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The Vitruvian Triad as a Translation of Human Characteristics: Opening the

Study of Architecture for Beginning Designers

Article · June 2020

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Stephen Temple
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The Vitruvian Triad as a Translation of Human Characteristics:
Opening the Study of Architecture for Beginning Designers

Stephen Temple, Associate Professor

College of Architecture, University of Texas San Antonio

Beginning design students have a tendency to view architectural

designing in a manner that lacks interconnectedness of design decision-making
across divergent content areas. Design decision-makiing is typically limited to
issues of function and aesthetics, frequently with one issue dominating the other.
Since design is fundamentally synthetic, beginning design students must first
come to realize the multiplicity of issues that may be synthesized. Architectural
design involves establishment of a normative position in which categories are
established and developed into an articulated and systematic framework for
decision-making. For mature architectural designers, this framework is a way of
deeply addressing the question of what architecture “ought to be.”1 For
beginning design students the issue is more fundamentally about finding a way of
working and an inroad to the basic questions: What are the given issues of a
design situation and how can these be categorized?, followed by, How can these
categories then be correlated and synthesized through design activities? For the
design instructor, then, the issue becomes, “How can these categories be drawn
out of beginning design students’ experience in the world?”
Delivered to beginning design students as a pedagogical device, the
Vitruvian triad, its modern characterization as “firmness, commodity, and delight,”
offers a widely accepted, even canonical, categorical system that broadly
correlates criteria for design across various boundaries of interpretation.2 As
satisfaction of the “conditions for well building,” the Vitruvian triad resolves the
schism between the categories of function and beauty that frequently confounds
beginning designers. With the addition of the category of “firmness,“ the
Vitruvian triad asks of design that it be engaged with mechanical issues, at least
in equal satisfaction of practical functionality and or aesthetic content. For the
designer, each category becomes useful as critical criteria within a system of
interrelationships in consideration of good design.3
However, applications of the Vitruvian triad in beginning design exercises
tend toward a view that architecture is primarily a physical thing that affects
human experience only from outside, as if issues like “firmness” are attributes
principally of the building itself. For beginning design students, valuing a building
primarily as a “thing” is a fundamental misinterpretation in which architecture
becomes effectively valued more for its qualities as an abstraction than as a
humane environment consisting of experiential phenomenon incorporating
human perception and interpretation. A more significant introduction to the
Vitruvian triad within beginning design pedagogy is to view it not as an
expression of buildings themselves but through the lens of human
characteristics. Theories of the human being consisting of “mind, body, and soul”
offer analogies with Vitruvian categories. From the perspective of student
experience, these analogous forms correlate with the experience of architecture
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as evidenced in their own existence in the world, and are thus easier for them to
understand and elaborate. [See Figure 1] Armed with correlation to human
characteristics, a beginning design student can easily extend these qualities by
analogy onto the characteristics of architecture and do so to achieve the highest
order of that extension.

For example, the correlate of “firmness” is “mind,” which utilizes logic in search of
sound reason just as structure requires logical integrity as the hallmark of its
“firmness.” “Firmness,” as a correlate of mental intellect, achieves its highest
order in structural logic that builds to a state of integrity, or unimpaired
completeness. “Commodity” occurs in the relationship of the physical body in
motion and in sensory relation to the surroundings during performance of tasks,
or interactions that operatively satisfy use and need. “Delight,” as a human
engagement through feeling and emotions, seeks the greatest value in the
dignity of the beautiful. Application of these categories as an “architectural
device” portends a systematic inter-relatedness of architecture with the living
correlates of every day human life.4

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 However, and in spite of the fact that mind, body, and soul pertain to
human experience, there remains a gap in equating mind, body, and soul to
architecture precisely because they are generalized analogies, and are thus,
generalized abstractions. Translating Vitruvian categories through mental,
spiritual, and physical aspects of human existence is a useful extension but does
not deeply illuminate the architecture/human being relationship. Human
existence is far more complex than simply mind, body, and soul. Many forms of
cultural and creative inquiry have probed more deeply into the characteristics of
human life. None have been more systematic than the approach of psychologist,
Carl Jung, who describes human experience as thinking, feeling, sensation, and
intuition in a fourfold diagrammatic structure of human characteristics.5 When
correlated with Vitruvian categories, Jung’s categories reveal a compelling
pedagogical argument for human characteristics as their very origin.

