history of theory

1. FUE - Future University in Egypt
Faculty of Engineering and Technology
Department of Architectural Engineering
ARC 322: History & Theories of
Architecture (4)
Fall 2018
Instructor:
Dr. Yasser Mahgoub
Lecture 2 - History of Theory

2. History of Theory

3. History of Theory
• Antiquity
• 1st century BCE, with the work of Vitruvius.
• Vitruvius was a Roman writer, architect, and engineer active in the
1st century BCE. He was the most prominent architectural theorist
in the Roman Empire known today, having written De
architectura (known today as The Ten Books of Architecture), a
treatise written in Latin and Greek on architecture, dedicated to the
emperor Augustus.

4. History of Theory
• Antiquity
• 1st century BCE, with the work of Vitruvius.
• Probably written between 27 and 23 BCE. It is the only major
contemporary source on classical architecture to have survived.
Divided into ten sections or "books", it covers almost every aspect
of Roman architecture, from town planning, materials, decorations,
temples, water supplies, etc.

6. History of Theory
• Antiquity
• 1st century BCE, with the work of Vitruvius.
• It rigorously defines the classical orders of architecture. It also proposes
the three fundamental laws that Architecture must obey, in order to be so
considered: firmitas, utilitas, venustas, translated in the 17th century
by Sir Henry Wotton into the English slogan firmness, commodity and
delight (meaning structural adequacy, functional adequacy, and beauty).

7. Firmitas
firmness
Venustas
delight
Utilitas
commodity
The Vitruvian triad
firmness, commodity and delight
structural adequacy, functional adequacy, and beauty

8. History of Theory
• Antiquity
• 1st century BCE, with the work
of Vitruvius.
• The rediscovery of Vitruvius' work had a
profound influence on architects of the
Renaissance, adding archaeological
underpinnings to the rise of
the Renaissance style, which was already
under way.
• Renaissance architects, such as Niccoli,
Brunelleschi and Leon Battista Alberti,
found in "De Architectura" their rationale
for raising their branch of knowledge to a
scientific discipline.

9. History of Theory
• Middle Ages (Medieval)
• Throughout the Middle Ages, architectural
knowledge was passed by transcription, word of
mouth and technically in master builders' lodges.
• Due to the laborious nature of transcription, few
examples of architectural theory were penned in
this time period.

15. History of Theory
• Renaissance
• Leon Battista Alberti, De Re Aedificatoria, which
placed Vitruvius at the core of the most profound
theoretical tradition of the modern ages. From Alberti,
good architecture is validated through the Vitruvian
triad, which defines its purpose. This triplet conserved
all its validity until the 19th century.

20. History of Theory
• Enlightenment
• New interest in Classical art and architecture.
• Thus the term Neoclassicism, exemplified by the writings of Prussian art
critic [Johann Joachim Winkelmann], arose to designate 18th-century
architecture which looked to these new Classical precedents for
inspiration in building design.
• Major architectural theorists of the Enlightenment include Julien-David
Leroy, Abbé Marc-Antoine Laugier, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Robert
Adam, James Stuart, Georg Friedrich Hegel and Nicholas Revett.

27. History of Theory
• 19th century
• Reaction against the dominance of neo-classical
architecture came to the fore in the 1820s
with Augustus Pugin providing a moral and
theoretical basis for Gothic Revival architecture, and
in the 1840s John Ruskin developed this ethos.

28. History of Theory
• 19th century
• The American sculptor Horatio Greenough published
the essay American Architecture in August 1843 in
which he rejected the imitation of old styles of
buildings and outlined the functional relationship
between architecture and decoration.
• These theories anticipated the development
of Functionalism in modern architecture.

32. History of Theory
• 20th century
• In 1889 Camillo Sitte published ”City Planning According to Artistic
Principles”. For Sitte, the most important issue was not the
architectural shape or form of a building but the quality of the
urban spaces that buildings collectively enclose, the whole being
more than the sum of its parts. Sitte's work was revisited by post-
modern architects and theorists from the 1970s.

33. History of Theory
• 20th century
• Louis Sullivan "form ever follows function“ (The
Tall Office Building Artistically Considered of
1896) a central tenet of Modern architectural
theory.

34. History of Theory
• 20th century
• Ebenezer Howard, founded the garden city
movement.

35. History of Theory
• 20th century
• Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Le
Corbusier provided the theoretical basis for
the International Style with aims of using industrialized
architecture to reshape society. Towards the end of the
century postmodern architecture reacted against the
austerity of High Modern (International Style) principles,
viewed as narrowly normative and doctrinaire.

36. History of Theory
• 20th century
• Frank Lloyd Wright, while modern in rejecting historic revivalism, was
idiosyncratic in his theory, which he conveyed in copious writing. Wright
did not subscribe to the tenets of the International Style, but evolved what
he hoped would be an American, in contrast to a European, progressive
course. Wright's style, however, was highly personal, involving his
particular views of man and nature. Wright was more poetic and firmly
maintained the 19th-century view of the creative artist as unique genius.
This limited the relevance of his theoretical propositions.

