The ambiguities of disegno

Journal of Architecture

Volumn 10, Issue 3, 2005, Pages 295-306

  Anstey, Tim ^a  

^a ROYAL INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY   (Sweden)

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EID: 63149179702     PISSN: 13602365     EISSN: 14664410     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/13602360500162360     Document Type: Review

References (21)

1. All the references to De re aedificatoria in this paper are given using the most recent English translation, On the Art of Building in Ten Books, trans. J. Rykwert, R. Tavernor and N. Leach (Cambridge Mass. and London, The MIT Press, 1988)
2. See also Giovanni Orlandi, L. B. Alberti, L'archittetura, (eds), G. Orlandi and P. Portoghesi, 2 vols (Milan, Edizione il Polifilo, 1966)
3. and the facsimile of the 1485 edition prepared by Hans-Karl Lücke: Hans-Karl Lücke, (ed.), Alberti Index: Leon Battista Alberti, De re Aedificatoria (Florence, 1485), 4 vols (Munich, 1975-9). As the current wealth of scholarship on Alberti makes clear his treatise founded a genuinely new view of the discipline of building and marks a transition in thought that appears ever more marked over time
4. This case is put most eloquently by Françoise Choay, The Rule and the Model, English trans, of La Règle et le Modèle (Cambridge Mass. and London, The MIT Press, 1997), pp. 65-135
5. De re aedificatoria. Prologue, p. 3
6. The classic account of the changes in the status of the architect in the early Renaissance is to be found in Richard A. Goldthwaite, The Building of Renaissance Florence. An Economic and Social History (Baltimore and London, The John Hopkins University Press, 1980). The records Goldthwaite examines suggest that in fourteenth and fifteenth century Italy, where the role of designer of a building is identified, this role coincides with formal responsibility as leader of the opera, that is to say of the actual building operation. This figure, at least in the context of fourteenth century Italy, was responsible to the patron or building committee, if the opera was part of a state or church controlled project (for example, the opera of the Duomo in Florence). This traditional model implies an automatic authorial link between 'design' and execution, the leader of the opera controlling the project rather in the way that a painter or goldsmith would retain authority over the hands in his shop. It is this model that Alberti's formulation appears to disturb
7. For a development of this argument see Tim Anstey, 'Framing Authorship', in Elisabeth Tostrup and Christian Hermansen, (eds), (theorising) History in Architecture (Oslo, Arkitekthögskolan i Oslo, 2003), pp. 49-55
8. Alberti's treatise is distinctive in identifying royal figures such as Solomon as exemplars for its model of the architect, and noticeable also for the limited use it makes of antique architects as exemplary figures. On these matters, particularly on the implications of Alberti's choice of exemplars, see Liisa Kanerva, Defining the Architect in Fifteenth-Century Italy. Exemplary architects in L.B. Alberti's De re aedificatoria (Helsinki, Soumalainen Tiedeakatemia, 1998), pp. 38-88
9. De re aedificatoria, op. cit., IX, 11, p. 318
10. Alberti's letters in relation to these projects are published, with bibliographies, in Joseph Rykwert and Anne Engel, (eds). Leon Battista Alberti, exhibition catalogue (Milan, Electa, 1994), pp. 456-7 [54. Lettera a Matteo di Pasti, Roma, 18 November 1454] and p. 462 [55.VII Alberti a Ludovico Gonzaga]
11. See 'disegno' in the Tullio De Mauro, (ed.), Grande dizionario etimologico della lingua italiana (Milan, Garzanti, 2000)
12. See 'design' in William R. Trumble, (ed.), The shorter Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2002)
13. See Michel Foucault, 'What is an author?'. Language, Counter-memory, Practice, ed. with an introduction by Donald F. Bouchard, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca, New York, Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 113-48
14. For a description of some of the historiographical problems of interpreting Alberti as an architect, and a brief outline of the chronology of buildings attributed to him, see T. Anstey, Divinity and Difference. On unity and distortion in the work of Leon Battista Alberti (Doctoral Dissertation, University of Bath, 1999), pp. 1-14
15. Two recent and authoritative studies that analyse Alberti are those by Robert Tavernor, On Leon Battista Alberti and the Art of Buildling (New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1998)
16. and Anthony Grafton, Leon Battista Alberti. Master builder of the Italian Renaissance (Harmondsworth, Allen Lane. The Penguin Press, 2000)
17. Mark Jarzombek questioned the validity of interpreting Alberti's buildings in terms of a complete, projected disegno in On Leon Battista Alberti. His literary and aesthetic theories (Cambridge, Mass. and London, The MIT Press. 1989)
18. For the observations on Cedric Price in this article I am indebted to conversations with Stanley Mathews, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Geneva, New York, and to the argument he presented in 'Cedric Price as anti-architect: the Fun Palace and the death of the architect', conference paper given at the SAH year meeting, 6-10 April, 2005, Vancouver, Canada. See also Stanley Mathews, 'An architecture for the New Britain: The social vision of Cedric Price's Fun Palace and Potteries Thinkbelt' (Doctoral dissertation, University of Columbia, 2003)
19. Price, memorandum, (August, 1964), Fun Palace document folio DR1995:0188:526, Cedric Price Archives, Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal, cited in Mathews, 'An architecture for the New Britain', ibid
20. In an article on the Fun Palace in the New Statesman (7 August, 1964), Reyner Banham noted how, during the early stages of the project, Price had teased the architectural establishment by steadfastly refusing to allow any image of how the completed construction would look to be released to the press. The article is cited in Cedric Price, Cedric Price: Works II (London, Architectural Association, 1984)
21. reprinted as Cedric Price: The Square Book (Chichester, West Sussex, Wiley-Academy, 2003), p. 59