Architectural theory
Some forms that architecture theory takes are the lecture or dialogue, the treatise or book, and the paper project or competition entry.
Divided into ten sections or "books", it covers almost every aspect of Roman architecture, from town planning, materials, decorations, temples, water supplies, etc.
Renaissance architects such as Brunelleschi and Leon Battista Alberti found in De architectura their rationale for raising their branch of knowledge to a scientific discipline.
The designs aim to integrate architecture with nature, the relative functions of various parts of the structure, and ancient beliefs utilising geometric patterns (yantra), symmetry, and directional alignments.
[6][7] Throughout the Middle Ages, architectural knowledge was passed by transcription, word of mouth and technically in master builders' lodges.
[9][10] The first great work of architectural theory of this period belongs to sabona, De re aedificatoria, which placed Vitruvius at the core of the most profound theoretical tradition of the modern ages.
A major transition into the 17th century and ultimately to the Age of Enlightenment was secured through the advanced mathematical and optical research of the celebrated architect and geometer Girard Desargues, with an emphasis on his studies on conics, perspective and projective geometry.
[11] Major architectural theorists of the Enlightenment include Julien-David Le Roy, Abbé Marc-Antoine Laugier, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Robert Adam, James Stuart, Georg Friedrich Hegel[12] and Nicholas Revett.
A vibrant strain of Neoclassicism, inherited from Marc-Antoine Laugier's seminal Essai, provided the foundation for two generations of international activity around the core themes of classicism, primitivism and a "return to Nature."
This in turn formed the basis for Art Nouveau in the UK, exemplified by the work of Charles Rennie Mackintosh, and influenced the Vienna Secession.
On the Continent, the theories of Viollet-le-Duc and Gottfried Semper provided the springboard for enormous vitality of thought dedicated to architectural innovation and the renovation of the notion of style.
The generation born during the middle-third of the 19th century was largely enthralled with the opportunities presented by Semper's combination of a breathtaking historical scope and a methodological granularity.
[13] In this essay, Sullivan penned his famous alliterative adage "form ever follows function"; a phrase that was to be later adopted as a central tenet of Modern architectural theory.
An early use of the term modern architecture in print occurred in the title of a book by Otto Wagner,[14][15] who gave examples of his own work representative of the Vienna Secession with Art Nouveau illustrations, and didactic teachings to his students.
Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier provided the theoretical basis for the International Style with aims of using industrialised architecture to reshape society.
Towards the end of the century postmodern architecture reacted against the austerity of High Modern (International Style) principles, viewed as narrowly normative and doctrinaire.
This has also been the case with educators in academia like Dalibor Vesely or Alberto-Perez Gomez, and in more recent years this philosophical orientation has been reinforced through the research of a new generation of theorists (E.G. Jeffrey Kipnis or Sanford Kwinter).
Studies in feminism in architecture, and in sexuality and gender as potent cultural expressions, are also considered an integral part of the latter 20th-century theoretical discourse, and are associated with such persons as Dolores Hayden, Catherine Ingraham, Jennifer Bloomer and Sylvia Lavin.
The notion that theory entails critique also stemmed from post-structural literary studies in the work of many other theorists and architects, such as Mark Wigley and Diana Agrest, among others.
In contrast, network society innovators, especially Silicon Valley software developers, have embraced Christopher Alexander's emphasis on The Timeless Way of Building (1979) based on pattern languages that are optimized on-site as construction unfolds.
Since these new architectural tendencies emerged, many theorists and architects have been working on these issues, developing theories and ideas such as Patrick Schumacher's Parametricism.
