Ayn Rand, Alberti and the Authorial Figure of the Architect

Although the history of literary authorship has been deeply studied, the concept of architect-as-author is now so thoroughly naturalized that its historical contingency is rarely grasped; nor are its origins clearly understood. Its inception can be identified, however, in the very milieu from which the auctor of letters emerged. Perhaps not surprisingly, the architectural author was invented, defined, and promoted by Leon Battista Alberti in De re aedificatoria (ca. 1450) as a displacement to architecture of the literary-humanistic invention of the living or recently deceased auctor by Dante, his commentators, and Petrarch (as opposed to the pre-trecento limitation of auctor-status to a closed list of ancient writers). Seemingly rational as described by Alberti, at once Petrarchan and Foucauldian, invoking both individual “fama” and the parameters of the “author-function,” his program of architectural production was in fact an impracticable fiction in terms of the material and procedural realities of architectural practice of his time. Nevertheless, it resonated powerfully as ideology, and eventually came to silently dominate modernity in both theory and practice as a mode of crypto-Albertianism. It appears to have entered the imaginary of the film-writer and novelist Ayn Rand, who fused it with modern American hyperindividualism in the figure of Howard Roark, architectural hero of The Fountainhead (1943; film, 1945, directed by King Vidor and starring Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal). Her story, despite itself, serves as another demonstration that the many problems attending architectural Albertianism have never been resolved

To Build Proportions in Time, or Tie Knots in Space? A Reassessment of the Renaissance Turn in Architectural Proportions

Since Alberti, and most critically since Wittkower’s 'Architectural Principles', architectural theory has tended to construe ‘proportions’ in plenary, static terms. The dimension of time and change that relentlessly affects all human endeavor is not accommodated by the celebrated Albertian ideal of immutable design perfection, so perfect in all respects that once attained ‘nothing can be added, taken away, or altered, but for the worse’. This article, drawing on the author’s recent book, 'Building-in-Time from Giotto to Alberti and Modern Oblivion' (Yale, 2010), outlines the antithetical, dynamic proportional methodology of the pre-Albertian architectural regime. Its point of departure was the author’s concept of durational aesthetics, according to which perfected architectural form is produced by a process of incessant revision. What distinguished this process from related ancient or neo-antique doctrines was above all its dynamic modality and participation in the fluid orientation and processes of ‘building-in-time’

Ayn Rand, Alberti and the Authorial Figure of the Architect

Although the history of literary authorship has been deeply studied, the concept of architect-as-author is now so thoroughly naturalized that its historical contingency is rarely grasped; nor are its origins clearly understood. Its inception can be identified, however, in the very milieu from which the auctor of letters emerged. Perhaps not surprisingly, the architectural author was invented, defined, and promoted by Leon Battista Alberti in De re aedificatoria (ca. 1450) as a displacement to architecture of the literary-humanistic invention of the living or recently deceased auctor by Dante, his commentators, and Petrarch (as opposed to the pre-trecento limitation of auctor-status to a closed list of ancient writers). Seemingly rational as described by Alberti, at once Petrarchan and Foucauldian, invoking both individual “fama” and the parameters of the “author-function,” his program of architectural production was in fact an impracticable fiction in terms of the material and procedural realities of architectural practice of his time. Nevertheless, it resonated powerfully as ideology, and eventually came to silently dominate modernity in both theory and practice as a mode of crypto-Albertianism. It appears to have entered the imaginary of the film-writer and novelist Ayn Rand, who fused it with modern American hyperindividualism in the figure of Howard Roark, architectural hero of The Fountainhead (1943; film, 1945, directed by King Vidor and starring Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal). Her story, despite itself, serves as another demonstration that the many problems attending architectural Albertianism have never been resolved

Architecture From Prehistory To Post Modernism, The Western Tradition

p.605; ill., bib.,index, 30c

Scénographie urbaine et identité civique : réflexion sur la Florence du Trecento

Trachtenberg Marvin, Bouniort Jeanne. Scénographie urbaine et identité civique : réflexion sur la Florence du Trecento. In: Revue de l'Art, 1993, n°102. pp. 11-31