Product Description

In De architectura (c.40 BC), Vitruvius discusses in ten encyclopedic chapters aspects of Roman architecture, engineering and city planning. Vitruvius also included a section on human proportions. Because it is the only antique treatise on architecture to have survived, De architectura has been an invaluable source of information for scholars. The rediscovery of Vitruvius during the Renaissance greatly fuelled the revival of classicism during that and subsequent periods. Numerous architectural treatises were based in part or inspired by Vitruvius, beginning with Leon Battista Alberti's De re aedificatoria (1485).

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #35907 in Books
• Published on: 2009-09-24
• Original language: Latin
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 464 pages

About the Author
Marcus Vitruvius Pollio (late 1st century B.C.), was a Roman military architect and engineer, and an expert in ballistic machines in particular. Robert Tavernor studied architecture in London, Rome and Cambridge and practices as a consultant architect. He was professor of Architecture at the universities of Edinburgh and Bath, and is currently Professor of Architecture and Urban Design at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Richard Schofield read Classics at Oxford in the late 1960s, then architectural history at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London. After working at the University of Nottingham for many years, he moved to the Istituto universitario di architettura di Venezia in 1997, where he is the Professor of the History of Architecture.

Customer Reviews

Very useful for those interested in classical archetecture
This is not a very pleasent read, but Vitruvius' ten books are the first written account of Classical architecture, dating from the 1st century ad. They are the basis for archetecture as we know it and as such a very useful read.