ARCHITECTURAL THEORY, VOLUME 1: AN ANTHOLOGY FROM VITRUVIUS
TO 1870, edited by Harry Francis Mallgrave. Malden MA, Oxford, Victoria:
Blackwell Publishing, 2006, 590pp., $49.95.
This anthology is a rich and comprehensive
documentation of the key stages
that construct Western architectural
theory, from Vitruvius's classical writing
to Gottfried Semper's theories in
late-nineteenth-century Europe. Comprised
of 229 texts by these and other
significant writers of architectural theory,
it represents an extremely valuable
resource for architectural design,
history, and theory education and,
more broadly, for aesthetic education,
art history, aesthetics, and visual culture.
Professor Mallgrave's career as
an architectural historian and theorist
at the Illinois Institute of Technology,
and editor of Architecture and Aesthetics
for the Texts and Documents
Series at the Getty Research Institute,
has enabled him to bring together a
large number of canonical texts by
architects and writers, including Alberti,
Palladio, Vasari, Perrault, Wotton,
Wren, Soufflot, Blondel, BoullŽe,
Ledoux, Soane, Reynolds, Pugin, Viollet-
le-Duc, Ruskin, and Greenough.
In addition, Mallgrave has selected
important contextualizing texts that
inform the philosophical, cultural,
and aesthetic development of the discipline
by writers such as Rousseau,
Voltaire, Montesquieu, Morris, Chambers,
Winckelmann, Locke, Hume,
Ramsey, Burke, Walpole, Price, von
Schlegel, Wolff, Jefferson, Emerson,
Hugo, Zola, and Leibnitz.
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