OnAlberti

Leon Battista Alberti's De re aedificatoria ("On the Art of Building," in ten books) is the first architectural theory of the Renaissance — written in Latin, modeled on Vitruvius, and addressed not to builders but to the learned patron. Its opening move is decisive: the building is split into lineaments (design, born of thought) and matter (material, given by Nature). Design becomes a thing of the mind, governing construction. Book One then asks where to build — and turns out to be, above all, a meditation on health. Together with On Painting, the book belongs to a burst of new technologies of the eye and the project: perspective, the printing press, the opening of the world.

Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472) was a Renaissance humanist educated in classics, mathematics, and law, who worked mainly as a papal administrator and scholar while simultaneously becoming the most influential architectural theorist of his age — as well as a writer, mathematician, urbanist, and cryptographer.

He gave himself an emblem: a winged eye, with the motto QVID·TVM — "What then?" / "So what?" The eye stands for vision, judgment, the all-seeing; the motto is half a shrug at his critics (and his illegitimate birth), half a Stoic what next? It appears on the bronze portrait medal struck by Matteo de' Pasti (c. 1446–50), and on his self-portrait plaquette — reckoned the earliest independent self-portrait in Western art.

Major buildings

Few but decisive — Alberti designed façades and churches that translated Roman antiquity into a new architectural language. The lineaments realised:

Rimini · c.1450

Tempio Malatestiano

A Gothic church reclad as a Roman temple — the triumphal-arch façade, left unfinished.

wikipedia ↗

Florence · c.1446–51

Palazzo Rucellai

The first palace façade to grid a house with the superimposed classical orders.

wikipedia ↗

Florence · 1456–70

Santa Maria Novella

A marble façade tuned to whole-number proportion, with the great scroll-volutes.

wikipedia ↗

Mantua · begun 1472

Sant'Andrea

His masterpiece — a temple front fused with a triumphal arch over a vast barrel-vaulted nave.

wikipedia ↗

Mantua · begun 1460

San Sebastiano

A radically centralised Greek-cross church raised on a podium.

wikipedia ↗

The complete Alberti

A working life of treatises across nearly every field — moral philosophy and satire on one side, the technical arts and sciences on the other. The two technology books — On Painting and On the Art of Building — are marked ●. Linked titles open the digitised text in the Xenotheka library.

Alberti wrote the treatise in Latin between roughly 1443 and 1452, and showed a near-complete draft to Pope Nicholas V around 1452. He kept revising it until his death in 1472. It was first printed in Florence on 29 December 1485 — the first printed book on architecture, opening with a dedicatory letter from the humanist Angelo Poliziano to Lorenzo de' Medici.

For whom? In Latin, thick with classical citation, "worthy to live on the lips of the learned." The reader is the prince and the patron — those who commission and judge buildings — and the cultivated architect. Pointedly not the craftsman: "the carpenter is but an instrument in the hands of the architect."

Alberti's two great technical books — On Painting (1435) and On the Art of Building — are, in effect, technology books: manuals for new instruments of design. They sit inside a single generation that re-tooled how Europe saw and reached the world:

The conceptual engine of the book. A building "consists of lineaments and matter, the one the product of thought, the other of Nature." Neither suffices alone — you still need "the hand of the skilled workman to fashion the material according to lineaments."

Alberti · lineamenta & materia

Vitruvius · fabrica & ratiocinatio

In relation to Vitruvius — an inversion of order. Vitruvius opens De architectura by saying architecture "is born of fabrica and ratiocinatio" — of making and reasoning. He names fabrica first: the architecture grows up out of the craft, the continual practice of the hand, with reasoning second to explain and justify it. Alberti reverses the sequence. He begins from lineaments — pure thought, lines and angles held in the mind — and demotes matter and the workman's hand to an "instrument." Reason no longer follows making; it precedes and commands it.

This inversion is the birth, in theory, of the project — and of the architect as an intellectual rather than a master-builder. For a seminar on Raumgestaltung, it is the moment space becomes something you conceive before you build.

Two orders of making — the Vitruvian sequence, and Alberti's:

       FABRICA
   (making · craft)
          │
          │
       BUILDING
          │
          │
     RATIOCINATIO
      (reasoning)
          │
          │
 FIRMITAS · UTILITAS
     · VENUSTAS

LINEAMENT        MATTER
    │                │
    └───────┬────────┘
            │
         CORPUS
    (building body)
            │
       CONCINNITAS
            │
         BEAUTY
            │
        ORNAMENT

If lineaments are the building conceived in the mind, ornament is what the building puts on once it stands. Alberti draws the line carefully: beauty is innate — a reasoned harmony in which nothing can be added or taken away without loss — while ornament is added to it, fastened on. The column, the cornice, the opening, the revetment dignify a structure that utility has already made sound. Ornament comes last — and is never quite finished.

