Introduction

Drawing has been my passion since I was fourteen, one should note that it was not so much as drawing in the form of art per sec but actual technical geometric drawings. I was fortunate to be streamed into a technical elective at high school and obtained a distinction in General Cambridge Examinations at my A-Levels. I then sprang off and took an apprenticeship position in an architect’s office, sacrificing my college years initially and instead precariously propping myself up on a high drafting stool over a drawing board and learning the precise art of depositing ink on trace for a decade before enrolling into school of architecture at a mature age of twenty-seven. What has inspired me to write this essay was two-fold. The first was reading Alberti’s Prologue and Book One in; On the Art of Building in Ten Books, and the second was a counter-reactionary reading of Carlos Frascari’s Chapter Nine in; Eleven Exercises in the art of architectural drawing. It was an eerie feeling of deja-vu but only then did I truly understand the sense of joy and pride that I had experienced when my detailed [hand] drawings of a Karl Schinkel window from the Bauakademie in Berlin was published in a 1987 Architectural Review journal. It is with confidence that I endorse the fact that I have been drawing for some forty-five years now having authored millions of lines…

[…lines that not only have produced numerous physical realities but also transmitted metaphysical realities through the realm of fantasies and myth while being explored by my imagination.] (1)

‘…to have an understanding and knowledge of all the highest and most noble disciplines. This then is [what made me] the architect.’(2)

Preface

The aim of this writing is to seek out all exploratory explanations from our learned ancestral masters with regard to the graphical procedures put to practice from the mid-fifteen century to our current era, in shaping the built environment. What was inherited and/or has innovation completely displaced the noble ways of the master-builders since Antiquity.

What have we lost, what have we preserved and what will we have at the end.

The individual who set the wheels in motion in terms of inventing the vocation, he claimed to rank the highest order of the arts was Leon Battista Alberti. For the sake of this short essay, I shall focus on Book One of his Ten Books on Lineaments from his book on the Art of Building.

Alongside his literary and aesthetic theories, I will bring on board two modern contemporaries; one, a practitioner + another, an architectural theorist - Aldo Van Eyck and Marco Frascari who have both immersed themselves in their own projects and theories to seek reasons to support or oppose Alberti’s architectural treatises.

What was then the matter of the heart is now the heart of the matter. Is this, to be true?

In studying the beginnings and having straddled modernity, how will we sustain ourselves through this Information Age and maintain the genius loci of our habitat on this planet by providing the safety, health and happiness for all of humanity to coexist with nature, indefinitely.

LEON BATTISTA ALBERTI

“…let lineaments be the precise and correct outline, conceived in the mind, made up of lines and angles, and perfected in the learned intellect and imagination.”

Leon Battista Alberti

When Alberti wrote his classic architectural treatise on the art of building in his ten-book format, it was a deliberate act of mimesis to the one Vitruvius had written, De Architectura some 1300 years ago. His predecessor recorded a passing era while Alberti set out to open a new establishment. Between these two ancient icons, architecture was both recorded and predicted. For the later, the ruins and the texts generated a new syllabus for a new architecture, nature herself. The former saw himself as a ‘curator’ [in the modern sense] of the traditions, he universalized. Whereas, Alberti summoned a reformative discipline for the role of the architect by proclaiming and appointing his newly ‘invented vocation’ to the highest authoritative and intellectual order in society hence writing his book, all in Latin!

THE LINEAMENTS | BOOK ONE 

‘Tota res aedificatoria lineamentis et structura constitua est.’

The whole matter of building is composed of lineaments and structure.(3)

In his prologue, Alberti argues that architecture is always comprised of two parts, the lineamenta which is derived from the mind, and materia that which is derived from nature.  He defers from Vitruvius who draws his distinctions in the arts between ratiocination and opus, which translates to the actual work and the theory of it.

For Alberti, design always precedes construction, yet lineamenta and structure are interdependent (4). This is a contradiction in a sense because the word, lineamenta is derived from finitio meaning ‘measured outline’ which circumscribes a ‘linear characteristic’ and so by this association, he implies: ‘design’, which in turn translates to the ‘beauty’ in things (5).  It is the function and duty of lineaments, then, to prescribe an appropriate place, exact numbers, a proper scale, and a graceful order for whole buildings and for each of their constituent parts, so that the whole form and appearance of the building may depend on the lineaments alone and so it has no direct bearing to materia (6) [structure].

Here within lies the contradiction, ‘lineament and structure are not interdependent’ but independent.  Perhaps in Alberti’s true conviction, he might have instead also meant; that part and whole and whole and part are interdependent. [I will disclose further on in this essay what led me to this assumption].

ALBERTI | VAN EYCK

| Dual Concepts of Wholeness |

In Book One, Alberti constantly defines the ‘whole building’ as a body of parts and not of a particular materiality but rather by their alignments and their exact placements having considered their origins and what the evolution of such dwelling places were to be, to begin with. He believed that Lineaments as multiple parts of architecture are all derivations of the mind, which then suggests that the beginnings of architecture must reside in the mind of the creator. He also insisted that such learned intellect and imaginations would lead architects to the original ordinance of their buildings. Since this is to be the case, the elements of which the whole matter of building is to be composed were classified to six attributes: locality, area, compartition, wall, roof, and opening. (9)

| City | House | House | City | City | Body |

In this session of the essay I shall bring on an influential protagonist since the mid- twentieth century who was an ex-member of CIAM then went on to be the co-founder of Team 10 and winning the RIBA Gold Medal in 1990. Van Eyck was undoubtedly an Alberti advocate in the ways he preached and practiced the profession. His surmounting concentration on wholeness and beauty unconditionally discloses his intellectual debt to Alberti.

For example, his complaint against the limited nature of remaining consistent indicates awareness of a continuing devolution that already concerned Alberti nearly 500 years earlier. They were both never discouraged from pursuing ‘wholeness’ as an aim to shepherd beauty towards reality. The dialectic that coincided often with one, a theorist and the other, an architect was predominately their common objectives to propose the ‘Art of Building’ as an approach, as an optimum state of mind, and as a discipline of practice, not as a technique for arriving at a particular aesthetic. Theoretical elaborations for both were a way to evolve a best possible approach, not a means to arrive at some predetermined end. Another such example was, Van Eyck’s elaborations on a configurative discipline and Alberti’s discussion of compartition, more specifically the ideal cities and the city-house | house-city relationship. [Book Nine]

In Book One, Chapter Two, Alberti defines compartition as ‘the process of dividing up the site into yet smaller units, so that the building may be considered as being made up of close-fitting smaller buildings joined together like members of the whole body. For both these individuals, the body refers to as much to the physicality of a human being or animal as to the organization of individuals inside a civic structure. It was vital for Alberti to consider every element of houses and cities alike by composing all the lines and angles into a single entity with the utmost care and attention to ensure that they work harmoniously to satisfy everyone’s needs and desires. Van Eyck mirrored such convictions especially in his Amsterdam Orphanage in 1960 by appropriating order and interdependency at all scales, creating both a home for the children and a small city.

Van Eyck Modernizes Alberti |

‘We compared a well-managed city to the body as to how the parts and the whole were connected in pain and pleasure.’

Van Eyck modernized Alberti’s preoccupation with appropriateness of the setting, i.e. locality and area; believing that propriety could be enough to facilitate one’s satisfaction of need and desire. The hypothetical model proposed by Van Eyck was a consideration true to the realities of industrialized construction in mid-twentieth century – in terms of repetition and modular construction. From his stand-point, what was imperative is that the quality of the initial unit, if suffices the ‘beauty and utility’ attributes alongside its interdependent conditions set down by Alberti would then create its own identity and if need be, exist on its own as a whole.

In short, Van Eyck’s model is a whole that when joined to other wholes, or multiples of it, extends the identity of the resultant [expanded] whole rather than diminish it. It is worth noting, this proposal remained an academic exercise simply because like most modern multiplicities, they are incapable of supporting so much conceptual weight. Setting the argument aside, it is admirable to see Van Eyck make a sincere attempt to establish the identity of the first unit as a whole in itself to assure legibility of an assemblage of parts, a radical departure from Alberti’s conviction that the parts form a whole that can be neither added to nor taken away from. Van Eyck recognized the necessity for a revision of Alberti’s notion of beauty, which could accommodate a crafted building but would have great difficulty moving multidirectionally, from part to whole and back again, in the manner that an assembled building demands. 

HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES 

The Ideal City celebrates the values in a well-ordered society, architecture stands as a metaphor for good government.

ALBERTI | MARCO

“If I want to see things, I do not trust anything else. I put them in front of me, here on paper, to be able to see them. I want to see, and for this I draw. I can see an image only if I draw it.”

