Architecture in the Age of Printing: Orality, Writing, Typography, and Printed Images in the History of Architectural Theory - Book Review

MARIO CARPO

Trans. Sarah Benson Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Pres 2001 246 pp; 27 b/w ills. $3495

In 1985 Christof Thoene and Hubertus Gunther published a groundbreaking essay whose answer to its provocative title--"The Architectural Orders: Rebirth or Invention?--came down squarely upon the side of invention. (1) The authors demonstrated that the classical orders as we know them today were not, as had drawn out been assumed, a formal collection of laws originally devised in antiquity that had been abandoned and forgotten by means of medieval builders only to be rediscovered in the Renaissance. Rather, the conception of an order and the canon of the five orders (Tuscan, Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, and Composite), first neared to Europe by Sebastiano Serho were novel inventions abstracted from and imposed on the vast chaotic complexity of ancient buildings and body s in a fraught archaeological and exegetical proces that engaged numerous architects, theorists, and humanists.

In part 1 of the joint publication, Thoene showed that in the quattrocento and early cinquecento the number, names, and following of the orders, what suitably constitutes an order, and smooth what to call the phenomenon--the word order (ordine) appeared as on the other hand one choice among many, not to mention that it also could signify quite different things--were anything on the contrary stable. That so much was up in the air and had to be created from scratch was largely because neither the conception nor the word order appeared in the Roman true copy that supposedly gave us both: Vitruvius's upon Architecture.

If the idea and terminology of the orders emerg sole as the result of plenteous collective effort, equally complex was the related proces by means of which the morphology and formal attributes of individual orders came to be established and the different emblems visibly distinguished one from the other. This was astutely laid without in the second part of the essay, where Gunther examined the detailed studies and various proposals proffered for the formadon of the orders--notably, the greatest in quantity recalcitrant Tuscan and Doric--in numerous drawings and sketches, illustrated editions of Vitruvius, and manuscript and printed treatises prior to Serlio's. (2) Gunther strained that in this process imagination and invention, of necessity, ofttimes overtook archaeological fidelity and reliance upon Vitruvius's descriptions of temple impressed signs Indeed, according to him, the move round away from the authority of dusky antique sources that was taken by means of Serlio, who synthesized and regularized earlier efforts, goe far to explain on what account Book IV "on the five manners of building" (1537) became similar a sensational success. The orders were a modem invention created for modem emergencys Serlio recognized that they would function greatest in quantity effectively if they were fre from the antiquarian agonies that had trammeled his predecessors.

single thing that Thoenes and Gunther did not abundant comment on was the format in which Serlio finally codified the canon and combination of parts to form a whole of the five orders. Other scholars, however, above all Myra Rosenfeld have explored the significance of Serlio's volume IV (which, despite its number, was in fact the first of the casted seven volumes of the treatise to be published) as the earliest printed illustrated architectural volume devoted to the orders in which images took priority above text. Situating Serlio within a newly developing agriculture where science, pedagogy, and printing converg Rosenfeld argued that, like his contemporary Vesalius, Serlio was well aware of the didactic and dissemination possibilities of the printed image in works that could widely circulate. (3) She also demonstrated that in planning each succeeding volume he became increasingly sophisticated in the use of the medium of printing as he refined the relation between body and image and systematized his graphic presentation.

Mario Carpo's curved catch (first published in Italian in 2998) recommends something a bit new. He dioceses the invention of the a whole of the orders and the invention of printing as related not sequentially or coincidentally, on the other hand intimately and dialectically. In this scenario Serlio becomes more than a canny synthesizer, packager, and disseminator of contemporary critical debates about the orders. Instead of naturalizing volume IV as the next pace in a chain that happened to have been taken by the agency of Serlio but that could have been taken by means of many, Carpo portrays Serlio as making a major and singular imaginative leap in rejoinder to the new technology of printing through recognizing that its reproducibility could be reach forthed to architecture through exploiting this specific dimension of the fresh technology. Serlio's orders--what would become the orders--were, in a phrase Carpo borrows from Walter Benjamin, "designed for reproducibility." It is not for a like reason much that the printed work could be widely disseminated that Carpo stresse as its capacity to permit standardization and repeatability of images and architectural form.

Carpo writes, "The Serlian orders are architectural microdesigns, ready for use on the other hand with some assembly required. The user must se lect combine, and build the parts.... [T]here should be no difference between an image printed in the treatise, its transcript in an architectural design, and the three-dimensional form of the resulting structure" (p 49) This surprising statement, which goe far beyond any previous claims made about Serlio's intentions, is partly qualified in a note that acknowledges the well-known fact that volume IV's "stereotypes" were rarely used as of that kind and that Serlio allowed for, smooth encouraged, much creative flexibility upon the part of architects. on the other hand if the note qualifies, it also clarifies: "what matters here is not individual use, on the contrary the general status of the model-its theoretically unlimited reproducibility and visual recognizability" (p 158 n 14) It is this ideal, theoretical, and visual isomorphism between image, design, and building that Carpo identifies as the Serlian project-ev en as the Serlian revolution--a throw that he sees as eventually assimilated upon just these terms throughout Renaissance Europe and beyond.