ABSTRACT
The question of ‘regional’ architecture – its envir on mental aspects and its polit ical im plica tions, hot topics today in the con text of tri umph ant globalization – appears, prob ably for the first time in his tory, in a Roman text, De Re Architectura, written in the time of Au gustus (63 bce – 14 ce), the first Roman emperor. The text identifies ‘regional’ buildings and juxta poses them with those of Greece and Rome which we call today ‘classical’, a word not used by Vitruvius. Vitruvius ded ic ated his book to the imperator, Supreme Ruler, Caesar, named Au gustus because he ‘gained the empire of the world’, praising Au gustus because ‘Rome gloried in [his] triumph and victory’, but also because of his sup port for the construction of pub lic buildings in Rome. In the words of the Roman his tor ian Suetonius, Au gustus ‘found Rome a city of brick and left it a city of marble’. De Re Architectura is the best written source we have on the architecture of antiquity. From what we know and from the tone of his book, Vitruvius aspired to be among the leading Roman intellectuals of his time busy constructing a polit ical theory and a Roman identity as global imperial ruler. It is clear, therefore, that Vitruvius’s goal in writing his book was prac tical and pressing: the new empire needed a uni ver sal toolbox of design and construction rules capable of serving a huge-scale construction program alongside the uni ver sal eco nomic, legal, and cultural ones, estab lishing a centralized global order that was taking the first major step toward making the world flat. The book tried to cover almost all aspects of design, from buildings and cities to ma chines and fortifications, with ref er ences to philo sophy, natural science, astronomy, ‘physiology’, acoustics, and medicine. Vitruvius was an engineer, architect, and writer, who was trying to cover all these topics in the framework of the philo sophy of Lucretius. Accordingly, he believed that architectural form is determined by nat ural causes. What cannot happen in nature, he wrote, cannot be forced in an artifact. In the fourth book of his text, he declared his intention to reduce architectural know ledge to ‘a perfect order’ (perfectam ordinationem), a uni ver sal rule sys tem within which nothing was permitted to be ‘inchoate’ and every thing was to follow rationally (habet rationem). In this spirit, he presented Greco-Roman architecture and its ‘kinds’ (he called them genera, in the Aristotelian sense of nat ural kinds) – Doric,
Ionic, and Corinthian – their ‘parts’, their ‘members’, and their organ iza tion in terms proportion and symmetry. Then he turned to another ‘kind’ of building, not subject to the same rules, regional architecture. As a ration al ist, after classifying the kinds and describing their differ ences, Vitruvius tried to explain what made them different. He contrasted the ‘regional’ ‘kinds’ of buildings (genera aedificiorum), the ones that belong to a region (regionum), with the Greek and Roman ones, their diversity caused by their different charac ter istics ‘ordained by Nature’ (‘proprietates locorum ab natura rerum . . . constituere aedificiorum qualitates’). In other words, the
phys ical envir on ment of the regions the buildings belong to accounts for their variety. The theory is not ori ginal. It goes at least as far back as a treatise by Hippocrates (460 bce – 370 bce), On Airs, Waters, and Places, a text that deals with the relation between human kind and the environment. It is of par ticu lar inter est that, in addition to architectural issues, Vitruvius also discusses the polit ical im plica tions of a world divided into regions of unequal quality. Thus, just as climate and phys ical con ditions influence buildings, so do they shape human beings. Consequently, he claimed, just as the extreme phys ical con ditions (natura rerum) of the North dictate buildings with strongly sloping roofs, among other features, and at the oppos ite extreme the phys ical con ditions of the South lead to buildings with almost flat roofs, so these extreme envir on mental con ditions create extremely different kinds of people, different in phys ical consti tu tion and in behavior. On the other hand, Vitruvius argued, there is a ‘temperate’ envir onment that produces temperate architecture and temperate people. This is the envir on ment Romans inhabit and the architecture they build. The temperate envir on ment is superior to the extreme ones, and so it is with the temperate buildings and people. The temperate architecture and people are more balanced, reflecting the balanced envir on mental charac ter istics of the region they inhabit. Again, elements of this theory are to be found in The Histories of Herodotus, where he argues that the climate of Greece is ‘ideal’, being temperate, in contrast to the very cold climate of Scythia and the very hot one of Egypt. Similarly, the Hippocratic treatise claimed that Euro peans are more industrious than Asians, owing to the temperate climate of their region. From these observations, Vitruvius draws a polit ical conclusion arguing that because of their temperate region (temperatamque regionem), the Romans have special courage and strength and for this reason they can overcome the deficiencies of the people of the northern or southern regions, presumably Germans and Africans. Romans are alloc ated this ‘excellent and temperate region in order to rule the world’ (terrarium imperii). Interestingly, the Hippocratic treatise argued in addition that because of their envir on ment and climate, Euro peans do not depend on any despotic authority, whereas Asians are gov erned by despots (chaps. 14-22). The architectural im plica tions of this environmental-political theory were that, by Nature, Roman (‘classical’) architecture must be applied globally. It is obvious that Vitruvius’s reasoning was inconsistent. On the one hand, from nature (naturae deducta) and on the basis of ration al ity (disciplinae rationes), it asserted that buildings, like people, are adapted to the envir onment of their regions, resulting in regional variety and diversity; on the other, it sup ported the polit ical, ‘imperial’, uni ver sal norm ative doctrine that Roman (‘classical’) buildings, like the ruling Romans, ought to be imposed in a region without being adapted to its regional con ditions, thereby creating a stand ard, classical, global world. History might have helped Vitruvius to understand that even classical Greco-Roman architecture was not uni ver sal and that its buildings were the result of regional adaptations. History occupies a small place in the De Re Architectura and it is frequently impressionistic even by the standards of its time. In the years to come, Vitruvius’s mater ialist theory of regional architecture would survive, associated with the role of architecture in shaping
ethnic identity, and it would also live on incarnated in racist and chauvinistic theories in nineteenth-century or early-twentieth-century architecture. But it will also serve as a point of departure in the study of the relation between particu lar envir on mental climatic factors and the regional diversity of human habitat and the regionalist movements toward its achievement. In contrast to Vitruvius’s book, Plutarch’s On Music, written soon after De Re Architectura, gives a detailed his tor ical account of armoniai, ‘modes’, tonal scales, the ‘kinds’ of music used in antiquity, and the role of imports, origin ally Asian, Thracian, and Egyptian, that led to the Greek inventions. Vitruvius’s discussion about the origin of the Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian kinds of architecture was brief, anecdotic, or fairy-tale-like. However, there is evid ence from the great Greek his tor ian Herodotus, who credited non-Greeks with the origin of most Greek achievements, that many key aspects of Greek architecture in fact came from other regions. Paradoxically, Herodotus was attacked by Plutarch, who called him ‘friend of the barbarians’,1 even though Plutarch himself, as mentioned, was equally forthright in attributing to nonGreeks the origins of Greek music.