Ten sentences, in his own voice, where the word turns:

1. "Ornament may be defined as a form of auxiliary light and complement to beauty."Book Six · the definition
2. "The precise nature of beauty and ornament, and the difference between them, the mind could perhaps visualize more clearly than my words could explain."Book Six
3. "In the whole art of building the column is the principal ornament, without any doubt."Book Six
4. "Ornament is never completed: even in a small temple there is always something left over that could and should be added."Book Seven
5. "Age will give a temple as much authority, as ornament will give it dignity."Book Seven
6. "Openings are an ornament that gives great delight and dignity to the work; but they present many grave difficulties too."Book Seven
7. "The work ought to be constructed naked, and clothed later; let the ornament come last."Book Nine
8. "The true and correct ornament of building: its principal generator is not the outlay of wealth, but the wealth of ingenuity."Book Nine
9. "The overall division and compartition of lineaments will draw much praise — itself the primary and principal form of ornament."Book Nine · ornament meets lineament
10. "Even if everything has to be done for the sake of ornament, he should furnish the building so that you would not deny that utility was the principal motive."Book Nine

The thread through all ten: ornament serves — it completes beauty without replacing it, dignifies use without disguising it, and is measured less by the outlay of wealth than by the wealth of judgment.

Across the Prologue and Book One, six claims carry the weight:

• AArchitecture is a noble liberal art — indispensable yet pleasurable, the one art that "unites use with pleasure."
• BBuilding founds civilization. Not fire and water but roof and walls "drew and kept men together" — into cities, trade, defense, health, dignity.
• CThe architect is an intellectual, who "by sure and wonderful reason and method" conceives in the mind and realises in construction — not a builder.
• DBuilding = lineaments + matter. Design precedes and governs construction; form is a thing of the mind.
• EBeauty is relational and organic. Through compartition the building must become "a single, integral, and well-composed body," part answering to part — "the city is like some large house, and the house … like some small city."
• FImitate the ancients and Nature — then surpass them. Take their example "to rival, or, if possible, to surpass the glory of theirs," not to copy as if "legally obliged."

And the practical scaffold — Book One names the six elements of building:

Most of Book One is, surprisingly, about health (salubritas). Choosing where to build is overwhelmingly a question of healthiness — and "health" works in two registers.

Alberti even lists the signs of a healthy site: an abundant harvest, inhabitants who reach "a ripe old age," "strong and handsome" youths, births "frequent and successful … not marred by any deformity." Deformed bodies, rust, leaning trees and eroded stone are read as symptoms of a sick climate.

Notions of a healthy location. What makes a place healthy changes radically from antiquity to the present:

The arc runs from health as found (read off the land) to health as produced (pumped through ducts). Alberti stands at the hinge: still reading the site like Vitruvius, but already turning a healthy location into a calculable matter of design.

Three words for an age

Each age compresses its values into a triad. Read across, they tell a story — from the qualities of a building, to the rights of a citizen, to the comforts of a consumer.

Alberti's own triad is drawn straight from the text: every building "is born of necessity, nourished by convenience … and only in the end is pleasure provided for." Notice the drift over time — from qualities a thing should have (Vitruvius, Alberti) to rights a person should hold (1789) to conditions a service should deliver (today). What kind of values are "comfort, security, sustainability" — and who guarantees them?

A sharp reading exercise. The English translation reaches for modern political words — "nation," "Italy," "the state," "the republic" — to render a 15th-century Latin text whose concepts were quite different. These are the translator's terms; the modern meanings are anachronisms. Alberti thinks in Roman categories: the city (civitas) and the commonwealth (res publica), not the nation-state.

• Nation gens / natio — "nations have been able to serve each other by exchanging fruit, spices, jewels." But natio means a people, a stock, a descent-group. The modern nation-state is an 18th–19th-century idea — it does not exist for Alberti.
• Italy Italia — "our own times in Apulia, here in Italy." Italia existed as a Roman geographic term, but Italy as a unified nation did not exist until 1861. For Alberti it is a peninsula and a cultural memory, not a country.
• Country patria — "the liberty of our country." Patria is one's homeland — effectively one's city — not a modern nation-state.
• State res publica / status — "the good and honor of the state." The abstract modern "state" (the Staat, lo stato) is only just being born in this period.
• Republic res publica — "the security, dignity, and honor of the republic." Res publica means the commonwealth, the common weal, "the public thing" — not "republic" as a constitution opposed to monarchy.
• Empire · province · dominion · liberty imperium · provincia · dominium · libertas — "new gateways to all the provinces of the world." A Roman cluster of civic and imperial concepts, not modern administrative or individual ones.

• Q1If lineaments can live in the mind "without any recourse to the material," what is the lineament of a digital model, a script, a generative rule? Where does design end and matter begin today?
• Q2Health for Vitruvius and Alberti is read from the site; for Koolhaas it is pumped through ducts. What would a diagnosis of a healthy space look like for the rooms and cities you design now?
• Q3Every age has its three words. If Vitruvius said firmitas, utilitas, venustas and today says comfort, security, sustainability — what are your three words, and what world do they smuggle in?

The course reading, plus Alberti's works digitised in the ETH Xenotheka library: