Reviews

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Vitruvius on Architecture

Thomas Gordon Smith
(New York: Monacelli Press, 2003) 232 PP., $60

It is amazing what passions an ancient Roman architect can still raise.

Marcus Vitruvius Pollio’s Ten Books on Architecture (De Architectura Libri Decem), written between 30 and 20 B.C., may be one of the most influential works of classical literature. Composed in a mediocre, tortuous Latin—clearly in imitation of such contemporaneous stylists as Cicero, but far below them—it wanders through a summary of virtually everything known at the time, in an attempt to lay the foundation of what architectural historian Frank Brown called “architecture as a liberal art.” Although the Ten Books is a highly imperfect work (which is probably what makes it so accessible to reinterpretation), it provides such a unified view of knowledge that it amply conveys the classical liberal arts ideal of education to the modern world.

For architects from the Renaissance to the early 20th century, on the other hand, the Ten Books has been something of a Holy Grail—a book which, if its secrets were ever fully elucidated (Vitruvius’s original manuscript included 11 drawings, which have been lost), would reveal the key to the creation of great architecture.

Thomas Gordon Smith’s Vitruvius on Architecture is definitely in this latter architectural tradition. The book is a reprint of Morris Hicky Morgan’s 1914 translation as newly emended by classicist Stephen Kellogg, with a lengthy introduction by Smith, drawings by Smith and architect Matthew Rosenshine and photos of (mainly Hellenistic) buildings. It is the illustrations that distinguish this work from all other translations of Vitruvius.

An architect by profession, Smith was a significant figure in the development of “ironic classicism” in the 1980s, which revived the use of classical forms in architecture in an amusing or ironic way (Philip Johnson’s 1978 AT&T building in New York is a well-known early example). Then, as chair of the department of architecture at Notre Dame, he converted to a more “rigorous” use of classical styles, which he now incorporates into his own buildings. He is a leading figure of a small but passionate group of classicist architects who continue to produce meticulously elegant and masterful renditions of 18th-century-style buildings. If you want a classical building, go to this group; no one today can do them better.

Nonetheless, Vitruvius on Architecture tells us more about Postmodernism and Smith’s own classical ideas than about Roman architecture or ancient liberal education. For one thing, this translation includes only five of the ten books (1, 3, 4, 5, 6), since Smith has determined that the rest of the books treat topics “outside the bounds of architecture.” The excluded books deal with mechanics, astronomy, hydraulics and a dizzying variety of other topics. Of course, Vitruvius’s argument was that the liberal arts were essential to the practice of architecture. It was his aim to connect all that was known by the educated men of his day to architecture; this unified vision of knowledge, bound together by architecture, is what makes the Ten Books a fascinating and unique work. Smith’s reductionism wrenches Vitruvius’s thoughts on architecture out of the context of the time and distorts the author’s intention.

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Although Smith’s book offers interesting insights into Greek and Roman architecture previously missed by scholars (like the canted fascia of the architrave of the temple of Artemis at Magnesia), it is probably not best used as a scholarly reference work. There are confidently asserted small errors: The oldest manuscripts of the Ten Books do not date to 1000 A.D., for example, but to the Carolingian period (eighth to 10th century A.D.); and the word “amphitheater” is not known only from non-Vitruvian texts but in fact appears for the first time in Vitruvius’s own Latin text. There are also errors of interpretation: The fantasy winged porticus villa shown in a tiny fresco from the house of M. Lucretius Fronto in Pompeii is given as an example of a “loosely jointed” country villa, whereas it is in fact a totally symmetrical formal composition.

Vitruvius on Architecture is essentially a passionate personal account, with Smith searching for a working architectural method. Like many recent interpreters, he argues that Vitruvius represents adaptability and creativity, not a hidebound adherence to set patterns. This is a hard argument to illustrate, though it is doubtlessly right, since Vitruvius himself repeatedly argues that the art of architecture requires modification based on aesthetic judgment and adaptation to the site or other needs. Perhaps inevitably, Smith tends to fall into his own trap, as his illustrations try to give complete visualizations of what Vitruvius meant by one or another paradigm. It was a Renaissance tradition to give complete scientific illustrations of possible paradigms; Vitruvius, on the other hand, probably left his descriptions vague for a purpose.

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Some of the drawings cut new ground in the art of Vitruvian exegesis. A number of plan drawings of houses in Pompeii, for example, show the main spaces with rigid “Vitruvian” proportions, or near proportions, surrounded by a blank void, neatly illustrating the probable habit of thinking that allowed trained professional Roman architects to achieve proportional designs selectively in the main rooms of a mansion. Some of Matthew Rosenshine’s drawings are truly gorgeous. Smith’s drawing of a fresco from the House of Augustus as a small actual stage set is intriguing and vivid, though probably not scholarly demonstrable—at least not yet.

Smith’s Vitruvius on Architecture offers a fresher selection of Hellenistic and late-Republican models than previously attempted, at least in the tradition of architectural practice. Some drawings and interpretations may enter the scholarly repertoire of Roman architecture, but this is mostly a book that struggles to bring Roman architecture to life at a time when we are still largely insensitive to the idea that mastery of history can guide the future. Smith wants us to understand that architects can become empowered by accepting external rules, that surrendering a “certain independence” may enable them “to engage in a rich architectural tradition.”

This plea to architects to take account of the past is the great virtue of Vitruvius on Architecture. As Smith knows, though classicism is far from a dominant trend in architecture today, it just won’t die.

Vitruvius on Architecture