Choice Reads

Title: Ten Books on Architecture by Leon Battista Alberti

Student:  Rhiannon Jones

Why this book?  I chose Alberti’s Ten Books on Architecture because it marked the rebirth of architecture as an intellectual discipline rather than a craft, revitalizing the intellectual tradition that had been in a state of dormancy since the ancient world. By consciously imitating Vitruvius, Alberti placed Renaissance architecture in a lineage succeeding the grandeur and scale Roman Empire architecture, while elevating the importance of the architect. Whether embracing history of rejecting it, every architectural theory written since stands in conversation with this treatise.