ABSTRACT
Around 1460, the year mercenary Federigo da Montefeltro married cultivated Battista Sforza, he began collecting books. Fueled by passion, his collection increased, and his ambitious architectural program for his palace at Urbino dedicated space for a library. He prominently situated his library along the main entry sequence into the palace, where its ceiling of flames features some of the palace’s most complex and enigmatic iconography. All this suggests that the space has a complex story to tell. Federigo’s new architect, Francesco di Giorgio Martini, master of analogical thinking, told that story through the medium of architecture and art. In the ducal library, the books may have gone, but the narrative endures in built form. Spanning rooms, buildings and cities, reaching across generations, revealing shocking events, spiritual beliefs and diving into the books themselves for further clues to the architecture, this chapter studies a rich historical example to illustrate how we can deploy spatial contexts, cultural programs and historical relationships to inform complexity and sophistication in architectural design. The architecture’s many conceptual layers result in experiential depths and human meanings that, centuries later, can still teach us and move us.