133
 Illustrated as a diagram, Jung’s categories of human types construct a
cross-polar set of relationships on poles of rational / non-rational and social /
individual realms. Overlaying the Jungian categories onto the categories of the
Vitruvian triad suggests a correlation between human characteristics and that of
architecture. It also suggests the possibility of a fourth pole::

sensing: “practical” involves body and senses; needs; use

thinking “logical” involves structure; integrity
intuition “meaningful” involves ideas; dignity
feeling ?

Sensing, thinking, and intuition have a correlate in the Vitruvian triad but “feeling”
does not. As Jung indicates and as is born out in our everyday experiences,
feeling is a fundamental aspect of the human construct. What is its Vitruvian
correlate for the architectural environment and what may be it highest order?
Feeling involves subjective, affective states of consciousness in which each of us
reacts differently based on our sensibilities and emotions . As such, feeling
occurs between will and instinct and at the same time it is mysterious. Feeling
has its source in our sense of wonder, as when our emotions are aroused by
experiences that are deeply captivating. Sources of wonder are many and varied,

134
and are derived out of our activities at play, when we engage in deep inquiry,
when we desire, and when we strive toward aspirations.
A fourth pole from Jung’s categorization of human characteristics may be
diagrammed as a pole of “connectivity” – as an interaction between play and
desire. Certainly architecture that supports in us a deep connection with the
environment through our sensory being and our cultural self and begins to
address the fundamental issues raised by Vitruvius regarding the “conditions of
well-building?” The four poles of connectivity, practicality, intelligibility, and
meaning correlate with Jung’s categories of feeling, sensing (body), thinking
(mind), and intuition, respectively. [See Figure 4] This diagrammatic shell
constructs a critical patterning of the relationship of human occupancy to the built
environment. More importantly, for the beginning design student searching for
order in all the possible permutations of effects on architectural design, this
process offers a soundly derived structure of fundamental categories for
architectural design decision-making.

Conclusion
In this essay, I have described a derivation of the Vitruvian triad in terms
of Jungian categories and offered a possible fourth category from desire and
wonder. The purpose of exploring architecture through these derivations is to
develop a way for students to open for themselves more systematic and
profound inquires about architecture. It is my contention that involving students in
the derivation of these relationships instills in them a fundamental impetus for

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conceptual thinking about architecture and its design. In my own teaching I
derive these diagrams within a lecture to beginning design students during their
first architectural design project. I do this as a way of passing it on to them.
Within the process of passing it on I raise the prospect of a fifth pole of
architecture, possibly the pole of “poesis” - that state of being between memory
and the moment, between the definable and the indefinite. Other poles are also
likely, and defining them is the responsibility and province of each designer as
they grapple with the content and experience of design. As design educators,
our most singular task is to pass on this quest.

Notes
Rowe. Peter G. Design Thinking. MIT University Press, 1987

Vitruvius Pollio Ten Books on Architecture. Translated by Morris Hicky Morgan.

New York Dover 1960. The modern interpretation is commodity, firmness, and
delight where “delight” is an interplay of responses to beauty, humor, spirituality,
etc. This was characterized following Alberti in, Wotton, Henry, Sir, The
Elements of Architecture. Amsterdam, Theatrum Orbis Terrarum; New York, Da
Capo Press, 1970. See also, Alberti, Leon Battista, On the Art of Building in Ten
Books. (De re aedificatoria). Translated by Joseph Rykwert, Neil Leach, and
Robert Tavernor. Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, 1988.

Scott, Geoffrey,. The Architecture of Humanism: A Study in the History of Taste.

New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. 1974.

Rowe. Design Thinking p 4.

Jung, C. G. Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self (Collected

Works Vol. 9 Part 2). Princeton, N.J.: Bollingen. 1951. See also, Jung, C. G., &
Franz, M.-L. Man and His Symbols. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1964. An
overview of Jung’s work is provided in Whitmont, Edward C. The Symbolic
Quest: Basic Concepts of Analytical Psychology, Princeton University Press,
Princeton, New Jersey, 1979.

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 translation
from understanding to misreading and back again

23rd International Conference on the Beginning Design Student

1-4 March 2006

Savannah College of Art and Design
School of Building Arts

Professor Conrad Marcus Rathmann, Conference Chair

Conference Committee:

Professor Sam Cribbs

Professor Connie Capozzola Pinkerton
Professor Scott Singeisen

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