Wittkower ‘s Theory of Architecture

Today we are going to talk about the relationship of

a book that was published in 1949 by Ruddoff
Wittkower, entitled “Architectural Principles in the Age
of Humanism” and its characterization of the
Renaissance architect. 特征描述，描述
And we will see, this is a book that had an
extraordinary impact on two distinct groups. The first
was the Renaissance architecture historians. This book
offered a new approach to the way we understand the
architecture of the 15th and the 16th century in Italy. The
other group was the modernist architect. It is strange to
think that a book on the Renaissance might have an
impact on modernist thinking, but this book
revolutionized our understanding of geometry, modular
pattern, and the ways in which diagram can be used to
explain the work of the architect.
Two things to say about this book. The first is that it
was highly invested in an abstract and intellectual
approach to the Renaissance. It underscored the rise of
theory in the 15th and 16th century and the ways in which
the works of a given architect might offer a coherent
kind of investigation into a set of problems surrounding
perspective, proportion, geometry, and the advent of
ideal form and architecture.
This highly abstract approach had repercussions
what it means ironically is that Wittkower was absolutely
disinvested from the complexities of history. He was not
interested in the cultural context, out of which
architecture arose, he does not delve into patronage,
religious history, the monastic orders, particular events
that might have marked the renaissance. Instead, he
stepped back to analyze architectural form as an
autonomous project.
At the heart of this approach is the notion of the
paradigm. The word paradigm comes from the Greek, it
means of pattern and to show side by side. In the later
definition, we really get a sense of a comparative
approach, that to put two things together means
essentially the creation of synthesis.
So the word ultimately served to underscore the
creation of an outstanding example of something, of a
model, a standard, an epitome, an ideal, a paragon. The
assumption on Wittkower’s part is that renaissance
architects were after such paradigms, that they sought
and developed them, and ultimately, through that
process, were after the core principles of architectural
form. By the same token, what's also true is that
Wittkower’s very own approach became paradigmatic.
In other words, it offered a standard means of
approaching the historical past, of interpreting the past,
and even of generating form itself.

How do we understand this book. Is it an

interpretation of renaissance architecture? Is it a
template for modernist architectural thinking?
What we can say is that Wittkower’s is a broad
attempt to characterize the theory of architecture as it
emerged in the 15th and 16th century in a distinct set of
places, in Florence and Rome and in Venice.
Furthermore, the book is broken up into four
chapters, that deal with issues that wittkower took to be
absolutely fundamental.
First, there is the question of symbolism. In other
words, how buildings mean.
The second chapter looks at the problem of the
appropriation of form. In other words, how did
architects look back to the deep past, and in particular
to the pagan classical past. Seize that tradition,
reinterpreted in syntax, and reinvent classicism as a
system.
Third, the question of typology, and the
development of building types. Are we talking about
churches? Are we talking about villas? Are we talking
about institutional buildings?
And lastly, the question of proportion, the
geometric ideal, the question of the measure.

And while any number of architects ， buildings,

texts are invoked in his book, it's also clear that there are
essentially two key players in his narrative.
The first we'll talk about today is Alberti, a theorist
and an architect, a real renaissance man. He was also a
painter. And second, a Venetian architect from the 16th
century named Andrea Palladio.
These two figures essentially represent the whole
of the Italian Renaissance for Wittkower. And when we
think about that, we understand that Wittkower's
approach was essentially reductive.

What might we expect the historian to garner from

a picture of the renaissance architect or the buildings
that he erected? We might assume that the historian
would be after a history of patronage, for example, a
history of the politics that gave rise to a particular
commission, who would consider the great events that
marked the 15th and 16th century, changes in military
technology. Also the question of politics or religion
during this period, the influence of the papacy, the rise
of ducal states and their sense of an autonomy from the
papacy. All of these are left out of Wittkower’s narrative.
To read Wittkower is to see a process of mental
abstraction at work. In other words, what Wittkower was
after wasn't the discrete cultural meaning of a particular
building in a particular context. He's not after giving us
some real and robust sense of the 16th century world
view.

Instead, he wants to bring together the classical kit

of parts, that make a building formalize itself, that allow
it to transform into the buildings we still have today. In
other words, Wittkower is looking for a kind of deep
structure, we might call it, that organizes architectural
form.
He’s going after the identification of their
component parts. What is a portico? What is a column?
This is why ultimately, he relies on diagrams to explain
architecture. He looks through the complex appearance
of a building like this, and all its three dimensionality,
and distills it into its most basic elements through plan,
sometimes elevation.
In other words, he develops a syntax, a language, a
form. He's interested in renaissance architecture as an
explicitly, and these are his words as an explicitly
“mathematical science which worked with special units.”

Wittkower’s whole analysis along these lines can be

understood as a philosophical exercise, not an historical
analysis, in which thinking and reason emerge as the
defining characteristics of the architect.
And this is what's demonstrated through the
diagrams. Ultimately what emerges from this is the
autonomy of architecture itself.

And we see this when we look at what his diagram

of the Villa Cornaro does. You can see that he's
interested only in the plan. He cuts away the rear
monumental staircase. He minimizes and essentially
elides the entrance porch. Takes away the column, and
therefore anything that might signify a supportive
function. He takes away the side wings. He takes away
the poche, the scale, everything. In other words, that
Palladio indicates in his plan and elevation.
We want to think about how these diagrams give us
a certain highly particular view of the renaissance, which
privileges geometry all the way from its basic special
units to the general order given to the universe by god.