Vitruvius

2000 years ago the roman architect Marcus Vitruvius Pollio wrote the ten books on architecture establishing the concept of the pattern book offering design principles and solutions that is still referred to in every architect's education. A Green Vitruvius is intended as a green pattern book for today. Now fully updated, this well established textbook provides advice suitable for undergraduate and post graduate students on the integration of sustainable practice into the design and construction process, the issues to be considered, the strategies to be adopted, the elements of green design and design evaluation within the process. Classic design elegance is found in the holistic clear solution.

A historical study of Vitruvius's De architectura, showing that his purpose in writing "the whole body of architecture" was shaped by the imperial Roman project of world domination. Vitruvius's De architectura is the only major work on architecture to survive from classical antiquity, and until the eighteenth century it was the text to which all other architectural treatises referred. While European classicists have focused on the factual truth of the text itself, English-speaking architects and architectural theorists have viewed it as a timeless source of valuable metaphors. Departing from both perspectives, Indra Kagis McEwen examines the work's meaning and significance in its own time. Vitruvius dedicated De architectura to his patron Augustus Caesar, the first Roman emperor, whose rise to power inspired its composition near the end of the first century B.C. McEwen argues that the imperial project of world dominion shaped Vitruvius's purpose in writing what he calls "the whole body of architecture." Specifically, Vitruvius's aim was to present his discipline as the means for making the emperor's body congruent with the imagined body of the world he would rule. Each of the book's four chapters treats a different Vitruvian "body." Chapter 1, "The Angelic Body," deals with the book as a book, in terms of contemporary events and thought, particularly Stoicism and Stoic theories of language. Chapter 2, "The Herculean Body," addresses the book's and its author's relation to Augustus, whose double Vitruvius means the architect to be. Chapter 3, "The Body Beautiful," discusses the relation of proportion and geometry to architectural beauty and the role of beauty in forging the new world order. Finally, Chapter 4, "The Body of the King," explores the nature and unprecedented extent of Augustan building programs. Included is an examination of the famous statue of Augustus from Prima Porta, sculpted soon after the appearance of De architectura.

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The first study in English of Vitruvius' De architectura to take the work seriously as a literary and cultural product.

The text has a translation on facing pages and is followed by a commentary on the main points of interest in it.

De Architectura is considered as the first book on architectural theory and as a major source on the canon of classical architecture as as it is the only treatise on architecture to survive from antiquity. It was written by the Roman architect and military engineer Marcus Vitruvius Pollio and dedicated to the emperor Caesar Augustus, as a guide for building projects. It contains a variety of information on Greek and Roman buildings, as well as prescriptions for the planning and design of military camps, cities, and structures both large (aqueducts, buildings, baths, harbours) and small (machines, measuring devices, instruments). De Architectura - Volume I goes into subjects such as town planning and general architecture, the qualifications required of an architect, the building materials, the Temples and the different orders of architecture (includes the section on body proportions that led to da Vinci's drawing) and civil buildings (baths, palæstra, etc.) The descriptions are completed with magnificient hand drawn illustrations by Andrea Palladio and Sébastien Leclerc.