture.
Centered on a great hall, the most conservative feature still remaining in Palladio’s designs, the villas are concen- trated into a massive block with a suite of rooms abstractly arranged around the hall, without an explicit functional program. They are composed without the customary apart- ments or room sequences that still governed the com- position of English country houses or French chateaus. Moreover, the proportions of these rooms, whether square or oblong, are fixed according to one of the three propor- tional formulas—based, without attribution, on Alberti’s system of ratios—that determine the length, breadth, and sometimes the height. The end result is a spatial ensemble predicated upon formal coherence rather than functional convenience. They are useful buildings, but buildings in which beauty is allowed to be the dominant desideratum.
The rural villa was a working farm as well as the seat of a cultured gentleman. It necessarily included a barn,
stables, and storage rooms for equipment and crops. Mak- ing a virtue of necessity, Palladio incorporated all these outbuildings into an integrated ensemble along with the residence itself (fig. 4-6). This task was accomplished by disguising these functional structures behind classical ele- ments. The connections between the villa and the major outbuildings were realized with colonnaded or arcaded log- gias, sometimes straight and sometimes curved in a great arc. In the treatise, these compositions always conform to Alberti’s bilateral symmetry. On occasion the composition is doubled to make the ensembles identical on both the front and the back, and on the sides as well. The underly- ing similarity among all the elaborate estate compositions is that any complex facade consists of five parts—the cen- tral block, the two connecting wings, and the terminal pavilions. This five-part composition was to become the formula for almost all subsequent monumental complexes and joined bilateral symmetry as a dual ideal for designs formulated in the classical tradition, regardless of whether they were for palaces, government centers, or cultural institutions.
The spatial implications of these ensembles were pro- found. The central axis, reinforced by the dependent wings, established a strong frontal focus for the composition as a whole (fig. 4-6). The disposition of the wings shaped a spa- tial zone along this axis. If the wings were curved or pro- jected forward, the enclosure formed a shaped exterior space inseparable from the rest of the complex ensemble, in which shaped space and formal mass were integrated. A number of these ensembles were also hierarchically ar- ranged in grade level on the site, with the central block at the apex, thereby enriching the spatial composition with vertical variation. These compositions ultimately served as prototypes for palace-and-garden or public-building- and-piazza complexes in all sorts of situations. Indeed, the
great compositions of the baroque, rococo, and neoclas- sical eras would have been virtually unthinkable without these precedents.
One more specialized but highly evocative example of the interrelationship of space and structure is the house known today as the Villa Rotonda, built around 1550 (fig. 4-7). Designed with four identical porticoes reached by broad stairways, the four axes meet in the central rotunda. Culminating in a dome at the top of the house, the center of the rotunda converts the four horizontal axes into a single vertical one. Thus the exterior is brought into a forceful re- lationship with the interior. But this relationship also works Figure 4-6
Exterior architectural space vertically and horizontally shaped: Villa Trissino, by Palladio.
Figure 4-7
Interpenetration of a building and its exterior environment: Villa Rotonda, by Palladio.
in the same fashion in reverse, from the inside out. From the porticoes, each of the broad stairways is flanked by projec- tions of the raised podium, thereby thrusting the four axes far beyond the house, powerfully rooting the architecture in the landscape. Although this particular composition was not susceptible to as many formal variations as the others, it became the most frequently imitated design in the trea- tise, not only for grand residences but also for government buildings, of which American state houses and county courthouses are familiar examples.
Palladio’s great contribution to the ideal images of ar- chitecture, conveyed to the world through Book II of the
Quattro libri, lay in the fact that each of his innovations
could be directly imitated, loosely adapted, or varied in nearly endless permutations and combinations. It was not a hindrance that these structures were residential; the geo- metric purity of their spatial designs could be adapted for any dignified building type. Another advantage was that Palladio’s contribution happened to occur at a moment when European culture was experiencing a sea change, and innovations were very likely to have profound con- sequences. That Palladio’s work exerted such broad and far-reaching influence is somewhat ironic in view of the circumstance that it had been carried out within a narrow context. His buildings were mostly constructed in the coun- tryside around a minor city for an exclusive group of pa- trons, whose highly cultivated interests were focused on arcane lore from a distant past. But this limited scope also just happened to encompass universality.
Classical architecture fed off the ideal forms intro- duced by Alberti and Palladio for the next three centuries. Indeed, except for the brief and limited predilection for pure geometric shapes—such as the sphere, the cylinder, the cube, and the pyramid—in the late eighteenth century, no other ideal images were introduced to supplant them.
Underlying all these forms was the ideal of bilateral sym- metry, which Alberti had introduced. But in the nineteenth century both bilateral symmetry and the formal ideals fell into disfavor. As Viollet-le-Duc explained at length in the second volume of the Discourses, its retention in architec- tural design was a sure sign that the internal spaces had been compromised in the interests of the exterior. Together with Ruskin’s advocacy of a more general balance of parts across the central axis to replace the mirror images, this rejection of bilateral symmetry brought its status as high dogma in architecture to an end, at least as far as theory is concerned.
When the Gothic cathedral displaced the classical temple as the ideal, a major shift in the role of the ideal oc- curred, for the appeal of the cathedral was less that of an image than a source of conceptual inspiration. Admired for the rational composition of its structure, skeletal in charac- ter and economical of means, its form was adapted to other building types only in highly limited circumstances. The Gothic cathedral never served, then, as an ideal in the mod- ern world in the same sense that classical archetypes had done in the preceding three and a half centuries.
CLASSICAL DESIGN METHOD
If Vitruvius’s accounts may be taken as an accurate indicator, classical design method comprised a variety of approaches. As already mentioned, geometrical schematization was em- ployed to plot the location of the formulaic features of an amphitheater. By contrast, the proper juxtaposition of functions was the rationale for devising the spatial scheme of a house. And the formulation of a peripteral temple was based on an aesthetic code. Vitruvius did not cite design method as an explicit issue, but it lay at the heart of his
instructions for these various building types, all three of which have conventional formats. Among the three, the one that remained relevant for the broader theory of archi- tecture was that employed to design the peripteral temple.
For that purpose Vitruvius was preoccupied by the peristyle, the design of which emanated from the thickness of the column shaft at its base, taken to represent either a single or a double module. This module was employed in the spacing of the columns, determined by formulaic var- iations. The dimensions for the platform resulted from the total number of modules in the columns and inter- columniations. (Paradoxically, the configuration of the naos—the enclosed portion of the building that served the cult function of the temple—and its siting within the peri- style did not occupy his attention.) The module also deter- mined the height of the columns and, in turn, influenced the height of the entablature. The total height of the order was coordinated with the total width of the temple and that, in turn, with the length. So the choice of a particular dimen- sion for the module had ramifications for the entire design process. Although Vitruvius never discussed the rationale of the temple plan as a whole, an ideal image—a pedi- mented temple front—governed the design.
Once the basic composition had been determined, a whole series of refinements needed to be incorporated in or- der to ensure correction of optical distortions imposed by distance or restricted viewing conditions. Sometimes both the platform and the entablature were to be curved slightly upward in the middle of each of the four sides of a temple to avoid the illusion of sagging. If a column was unusu- ally tall its taper needed to be curtailed to compensate for the impression of greater diminution over distance. So, likewise, the spread of the capital and the thickness of the architrave had to be proportionately increased. Columns set behind other columns needed to be thinner, but they
ought to have more numerous flutes for the sake of sug- gesting greater thickness than they actually possessed. Tall columns on the long side of a temple must lean inward slightly on their outer face, but needed to be perpendicular to the platform on their inner face in order to make them appear straight. And finally, any proportions were to be adjusted according to the judgment of the eye when con- ditions of viewing imposed apparent distortions. (De
architectura III.iii.11–13, III.iv.5, III.v.4, 8–9, IV.iv.2–3,
VI.ii.4.)
The upshot of such a design method was that for any building based, however loosely, on the peripteral temple, the requirements of the columnar feature and its coordina- tion with the main block dominated the procedure. How- ever carefully the spaces of that block may have been composed in order to serve their respective purposes, their arrangement within the block and their dimensions would be affected by the limits imposed by the columnar order and the requirements of spatial proportion. Consequently, if the design of a building was rooted in the classical tradi- tion, it was necessarily conditioned by an ideal image, one largely formulated from the outside in.