- Carla Scarpa

| To Draw or Not to Draw |

Be cautioned, because this session of the essay may present itself as being biased, simply because my unconventional beginnings in this profession. The mystery in architecture is in the intuitive storytelling dualities of drawing and building. Architecture is not just a graphic trade with an intellectual tradition that transforms drawings into buildings but one that also trades “idios kosmos” [the combination of individual reality and private dreams] for “koinos kosmos” [a shared reality coalescing in dreams that all of us share].  But in the same breath, Marco so accurately states that the major conundrum in the present condition of architecture is that we do not teach or understand the discipline of architectural imagination. A majority of professors and students of architecture feel to teach and to learn architectural imagination through defined and controlled procedures threatens their creativity. Students [these days] envisage construction drawings as a superfluous disciplinary requirement that merely delays the growth of their architectural capabilities. The bohemian belief that architects are artist, misconstitutes the most intelligent segment of architectural practice, by which our constructed world comes about through the translation of drawings into buildings and buildings into drawings.

| To Draw is To Translate and Vice Versa |

Marco provides a remarkably accurate analogy of architectural translations. His definition is the result between the univocality of an interpretative scheme and the ambiguity of the image dictated by cultural identifications. A highly complex undertaking. But if one interprets Marco’s language-architecture analogy, where in it is a known pedagogical tradition that in order to speak a second language, the student has to first translate the new language into his/her native language then bridging it back to the new. Taking this paradigm over to the architectural discipline, Marco clarifies why and how students and architects go about conceiving new architectural artifacts without firstly producing a set of measured architectural drawings. He critiques these drawings they produce via this mono-directional way of thinking and compares them to the sentences in ‘grammelot’, the gibberish language he claims used by medieval jesters. A make-shift language consisting of a few real words, interspersed with nonsense syllabus mimicking the sound utterances to convince the audience that it is a real known language. The architectural grammelot that Marco so rightfully refers to is the ostentatious imitation of the graphic representations of famous architects, without any comprehension of what it will be if translated into a constructed built-form. He convincingly reminds us of this comic-like approach that omits the richness of character and intensity that we see popping up all around us in our built-environment.

Torn between Yes and No

Taking Marco’s cues about the metaphor of the use of ‘architectural grammelot’ practiced amongst contemporary architects, I am more than attempted to agree to this comparative phenomenon as described in his language-architecture analogy. Reading John Dee’s English translation in the mid-sixteenth century of Alberti’s manifesto on Lineamenta, clearly narrates the ambiguity and the incomprehensibleness that architects’ representations pose as their object of delineation of the corporeal. 

“The whole Feate of Architecture in building, consisteth in Lineamentes, and in Framyng, And the whole power and skill of Lineamentses, tendeth to this: that the right and absolute way may be had, of Coaptyng and ioyning Lines and angles: by which, the face of the buildyng or frame, may be comprehended and concluded. And it is the property of Lineamentes, to prescribe vnto buildynges, and euery part of them, an apt place, & c. And we may prescribe in mynde and imagination the whole formes, all material stuffe beyng secluded. Which point we shall atteyne, by Notyng and forepointyng the angles, and lines, by a sure and certaine direction and connexion. Seyng then, these things, are thus: Lineamente, shalbe the certaine and constant prescribyng, conceiued in mynde: made in lines and angles: and finished with a learned minde and wyt.”

INTO THE PRESENT 

| Conclusion |

You may ask; in the realm of our current digital technologies, what is the status quo of Alberti’s five-hundred-year-old architectural treatise in the contemporary context? Is it problematic?

Not from my point of view; a significant reason for this is that no matter how fast the world and our conceptions of the world appears to be changing, we cannot in fact escape the strong resilient discourse that holds fast to the core of Alberti’s architectural treatises: imagination, education, geometry, nature, climate, morality, piety and the harmonious whole. And above all, Alberti was a humanist.

You may challenge; is architecture worthy of the canonical role given to it by Alberti?

In conclusion; I think one has to take a ‘reflective role’ in order to embody Alberti’s aesthetic and technical expressions of geometry into a wholesome reflexive, thinking and perceiving agency of the present time.

Bibliography

Image Sources

FOR PAPER NOW IS ALL THE RAGE,
AND NOTHING ELSE WILL SUIT THE AGE

MARCO FRASCARI