ABSTRACT
While architecture education has been exported as part of the colonial project, why and how to speak of architecture in a Western context as a European study implies? This study answers this question by recounting an intellectual history of the discipline of architecture in its constant effort of questioning what the discipline of architecture is and might become. This chapter traces key discussions on the definition of architecture throughout the centuries in Western knowledge. Architecture disciplinarity and its negation through interdisciplinarity have been debated since Vitruvius’ The Ten Books on Architecture. In ‘The Education of the Architect’, Vitruvius stated that an architect has to be conversant in matters related to geometry, history, philosophy, music, medicine, jurisprudence, astronomy, and the theory of the heavens. In the fifteenth century, the Renaissance mathematician Luca Pacioli wrote De divina proportione, where he stated that perspective provided the mathematical formulation — the ‘mathematical vocabulary’, he would argue — of space that has finally made architecture ‘disciplined’. In other words, it was the mathematical rigour of perspective that allowed architecture to become a discipline, that is, a field of human knowledge. In their Encyclopedia, or a Systematic Dictionary of the Sciences, Arts, and Crafts (1751–1766), Diderot and d’Alembert included architecture under all the three main branches of knowledge — memory, reason, and imagination. Within a particular historical context, key definitions of architecture emerge as epistemological classifications: architecture as a techne (ancient Greece), a mechanical art (mediaeval Western Europe), an art of disegno (Renaissance Italy), and a fine art (eighteenth-century Western Europe), where each definition includes architecture, and at least two more disciplines, as we understand them today. In the 1960s, architects and historians discussed architecture between its own autonomy and relationship with other disciplines, and understood these two positions as mutually exclusive. Most recently, other definitions have been used to describe architecture within a vast field of disciplinary expertises, while using denominations such as transdisciplinary, cross-disciplinary and non-disciplinary. This chapter understands architecture as an interdisciplinary field whose intersection with other disciplines is not only inevitable but necessary for its own making and adapting to current needs.
