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

255 Pages·2001·6.18 MB·English

by  Mario Carpo

Architecture in the Age
of Printing
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Architecture in the Age
of Printing
Orality, Writing, Typography, and Printed Images in
the History of Architectural Theory
Mario Carpo
translated by Sarah Benson
The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England
This translation © 2001 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Originally published in 1998 as L’architettura dell’età della stampa. Oralità, scrittura, li-
bro stampato e riproduzione meccanica dell’immagine nella storia delle teorie architettoniche
(Milan: Jaca Book).
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any elec-
tronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information
storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.
This book was set in Janson and Rotis semi sans by Graphic Composition, Inc.
using QuarkXpress.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Carpo, Mario.
[Architettura dell’età della stampa. English]
Architecture in the age of printing : orality, writing, typography, and printed
images in the history of architectural theory / Mario Carpo ; translated by Sarah
Benson.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-262-03288-0 (hc. : alk. paper)
1. Communication in architecture—Europe—History. 2. Graphic arts—
Europe—History. I. Title.
NA2584.C3713 2001
724—dc21
00-065368
Contents
Preface to the English Edition vii
1. Prologue: Architectural Culture and
Technological Context 1
2. Vitruvius, Text and Image 16
3. Architectural Knowledge in the Middle Ages: Orality
andMemory versus Script and Image 23
I Rules without Models 23
II Models without Images 36
4. Architectural Drawing in the Age of Its
Mechanical Reproduction 42
I Serlio 42
II Rome in the 1540s 56
III Paris in the 1540s 71
5. Geneva 79
I Triumph and Censorship of the Printed Book 79
II North and South: Books versus Images, Images without
Books, Images in Books 81
III Illustrated Books and Architectural Treatises in Geneva 88
IV Serlio’s Orders, Vitruvianism, and the Protestant World 96
| vi |
| 6. Decline and Fall of Typographic Architecture 103
nts
nte I From Shute to Vignola 103
o
C
II From Gesner to Possevino 109
7. The Turning Point of 1450: Abstract Rules versus
Standardized Components in Albertian Theory 119
I Alberti 119
II Francesco di Giorgio 124
III Filarete 131
Notes 141
Bibliography of Frequently Cited Works 224
Name Index 237
Preface to the English Edition
This is a revised translation of a book first published in Italy in 1998 (L’ar-
chitettura dell’età della stampa. Oralità, scrittura, libro stampato e riproduzione
meccanica dell’immagine nella storia delle teorie architettoniche, Milan: Jaca
Book). I am indebted to many friends and colleagues (and indeed, to some
students) for ideas, comments, and criticism, before and after the publica-
tion of the Italian version. Particular mention, however, is due several re-
viewers who prompted me to rewrite some chapters of this book prior to its
translation into English: Frédérique Lemerle, Christof Thoenes, Georg
Germann, and Yves Pauwels. Likewise, Françoise Choay and Joseph Ryk-
wert provided generous and helpful advice throughout the various phases of
researching, writing, and translating; before publication in Italy, Maria-
Antonietta Crippa helped me to revise the Italian text; for some years Jean
Clay has been taking care of the (now forthcoming) French version; and fi-
nally, useful advice was given by some anonymous readers who assessed the
manuscript for the MIT Press, and by Roger Conover who patiently super-
vised the whole operation. Sarah Benson translated this book from Italian
and a variety of other languages and dialects, and did her best to cope with
the fact that I sometimes wanted to translate parts of it myself, much to the
detriment of all parties involved.
Originally published in January 1998, this book is essentially based on
the state of the art around and not after 1996 and 1997, when most of it
was actually written. Since then, new and important contributions have
appeared in fields relevant to the scope of this study. Some of these recent
publications are mentioned in the notes to this edition when they bear
immediately upon the topics under discussion.
| viii |
| More crucially, the basic thesis of this book, focusing on the feedback
n
ditio loop between architectural theory and the media, was conceived at a time
E
h (around 1995) when the notion of an ongoing media revolution was not yet
nglis the talk of the town—and certainly not in Europe. My argument then (five
E
e
h or six years ago, which is a long time in the chronicles of information tech-
o t
e t nologies) was that at the beginning of the modern age, the shift from script
ac
Pref to print, and from hand-made drawings to mechanically reproduced im-
ages, had changed the history of Western architecture.
Having proved that, as I hope this book has, I remember cautiously
suggesting at that time that a similar revolution might have been in the
offing—likely to happen again, and indeed, imminent. The next shift
wouldobviously be from text to hypertext, from printed images to digital
representations. And since the rise of printed images had changed the his-
tory of architecture, so my argument went, then the decline of printed images,
and the parallel rise of virtual reality, were necessarily going to have some
consequences for architecture as well.
This is happening. Things have changed fast, and cyberspace has al-
ready pervaded the discourse of architectural criticism. Rem Koolhaas is
now granting interviews to Wired,not to The Journal of Reinforced Concrete.
Still, for all the hype, and alarm, which as always accompanies every period
of challenge and change, no one knows for certain what architecture will be
after the age of printing. This book, which recounts how architecture came
into the age of printing, implicitly suggests that architecture will also man-
age to get out of it—and survive. After all, we did well without printing for
quite a while.
Paris, July 2000
| 1 |
PROLOGUE: ARCHITECTURAL CULTURE AND
TECHNOLOGICAL CONTEXT
According to the Oxford English Dictionary,a machine is “an apparatus for
applying mechanical power, consisting of a number of interrelated parts.”
The same entry goes on to explain that “in recent use the word tends to
be... reserved for those apparatus of later invention in which manual la-
bour is superseded by the action of the mechanism.”1In the production of
material goods the use of machines may require a higher degree of precision
than manual handicraft. In compensation, as both this definition and com-
mon experience tell us, machines have generally allowed for some reduction
of human labor or energy. Typically, these savings are bigger when machines
can reproduce large numbers of identical objects (economies of scale).
The idea of mass producing a series of artifacts, even complex ones, has
a long tradition. In 1516, Thomas Moore’s Utopia already anticipated the
construction of identical houses and cities. But it was only with the indus-
trial revolution that this abstract goal became a material possibility, and
even in some cases an inevitable necessity. It comes as no surprise that such
plans were always controversial. In the West, various cultures and traditions
have reacted differently to the technical conditions imposed by new means
of production, and with results that still affect our daily lives. Some Euro-
pean landscapes have been marked more than others by the visual conse-
quences of mechanization.
I will not deal here, except incidentally, with the economic and social
history of the industrial revolution, which followed different courses in
every country. The question that I wish to ask is: why is it that, having
reached similar levels of industrialization, and using equally similar tech-
nologies, some regions of Europe produced such different visual environ-
ments? The answer to this question will not be found in economic