"I never stopped exploring, considering and measuring everything and comparing the information through line drawings until I have grasped and understood fully what each had to contribute in terms of ingenuity and skill; this is how my passion and delight in learning relieved the labour of writing."
Leon Battista Alberti was born in Genoa in 1404. He lived in Florence, Urbino, Rome and Mantua and died a European celebrity and Vatican insider in 1472. Alberti is considered the greatest architect of the 15th century. As well as composing a fullscale treatise on architecture, On the Art of Building, he wrote works in the fields of painting, philosophy, sculpture, nature and engineering, and, most significant of all, he wrote about the design of cities. He was responsible for transforming European taste away from medieval or Gothic; through original study he rediscovered classical forms in what we call the Renaissance. Six hundred years later and 250 years after they were built in Ireland, we enjoy the landscapes, houses, cities, towns, squares, public buildings and monuments that he inspired. This is a wonderful book. It is elegantly written by a terrific American scholar, Prof Anthony Grafton of Princeton University. He makes a complex subject accessible to the general reader.
There are nine sections in the book, beginning with "Who was Alberti?", followed by a dissertation on humanism and scholarship. In the section on technology, "Amongst Engineers", the author explains that they take their name, not from their occupation or the material with which they work, but from brilliance of intellect - their ingenuity. On aesthetic criticism, which Alberti intertwined with geometry, mathematics, astronomy and optics, he said the actual rendering of the final image is merely the material form of the higher work of the artist's intellect. The fifth chapter is on Florence and its families, language, patronage and Alberti's work in Florence at the Rucellai Palace, which is massively solid, and Santa Maria Novella, which is literally brilliantly decorated. There is a chapter on Alberti's work as advisor, civil servant and antiquarian, dedicating himself to systematic efforts at rescue archaeology; describing the Pantheon he said: "Anyone who thinks extremely thick walls lend a temple dignity is mistaken."
CHAPTER eight, concerning "The Art of Building" is the centre of the book; here are the aesthetic and urbanistic ideas that Alberti espoused. Alberti says "the architect is a godlike figure who imposed mathematical order on unruly matter: he could create whole cities from nothing". This amazing, exaggerated overstatement is relevant to all master planners who do not understand the means and circumstances of work. Alberti considers the idea of something as most important, and in practice the built work deals with circumstance, material, budget and so on. Alberti stands for close attention to context, for commitment to the histories of sites, buildings and cities, for love of tradition, and he is the ancestor not of "the planners who ripped and tore the centres out of modern cities but of European and American city thinkers like Jane Jacobs, the respectful restorer of urban space".
Influenced by Vitruvius, Alberti formed his work On the Art of Building in 10 books which described cities and individual buildings, fortifications, houses, structural elements, ornamental details and the natural environment in which buildings have to stand, dealing with the long-term effects of sun, rain and wind on structures. He was concerned not only for individual building types, but also for the larger contexts in which buildings stand and for the way in which a person moving through the city would encounter any given facade or open space. Urban design in the 14th and 15th centuries normally did not involve the erection of whole new cities, rather it called for the re-configuration of existing buildings and the opening of new roads through old neighbourhoods.
Alberti said an architect's drawings and models should be honest, flat, precise renderings of what he hoped to build - not deceptive exercises in perspective. He insisted that buildings should re-shape people who inhabit them. Buildings are not only functional devices but therapeutic, full of air and light, gardens, walks and porticos. Alberti indicated over and over again that the test of a building lay not in style or decoration but above all in its spirit, the impact on those who see or live in it.
Anthony Grafton, in the final chapter, reviews Alberti's buildings, which he describes as "sermons in stone". Alberti praised the virtues of austerity and parsimony. He evoked the frugality that characterised classical buildings, both public and private, with at least as much enthusiasm as he showed elsewhere for grandeur in structure and ornament. He preferred the grave, simple churches of early centuries with their single altars and austere services. Grafton explains the plan of the church of San Sebastian, the apse of the church of Annunciata and the facade of Malaferta Temple at Rimini. Alberti reminds the architect that "using scale models, re-examining every part of your proposal two, three, four even seven and up to ten times until from the foundation to the uppermost tile ensuring there is nothing large in scale for which you have not thought out, resolved and determined thoughtfully and at length". This book has one problem for the architect - there are few illustrations. For an architect, words are no substitute for the visual. A friend recently brought back two books on Sigurd Lewerentz from Stockholm. One book had the architect's drawings and the other the author's text and photographs of his buildings. This exquisite delight and infinite freedom for the architect of studying sketches, plans, elevations and sections, along with colour photographs, echoes Alberti's primacy of vision, imagination and ideas over mere words.
Shane de Blacam is partner at de Blacam and Meagher Architects. Among his current projects are three new buildings north of the library at Cork Institute of Technology