37. History of Theory
• Contemporary
• In contemporary architectural discourse theory has become
more concerned with its position within culture generally,
and thought in particular. … discussing philosophy and
cultural studies as buildings, and why advanced
postgraduate research and doctoral dissertations focus on
philosophical topics in connection with architectural
humanities.

38. History of Theory
• Contemporary
• Peter Eisenman's and Bernard Tschumi's interest in Derrida's thought
• Anthony Vidler's interest in the works of Freud and Lacan
• Gaston Bachelard's Poetics of Space or texts by Gilles Deleuze.
• Phenomenology, Christian Norberg-Schulz
• Philosophers and historians of science, Nader El-Bizri, Manfredo Tafuri, are
interested in new ontological ( the way things are) definitions of architecture vs
epistemological definitions (the way we know things)
• Mark Wigley, architecture is compared to a language which can be invented and
re-invented every time it is use - deconstructivist architecture
• Christopher Alexander's emphasis on The Timeless Way of Building (1979) based
on pattern languages that are optimized on-site as construction unfolds.

39. History of Theory
• Since 2000
• rapid rise of urbanism and globalization
• developing a new understanding of the city
• new understandings of the urban conditions of our planet
• fragmentation and architecture
• high technology
• ecology
• mass media
• economism.
• "Digital" Architecture.
• Biomimicry! (the process of examining nature, its models, systems,
processes, and elements, to emulate or take inspiration from them
in order to solve human problems. Architects also design organic-
looking buildings in the attempt to develop a new formal
language.)

40. History of Theory
• Since 2000
• Digital morphogenesis (computational techniques that
are influenced by algorithms relevant to biological
processes)
• Genetic algorithms developed in computer science are
used to evolve designs on a computer, and some of
these are proposed and built as actual structures.
• Since these new architectural tendencies emerged,
many theorists and architects have been working on
these issues, developing theories and ideas such as
Patrick Schumacher's Parametricism.

41. History of Theory
• Since 2000
• We are witnessing the birth of an entirely new
type of architectural theory and practice.
• Contemporary architecture's theoretical world
is plural and multicolored.
• There are different dominant schools of
architectural theory which are based on
linguistic analysis, philosophy, post-
structuralism, or cultural theory.

46. Timeline of architecture

47. Some architectural theorists
Historical
• Vitruvius
• Leon Battista Alberti
• Andrea Palladio
• Sebastiano Serlio
• Gérard Desargues
• Filarete
• Francesco di Giorgio
• Teofilo Gallaccini
• Marc-Antoine Laugier
• Antoine-Chrysostome Quatremere de Quincy
• Giambattista Piranesi
• Carlo Lodoli
• Francesco Milizia
• John Ruskin
• Horatio Greenough
• Eugène Viollet-le-Duc
• Karl Friedrich Schinkel
• Paul Sédille
• Hermann Muthesius
Formalism and space
• Hans Auer
• Konrad Fiedler
• Henri Focillon
• Paul Frankl
• Adolf von Hildebrand
• Emil Kaufmann
• Theodor Lipps
• Alois Riegl
• Geoffrey Scott
• August Schmarsow
• Gottfried Semper
• John Summerson
• Robert Vischer
• Heinrich Wölfflin
• Wilhelm Worringer
Modernist
• Reyner Banham
• Ernesto Nathan Rogers
• Bruno Zevi
• Sigfried Giedion
• Leonardo Benevolo
• Steen Eiler Rasmussen
• Otto Wagner
• Le Corbusier
• Adolf Loos
• Lewis Mumford
• Edoardo Persico
• Raymond Unwin
• Ebenezer Howard
• Rudolf Arnheim
• Lúcio Costa
Postmodern and contemporary
• Christopher Alexander
• Stan Allen
• Pier Vittorio Aureli
• Andrea Branzi
• Markus Breitschmid
• Preston Scott Cohen
• Peter Cook (architect)
• Gillo Dorfless
• Nader El-Bizri
• Peter Eisenman
• Hal Foster
• Kenneth Frampton
• Marco Frascari
• K. Michael Hays
• Charles Jencks
• Jeffrey Kipnis
• Rem Koolhaas
• Leon Krier
• Sanford Kwinter
• catherine igraham
• Sylvia Lavin
• David Leatherbarrow
• Marc Linder
• Christian Norberg-Schulz
• Werner Oechslin
• Juhani Pallasmaa
• Alberto Pérez-Gómez
• Paolo Portoghesi
• Aldo Rossi
• Colin Rowe
• Joseph Rykwert
• Yehuda Safran
• Denise Scott Brown
• Richard Sennett
• Daniel Sherer
• Robert Somol
• Deyan Sudjic
• Manfredo Tafuri
• Robert Tavernor
• Panayotis Tournikiotis
• Peter Trummer
• Bernard Tschumi
• Oswald Mathias Ungers
• Robert Venturi
• Dalibor Vesely
• Anthony VIdler
• Paul Virilio
• Sarah Whiting
• Bruno Zevi

48. Thank You.